Locals only

Today Basilia and her mom and I wanted to go to the beach, something we hadn't done for months. We considered playing it safe and going to El Tunco, a beach we've already been to twice. It's easy to get to, we know we like it, and we have friends there we could look up. However, I successfully lobbied for trying someplace new, so we took a considerably longer bus trip to go to Playa Los Cóbanos.

Like the Lonely Planet guidebook says, it's a beautiful place, but we were kind of taken aback by how crammed the beachfront was with snack shacks, restaurants, and ranchos (the Salvadoran name for little open-air huts you can rent for a day to have some shade and a place to ditch your stuff while you swim -- elsewhere in Latin America known as palapas). We eventually found some good food and had a nice afternoon at the beach, but the consensus is we like El Tunco better. Los Cóbanos does have the distinction of having the only coral reefs on the Pacific Coast of Central America, but we didn't get around to renting snorkel gear to go check it out.

To me the most interesting aspect of Los Cóbanos was that, of the hundreds of beach-goers, we didn't see anyone but yours truly (I love the Spanish equivalent for "yours truly" to refer to oneself: "su servidor") who appeared to not be Central American. Since the place is evidently not catering to the foreign tourist trade, it has this intense kind of Salvadoran-ness about it. All the grittiness of a public marketplace in the city, right up to the waterline. Kind of fascinated and repulsed us at the same time -- lively but not the relaxing experience we were looking for.

When we got back to Antiguo Cuscatlán, we found our neighbors the tailors had made a Barcelona soccer shirt for their dog. Salvadorans are nuts about Spanish soccer teams, mainly Real Madrid and Barcelona, but this was the first time we'd seen this particular expression of fandom.

Basilia with Barcelona Fan