El Salvador: Acajutla and San Salvador



 January 26, 2023 El Salvador

We arrived in Acajutla, El Salvador’s principal port, at sunrise. This involved a lot of tugboats and many men on the docks preparing throw lines and tethering us to the pier. 

 Not many cruise ships stop in El Salvador. Nonetheless, there were musicians to greet us. The ship’s gangplank was at a steeper angle than previous ports. El Salvador uses the US dollar for currency (since 2001) which made transactions simple, and has apparently helped stabilize the economy.

We took a bus to San Salvador, the capital. The metropolitan area has 2.4 million people. We were in the historic center, which is a work in progress. The first thing we saw stepping off the bus was a construction site for a large new China-funded national library. According to our young tour guide, taxes have gone up since construction started so the jury is out among Salvadorans whether this is a good thing. Despite being destroyed by earthquakes a couple of times over the past 500 year or so, San Salvador has quite a few colonial-looking buildings.  One is the presidential palace, which is unsafe for earthquakes so is instead an empty museum.





One thing I appreciated was the designated public market for street vendors. It was possible to tour the buildings without being hassled. Having said that, the very best part of San Salvador for me was our limited time wandering among them. We mostly bought pupusas (national dish of El Salvador) and fresh fruit. As usual, Charlie was fearless using his rusty Spanish, which made it possible to communicate, if imperfectly, with these wonderful people.

Our young tour guide said the current administration has mostly eliminated El Salvador’s gang problem. After receiving criticism from human rights organizations for at first outright shooting them, they next organized a mass arrest. By offering free money to citizens during covid (much like the US did), they required a national ID to pick it up in person. Those who were flagged as gang members were arrested when they came to pick up their assistance money. At least that’s the story we were told, as I understood it. It felt safe in San Salvador, and apparently business owners are happy to no longer be paying extortion money.

The next stop was lunch at an anttractive open air restaurant. The food was very good, but in the middle of lunch our tour guide finally got the memo that Insignia was leaving an hour earlier than originally scheduled. With traffic, we weren’t going to make it. This resulted in a hair-raising, siren-screaming police escort back to the ship in Acajutla through heavy traffic. People in the front of the bus said it was terrifying. Those of us in the back, other than realizing we were going really fast and noting the surprised expressions of road-side workers, weren’t as affected. And the ship waited for us. 

Peace & love,

Jill










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