Tazumal Ruins

We hopped on a bus to Chalchuapa to put some more Mayan ruins in our eyeholes. The last pyramid we saw was cool but it left us with questions. I could Google the answers of course but I’m a fan of getting the information from the source. We rocked up to Tazumal and it turned out the museum was closed for refurbishment. Not a chance of gleaning any facts from there then, it didn’t even have a fucking roof right now. The ancient ruins in front of us were in better nick than the museum. There aren’t any interpretation boards either so after a fifteen minute circuit of the ruins we just stood there, gawping at it in bewilderment.

Like, what are we even looking at? The structure in the middle was a fuck off great big concrete step pyramind thing. The Mayans had chocolate and they had indigo but I’m 99% sure as shit they didn’t have concrete. Obviously it was some manner of restoration but really, all we could see was concrete. Was any of it original? There were other structures around it made from rocks, they looked more authentic, but honestly, what was what?

As we’d entered the site a bloke had greeted us in English and told us where we could go and what we could climb up so we approached him and asked him, well, everything. He was brilliant. So that concrete thing is Mayan, but the actual 1400 year old Mayan pyramid is made from adobe which is mud so obviously it’s very fragile. An archaeologist in the 1950s decided that the best way to protect it was to cover it in concrete, remaining faithful to the shape of course, rather than, y’know, putting a roof over it or a building around it so people could see the actual, genuine Mayan temple.

The other stuff built from volcanic rock isn’t Mayan at all. It’s 1000 years old and was built by the Toltecs from present day Mexico. They only used their temples for worship, their burials were done by stuffing corpses into urns in the foetal position, whilst the Mayans used their pyramids for worship and burial, and get this; that pyramid (which is solid, by the way, not hollow) is only the tip of the structure. There are eleven Mayan temples underground here. Eleven!

We’ll never get to see them because there’s not enough money to excavate them. In fact the whole town of Chalchuapa is sat on top of ancient ruins. If people dig in their gardens they find artifacts. It’s all going to stay buried though, largely because people live there and you can’t really go displacing thousands of humans just for a bit of history no matter how important it’s deemed to be.

That answered a lot of questions though. We’ve got a few more Mayan ruins lined up in Honduras and Guatemala so hopefully we’ll learn a bit more about this culture that just mysteriously disappeared.

Santa Ana Volcano

We’d heard the effort to joy ratio for Volcán Santa Ana was acceptable. Apparently it’s absolutely up a hill because of course it is, it’s a murder mountain, but it’s not too horrific, not too long, and the eyehole fodder at the top is worth the annihilation of your calf muscles. It’s compulsory to take a guide but fortunately there’s a group hike every day, somewhere between 10am and 10.30am, and guys, it is such a well oiled machine, you can tell they’re the experts now. I wish other countries would take note and implement shit like this on other have-to-have-a-guide hikes.

You can take a local bus to the trail head, there’s only one bus that will get you there on time and that’s the 7.40am 248 bus from the La Vencedora office. They’re used to this shit. We rocked up and a smiling man with a massive rifle (not a euphemism) asked us if we were going to the volcano. That’s a thing you need to get used to in El Salvador, the sheer quantity of large firearms. As a Brit very unused to them, weapons of any kind are a bit jarring. But he pointed us in the direction of the ticket desk where we paid for our passage and joined the sea of other tourists in the waiting room.

You’re eventually ushered onto the waiting chicken bus and off you fuck, collecting passengers as you go until you’re deposited more or less at the trailhead where the guides will meet you, talk at you in Spanish, then take the compulsory tip off you. He’d told us the bus times back, laid down a few ground rules (no smoking is the only one I picked up with my awful Spanish) and told us it could take two hours to get up and two hours to get down. Dear reader, it does not. Even I, with fitness levels akin to a chain smoking sloth with a penchant for lard, didn’t take that long.

We paid our entrance fee and followed the crowd up the hill. We weren’t at the front but we weren’t actually too far behind to start off with. The hill pretty much starts straight away, no dicking about, but it’s honestly not that bad. I mean, tell that to my lungs though, I was still puffing like a steam train on crack. The lead guide was stopping to tell us stuff but only in Spanish and to be fair I couldn’t hear her over the sound of my own gasping anyway.

There are also, and I shit you not, actual flat bits! Seriously, it’s really nice. Even the uphill sections are alright. This is El Salvador all over, just so fucking lovely and enjoyable. We did fall behind the lead group to walk on our own, partially because we’re not 25 any more, largely because the constant, loud chatter was starting to feel like being punched in the head. The hardest thing about a group hike like this is, well, it’s the group isn’t it. I think if Tarrant heard, “Yah! Yah! One hundred percent! Yah!” one more time she’d tip the poor woman down the mountain. We caught up with them when they stopped to rest at the lookout points then took our own rest as they headed on.

