CRUISE VIGNETTES 10 Golden Odyssey

MAYAN RUINS
We then visited the Mayan ruins of Tazumal, near the town of Santa Ana, if I remember correctly, and we climbed the steps to the top. Interesting, but we prefer ruins we have seen in other countries.

Then we headed for a mountain-side across a valley from a volcano that had finally stopped erupting, after several years of activity. In Los Angeles, in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the newspapers said the beautiful sunsets were a result of all the dust put in the air by this volcano. There are several rather active volcano in El Salvador, but we don’t remember the name of the one we saw.

The volcano had erupted for several years, and a hotel had been built on an adjoining mountain, so people could watch the activity. Then the volcano stopped erupting at about the same time the hotel opened. The road up the mountain was about 4 inches deep with dust, and now we discovered that the taxi’s windows were not down, there was no glass in the windows. Boy did we get dirty!

Of even more concern was the fact that our taxi overheated, and we had to stop for water and time to cool down, a couple of times. By now the other taxi had disappeared, and we felt a little isolated.

This was really a poor country. Back of the trees on both sides of the road, we could see families living in the open, with maybe a cardboard shack as cover. Every couple of hundred yards there was a 50 gallon steel drum with water for the people to use, but there was an inch of dust on top of what water was left. This is as bad as we have seen it anywhere.

Finally we got up the hill, viewed the temporarily idle volcano, then back to the ship. You can’t imagine how dirty we were! Hair was caked with dirt, clothes were dirt brown, and were we tired!

Don’t remember now where the tours scheduled by the ship were supposed to go, but I remember, but not with much confidence, that the reason we took the taxis, was because the scheduled tours has been canceled for some reason. But since we have never taken the scheduled tours on any other ship we have been on, that most likely would not have made any difference to us.