The day starts at 8.15am, when our tour guide Omar, apparently a surf instructor, has shown up super early. He looks amusing in his khaki shorts, sneakers and white T-shirt, like an out-of-place aging surfer dude. We scramble to get ready soon, no breakfast except for cereal bars. We pull up at a convenience store that’s seemingly everywhere, called ‘On the Run’. The boss, Julio, meets us and sets us up with a lunch box, giving us the usual stories about having to charge more for credit card or travelers cheques. We offer cash, and are on our way. Omar regales us with his life story- apparently he was an agricultural engineer who quit his job to surf, and wants to take us to see his beautiful beach house. Two hours of solid drive later, we pull up at a stunning vista of Lago Coatepeque, a crater lake in the complex. Meanwhile we’ve picked up a passenger in the back of the pick-up, a fact that makes me slightly nervous. He jumps off soon enough though. We enter the volcano park, whence our guide points out Izalco volcano and expresses his excitement over us climbing it. We look at each other in alarm and quickly assure him climbing it was never our intention. He seems very disappointed. The entrance fee is a dollar per head, and we have a boy speaking broken English as our guide. We trek down Ilamatepec, down a series of what one could call for lack of a better word, ‘steps’, defined by a log across the end of each one. The trek down takes half an hour, bringing us to the foot of Izalco. Izalco is dark grey and devoid of vegetation. It is an incredibly windy day, and even climbing up a few feet of the mountain leads to us almost toppling over. We decide to break for lunch while Omar happily saunters up the volcano. After a while, we begin the slow hike back up Ilamatepec; every ten minutes I am convinced we must be close to the top. But it takes an agonizing two hours back up. B has difficulty breathing and stops every few steps to calm her heart down. I break ahead occasionally only to realize my heart is beating like a jackhammer in my ears and I may drop dead unless I slow down! The security guards in front and behind us have a tough job of it, waiting patiently as we huff and puff our way back. When we have been going for a while, the guide points to a marker and tells us that is the height of Izalco, which is the first point at which I realize the mountain we are climbing is even higher! Getting to the top is quite an event, needless to say. B takes Omar up on his earlier suggestion of driving us to the beaches, and he resists citing time constraints, but she persuades him. Exhausted from the midday sun, I fall asleep in the front seat, but when we get to the beaches, oh what a sight! Straight out of a postcard!! The sea and sand are beautiful, coconut palms dotting the shoreline, a few brave surfers battling the indomitable waves. The beaches we see are in an area called La Libertad, the tiny one we first saw being Playa Mizata (Mizata Beach). He takes us to another that is a fishermen’s haunt, lined with row upon row of fish stalls. I walk queasily through the market, while B takes in delightedly the smells and sights of dried fish slit open and displayed temptingly. We also stop at the small resort Omar works at, where there is a tidal pool filled by water from the sea. It is lovely and we wish to stay longer, but the day grows long. We ask Omar to stop at a Pollo Campero (like KFC but so different!) on the way back. After showers, we settle down to our feast of fried chicken with buns, and coleslaw that tastes like green coconut chutney…yum!
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