It does get a bit rockier and steeper as you get closer to the top but because El Salvador is awesome it does so in a good way. Like, honestly, it’s not at all awful. I kind of like it when it’s a rocky uphill and you have to think about where you’re putting your feet. It takes your mind off how far you’ve got to go and the fact you’re, y’know, walking up a hill. The weather had been perfect too, just the perfect amount of overcast so it wasn’t unbearably stinking hot and you didn’t feel like you were on a cross trainer in an oven. I did think this was going to backfire on us as we were maybe a hundred metres from the crater.

The cloud whisped across the landscape, obscuring pretty much everything. Oh do fuck off, I’ll not be best pleased if we walked all the way up here just to look at some mist. Don’t get me wrong, it’s actually a really lovely, really enjoyable walk with just the right amount of incline, and I’m very pleased we didn’t have to do this in blazing sunshine, but I’d very much like a bit of crater with my slog. It did not disappoint. You get to the edge and it is so very much worth every single footstep.

It’s a cracking crater with the volcanic colours we’d become familiar with splashed up the side as gas and steam ejected itself from the rock and wafted across this incredible turquoise lake. Absolutely stunning, probably our second favourite crater and yeah, you know your trip might have involved a few too many volcanos when you’re able to make a list of which ones you like the best. This definitely has a very good effort to joy ratio, very much skewed in the favour of the joy part. There’s also a bloke flogging ice creams so we definitely relived him of a couple because if he’s dragging that shit up a mountain every day he deserves your $1.50.

We also realised we had a pretty decent chance of making the 1pm bus, something we’d actually ruled out when weighing up our general ability to walk up hills, or lack of ability thereof. We made it back down with loads of time to spare. This is actually the first hill I’ve enjoyed walking up since I got ill in Somerset this time last year and had to hole up in Weston-super-Mare for several days. I’m not saying I want to walk up all the hills just yet but after a year of really, really struggling with something I used to do for fun it’s reassuring that I don’t completely fucking hate it.

Jump to “Useful shit to know…”

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Tazumal & Volcán Santa Ana, Santa Ana, El Salvador

Stayed at: Castello Hostal, Santa Ana

Useful shit to know…

• To get from Juayúa to Santa Ana you take the 238 which leaves from a different place to the 249.
• Head to coordinates 13.84388, -89.74767 on the corner of 5 Avenida Norte and RN12W.
• It cost 80 cents each and took about an hour and a half.
• We were dropped a couple of blocks away from the terminal in Santa Ana at 13.988045, -89.566037.
• There are surprisingly few buses a day, the current schedule is below but it does change I’ve heard.

• To get to Tazumal take the 218 to Chalchuapa which is the town where the ruins are.
• The 218 runs north up 4 Avenida Sur then turns left onto 9a Calle Poniente.
• We caught the bus on this corner outside a comedor which, incidentally is very good for breakfast pupusas.
• It cost 30 cents each and took just under an hour.
• The bus goes into Chalchuapa, the closest it gets to Tazumal is 13.981904, -89.676291 and if you let the driver know where you’re going he’ll let you know.
• Head down 7ª Calle Oriente to the ticket office. It’s US$5 for foreigners.
• To get back to Santa Ana stand at the bus stop diagonally opposite where you got off, outside the cemetery.

How To Get On The Santa Ana Volcano Group Hike.

• The 248 bus is scheduled to leave from La Vencedora (13.991334, -89.564559) at 7.40am.
• You buy your bus ticket inside the office. It’s 70 cents.
• You won’t be the only tourist, there’ll be plenty in the waiting room. There’s toilets and a kiosk.
• Just before 7.40 we were herded onto the bus which left just after 7.40. It often leaves later I’ve heard.
• It took about two hours and dropped us close to the entrance of the volcano where we were met by guides.
• We were given a briefing in Spanish which included bus times back to Santa Ana.
• We paid US$3 each to the guides (guides are mandatory) then walked the half a kilometre to the ticket office.
• It costs foreigners US$6 each to enter.
• There are toilets here if you need to use them.
• Tickets are checked and ripped and they look inside your bag.
• We started walking at about 10.10.
• There’s a guide at the front and one at the back, plus a third guide but I’ve no idea what their function is.
• It’s worth noting that the guided walk used to be at 11am but this is no longer the case and it seems to start when the tourists that arrived on the 248 are ready.
• It took us about an hour and twenty minutes to walk up including a few very short breaks.
• There’s a bloke at the top selling ice creams for US$1.50.
• You can go at your own pace, you don’t have to keep up with anyone and you can spend as long as you want at the top. You don’t have to wait for the group to start heading back down either.
• It took about 55 minutes to get back to the ticket office.
• There’s a stall selling grilled corn at the exit to the trail, on the road.
• There’s a bus anywhere between 1pm and 1.30pm (it arrived at 1.25pm in our case).
• If you miss this bus the next one is going to be between 4pm and 4.30pm.
• It took less time to get back, about an hour and 45 minutes.