El Salvador; or, wired on café

OK, so I am absolutely buzzing right now. I heard everyone talking about how good the coffee was, oh man, it's great, so I thought, why not? I was cold and wet and soaked to the bone, so I tried it. Half a cup later I'm rarin' to go, wowza. So bear with me as I do a little stream of consciousness typing here.

I arrived in Guatemala City on Thursday night, got some sleep, and early Friday left for El Salvador with Anh and her friend, Colleen. A few more hours outside of San Saldvador, we arrived in Juayúa, a sleepy town that on the weekends gets going with a food festival. To make a long story short, we spent today on a hike through the cloud forests where they grow coffee, a group of five us us, plus our guide, Mario, and our host, Cesar. After many, many hours of trekking and almost falling down hills that we couldn't see the bottom of, we were picked up by Cesar to get to the hot springs to relax, give ourselves natural mud baths (we dug up clay from the fumaroles toward the end of our hike). Usually we would have walked, but apparently we were one slow group, so we got a VERY bumpy ride, with several of us almost flying out the back of the '76 jeep several times. Fun. It was a good day, even when the monsoon rains hit (even Cesar said he's never seen rain like that), in which we drove back, uncovered, almost 40 minutes. I should have brought another pair of pants.



Photos later, when I borrow a card reader from somebody, but they'll mostly be of clouds with vague shapes in them anyway :) [photos now up here]

Tomorrow we go back to Guatemala to set out towards Tikal and other locations. We picked up another traveller, Franz (I hope that's how you spell it), a German, who is daring to come with us...

Excuse me, I need to go run around the block a few times now.