Friday August 30, 2019

El Salvador

Genesis 22:1-19  

v. 5   [Abraham] said to his servants, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.”  Millennia ago Abraham’s servants stayed with the donkey.  Today Jaime stayed with the car while we climbed about 1800 feet up the mountain with young Geraldo.  We weren’t going specifically to worship but oh! what an awe-inspiring sight the volcanic crater of Ilamapetec was when we got ourselves to the top—a feat whose end was not entirely certain in the doing.  Thank you, Lord, for the energy, stamina and grace you allowed us for the climb.  Thank you for the wonder of the amazing sight as we looked over the rim.  Thank you that we got safely up the rocky slope to 7800 feet and back down again.

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We were up early, since it’s two hours later here.  To my dismay, the itchy red bumps that appeared on my legs before I left home are increasing.  What is wrong with me?  We scrounged breakfast.  At 9:00 the tour guide Chris had arranged picked us up—Geraldo, young and English-speaking, with Jaime our driver, who didn’t say much.  Geraldo, a 19-year-old college student studying economics, was a fount of knowledge on many subjects.  He’s traveled all over Central America in robotics competitions but only started studying English recently.  He hopes to be accepted to the University of Virginia later this year, then when he finishes college he’d like to stay.  “It’s every Salvadoran’s dream to work in the US and bring his family over,” he told us; I was surprised he said that so freely.

El Salvador has 26 volcanoes.  The best coffee is grown in the rich soil on their slopes and 100% exported.  The roadway got rougher when we turned uphill toward the Santa Ana volcano, also called Ilamaptepec, El Salvador’s highest at 7812 feet (2381 meters) and Geraldo’s favorite.  Today’s walk to the top with us would be his 47th ascent since November.  Jaime turned into “secure parking” in a clearing where a little man seated on a box was smiling at us.  “This is our practice climb,” Geraldo told us as we started up a cool forest path that soon steepened into awkward steps made of dirt and tree roots.  We came to a grassy spot with a ranger station and picnic tables where Geraldo told us we had to wait for a ranger to walk with us.  We were assigned Saul.  The group of about eight behind us got their own ranger, but along the route many hikers passed us without rangers.  “Why doesn’t everybody have a ranger?” we asked Gerraldo.  The answer was one of a number of lost-in-translation statements.  The groups of a dozen or more can look out for each other, he told us.  But the ranger-free groups weren’t all big groups.  Was it because we’re foreigners?  No, he said.  We’re not convinced, but we’ll never know.

Up through the woods we hiked.  It wasn’t so bad.  Out of the trees into high bushes—well, we knew we would be in the sun.  We stopped for a view through a clearing to two other volcanoes.  The pointy one on the right with a glimpse into the rim, Izalco, had erupted for almost 200 years.  It was known as the lighthouse of the Pacific.  “Let’s build a hotel overlooking the eruption,” someone decided, and so they did, on the adjacent volcano with a perfect view of El Salco’s fire and fury.  Shortly before the hotel’s completion in 1966, the volcano stopped.  There has been not a peep since.  The hotel lasted a year.  There is still a cafe and now the government is rebuilding the hotel, though it will be very expensive, said Geraldo.

Too soon we were above the treeline.  The sun was hot.  The air was thin.  The path was treacherous with rocks, ruts, big boulders pretending to be steps and little stones that slid underfoot.  We had brought our hiking poles and I don’t think we could have done the climb without them, though no one else had any—nor was anyone else our age.  We had to stop for little rests.  We asked Geraldo—several times—how long the hike was but that was another lost-in-translation response.  All we could do was look up and see how far we still had to go, which looked farther than we thought we could hike.  Maurice was breathing hard.  I was feeling lightheaded.  We had water but, not realizing the strenuousness of our activity, the snacks we brought were minimal.  Chris hadn’t done this hike yet, but he’d told us “lots of embassy people do it”—which we now knew translated as something like, “All the kids do it but you old people might have trouble.”  The valley view was magnificent from the path.  Was it really worth it going all the steep and difficult way to the top?

But we did.  The mountain slope flattened and the open ground broadened.  We could see a line of people standing around what might be the rim, and there was a guy with a white box…selling popsicles?  At one side of the top was an arc-shaped plot of land where the visitors stood before the ground plummetted downward into a deep cone.  The air smelled of sulphur.  Far below, opaque greenish water was tinged with yellow at one corner.  Steam rose from the water and part of the ground and drifted languidly.  We were just two of many visitors transfixed by the surprising and astonishingly beautiful sight.  In another direction we saw half of Lake Coatepeque and its little island where the richest people have their homes, Geraldo told us.  “The lake changes color once a year,” he added.  What did that mean, I wondered.  Does it look especially blue in the autumn sun, or is this another lost-in-translation statement?  Later he showed us a picture on his phone.  The currently standard-gray-blue lake was glowing aqua.  It was not a trick of the light.  Scientists don’t know why it happens, Geraldo told us, or when it will occur, or how long it will last.  (Chris said that’s true—something about minerals, maybe, or algae.)

We started down at a slightly faster rate than we had ascended, though we asked to sit on a rock for fifteen minutes and finish our snack of grapes, crackers and hummus.  “You did really good,” Geraldo told us.  “You hiked up in an hour and 25 minutes.  The average is two hours.”  “You mean we could have taken more breaks?” exclaimed Maurice.  We were afraid we were holding Geraldo back.  We’d thought this was a half-day trip and didn’t realize we had him for the whole day.  Indeed, he offered to accompany us somewhere for lunch, so when we got back down he had Jaime take us to the former-hotel-turned-cafe where we looked out the glass windows at the dormant volcano while we ate.  By the time we got home it was 6 pm.  It had been a great day.  “Well, you’ve had your practice hike for Machu Picchu,” said Geraldo.  We told him to let Chris know if he got accepted to UVA and he could come to our house for holidays

Chris got home about a half hour after we did.  He had expected to arrive earlier but there was some sort of emergency on San Salvador’s runway and his plane was briefly diverted to Costa Rica.  “Welcome, international traveler!” I called out to Chris as I unlocked the many fastenings on his doors.  Oh, wait—we’re the international travelers he was supposed to be here to greet before he signed up for his Argentine boondoggle.  Chris ordered a pizza, then he and Maurice watched one of the football games that Chris manages to patch through various devices and services and make appear on his big screen.  Still itchy, I called it a day.