After an excruciatingly hot night in the bus in Playa Tunco, we rolled towards the east-side of La Libertad to search for some nicer beaches. We didn´t have to look to far. Only an hour or two drive away, we found a little fishing village with a nice sandy beach, or at least sandy.. Pretty much the whole coast-line of El Salvador get the massive waves coming in from the pacific ocean and this was no exception. Spent more or less the whole day just playing around in the waves, which is a lot more fun when the beach-floor is sandy and not covered in pointy rocks. Rounded off the day with a vegetarian meal, maby for the first time in my life, and watching the crazy lighting storm that was developing out in the ocean. After our travels in the Amazon it takes a lot to impress me when it comes to lighting, but this was absolutely spectacular. A shame I don´t have a good enough camera to catch moments like that.
Our original plan was to head for Suchitoto up in the mountains the next day, but my dutch bus-companions decided that they wanted to stay another day, so I ended my very short bus-adventure there and headed for Suchitoto with Cazmir, who, as me, was sick and tired of the humid and hot beach-life. We chicken-bussed through the capitol, San Salvador, to the pleasant little mountain town. There aren´t many tourists in El Salvador in general, and the few who make the trip usually go to the coast to surf. Suchitoto was gringo-free, which meant that two tall blond european guys got loads of attention. Both positive, and negative. We were advised to get police escorts if we wanted to anything else than to walk around the centre. Since we were determined to do some hiking in the areas aroung the city, we followed that advice an asked around at the local police-station. The police-officers seemed happy to help and on our first excursion we got three officers following us, and two on the second. El Salvador is screaming for tourism, and it seems like they have understood that security is essential.
Other than a couple of waterfalls, there wasn´t really much to do in Suchitoto. Cazmir headed up for Guatemala whilst I got on a chicken bus towards the border with Honduras. I´ve grown pretty comfortable with being the only white person around, and when I´m traveling on the noisy chicken-buses I usually just put my ipod on and watch the world pass by out the window. This time, it turned out to be a bad idea. Just 200m before we arrived in my transit-town, a local kid came walking down the aisle and gave me a knock in the stomach as he napped the Ipod and started running off the bus and down the street. I jumped out off my seat and chased him down the street, closing in the gap meter by meter. When he turned of the main road and into something I would describe as a very shady neighborhood I peeked back to see if the bus, still carrying all my stuff, had stopped or not. It hadn´t, so I stopped and rushed back to the bus and my precious backpack. After all, my passport, money, backpack and visa-cards are worth way more than the ipod. I got my stuff and looked up a police officer to file a report for the insurance-company. The officers told me to get in the car and started driving around, looking for the thief. People had seen me chasing this kid down the street, and pointed us in the direction they saw him go. At one point they cocked their massive machine guns and went into a restaurant like a two-man swat team. That kinda made me realize that I am now very far from home. Luckily, nobody was hurt, I got my report and hurried out of this s***hole of a town and went for the much more tranquilo La Palma.

I arrived in La Palma way after sunset and was eager to just shack down in the first hotel I could find. Since La Palma also was completely out of tourists I got an amazing offer for a big, clean private room, with AC, tv and private bathroom. With just a couple of seconds of bargaining I lowered the price from 20 usd to 10. This, combined with the awesome and super-cheap restaurant over the street, made me decide to stick around for a while.
Ended up spending three days in La Palma, just reading, working out and eating. A very good and relaxing time!

The photo-selection from the highlands are very limited because all the photos were taken with Cazmirs camera, and I only had them on my now stolen ipod..