It's a Smog World After All

My impression during my first month here was, hey, for a city of two million in a developing country, San Salvador's air quality isn't that bad, provided you're not directly behind one of the thousands of particulate-spewing diesel buses. The views across the city from one end to the other were pretty crisp...until today. With rising temperatures and stagnant air, the smog suddenly showed up, looking at least as thick as a bad day in L.A. or Denver. So maybe it wasn't the best of days to go sightseeing on the urban periphery, but the opportunity came up to go see Puerta del Diablo with our friends Mirna and Mercy, so Basilia and I hopped in Mirna's old VW, bringing Basi's mom along. Doña Basilia is always up for an outing, which I guess is where Basilia gets her restlessness. (In Central America people who'd always rather be in the street than at home are called Patechucho, a contraction of pata de chucho, or dog's paw -- an apt metaphor for wanderlust.)

I was morbidly curious about Puerta del Diablo, as Joan Didion in Salvador described it as the place where the death squads and secret police would take the disappeared and hurl them off the cliff during the civil war. Despite the scary name and this grim history, Puerta del Diablo today is a pretty innocuous weekend getaway destination for San Salvadorans. It's also a testament to the enterprising nature of this country. If it were in the U.S. it would probably be a state park with a parking lot, restrooms, and an interpretive trail. Here the official  infrastructure is minimal, but the place is crawling with dozens of roving and stationary entrepreneurs, selling everything from pirated CDs to pupusas to drinking water. There's even a zipline ride if you want to take the fast way back down to the road from one of the rock formations. Interestingly, the generic term for recreational ziplines in El Salvador is "canopy," I guess derived from the use of ziplines for exploring the canopy of tropical forests in Costa Rica that dates back for some years.

White stone pillars mark the path to the top of Puerta del Diablo

Oh yeah, work! I did some of that this week. Actually it was a very busy week. I spent a lot of time assembling information related to the energy system for the Citalá retreat that I wrote about earlier this week. Yesterday I met with Nelson Quintanilla and Federico Machado, both UDB electrical engineers, to develop a load analysis for the Citalá site. I enjoyed working with them on the details. They listen to my ideas, but they're not afraid to politely disagree when the situation calls for it, and they made a lot of good points. I can work with these guys.

I also made plans for Monday to visit two sugar cane processing plants with cogen systems that are net contributors to the electric grid. Tomorrow I need to spend a good chunk of the day reading some documents I have about energy production in the Salvadoran sugar industry so I can be prepared with questions on Monday.