Today has been one of the most draining, most nerve-racking but also most rewarding days I've ever had travelling.

I was up bright and early at 6am to an already bustling San Salvador, streets brimming with gas belching traffic and sidewalks packed with streetvendors, school kids and suit-lined businessmen. I headed to the domestic bus terminal for all destinations west of San Salvador - one of the most confusing I've ever been in. It was a dirty melee of repainted Canadian school buses converted into public buses packed with passengers plying the Salvadoran highways.

Eventually I found my way onto a bus bound for the western metropolis of Santa Ana, but thanks to a women sat on the same crowded bench as me needing to get off at the same stop, I was off at the correct place - a tiny village called El Congo.

I just missed it. The next bus bound for the Cerro Verde National Park, and properly pissed off and desperate to get there ASAP, hitchhiking proving not to be an option, I settled for a 20 US Dollar Tuk-Tuk ride.

It was well worth 20 Dollars.

The tuk-tuk ride took way over an hour on the bumpy, twisty mountain roads but passing through gorgeous volcanic scenery. El Salvador is thoroughly well-cultivated, coffee and maize plantations as far as the eye could see blanket the landscape.

After completing one of the world's longest ever tuk-tuk rides I finally arrived at the Cerro Verde National Park and helpfully bumped into an extroverted Salvadoran pyschiatrist named Alberto, in his Mitsubishi 4WD, along with his son (who was educated in San Salvador's German school - a German government ran german-language international school) and his university friend from Berlin. I hitched a lift with him up to the start point of the trek up the Santa Ana volcano.

We were then joined by a couple women from London, Royal Holloway graduates, one an ex-daily mail (and anti-daily-mail) journalist and the other a PR Consultant, who'd hired their own truck!

For the trek up the Santa Ana volcano, El Salvador's tallest volcano at 2,381m altitude, you have to wait for an 'official guide' as well as a police escort handily equipped with an AK47 to shoo away any potential thieves.

Once all the bueracracy was out the way, it was time for the trek. It was hot, but very sunny meaning glorious views across the national park. From Santa Ana we could see the fabulous Izalco volcano, a perfect cone shaped volcano - interesting as it was the sight of the America's first communist uprising back in the late 1920s. The other volcano is Cerro Verde, a volcano whose crater has sunken into itself and is now covered in thick rainforest.

The forested slopes of Santa Ana soon gave way to bleak, volcanic rock, but it was a relatively short hike at just around 90minutes before reaching the glorious crater. A portal in the centre of the earth, a sulphorous, bubbling turqouise blue, the crater is a fantastic climax to the hike.

Once the hike was over, Alberto offered to take me to lunch with his son and the German, to a restaurant on the shores of Lago Coatepeque. Oh my god, this place is beautiful.

I almost felt like a Bond villain, it had that atmosphere, a beautiful, shimmering lake with a looming, cloud enveloped volcano on its shores with jet skies pounding its surface and restaurants lining the lakeshore packed with the Salvadoran elites. We had the cheapest option, and another beer called Pilsen (for whatever reason every country seems to have its own beer brand called Pilsen) and enjoyed the fabulous view.

Getting home was a tad perilous. Alberto dropped me off in the industrial, San Salvador satellite suburb of Santa Tecla and the buses back to San Salvador were quite difficult to navigate (i.e. work out where the hell I was going and make sure I didn't end up in a gang controlled hellhole by accident just as night was setting in).

I eventually managed it, with a lot of very helpful local help but boy, San Salvador is horrid. Even by Latin American standards it feels edgy and unsafe, everything is dirty and polluted and the extremes of poverty and wealth are juxtaposed at every turn. Not a place to even think about going out at night.

Gladly, I'm leaving for the beach tomorrow...

Vamos!