12th September 2009 - 14th September 2009
At 4:45am in Copan, we got up and headed to catch the local bus which would take us to the highway where we could catch a coach to San Salvador. After our last luxurious bus ride we decided to upgrade again and paid a whopping $46USD each for the pleasure. It was a bit of a rip off but it meant a hassle free border crossing and not having to catch 6 different buses in one day which made it all worthwhile. It was weird when we were crossing the border as we didn't need to get our passports stamped as Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua have a joint stamp which allows us entry into the four countries for up to three months without having to leave. A good system but you still have to go through the process of getting your passport checked which is a little bit annoying. Definitely makes you appreciate living in Australia and not having any border crossings there!
We arrived in San Salvador around lunchtime and found a nice hostel to stay at called Casa Australia. Not sure where the Australia part comes from as there was no reference to our country anywhere and they couldn't speak a word of English. We were excited though as we were going to see Deadmaus with our friends from Lake Atitlan Stijn (Stan) and Ruth. Unluckily for us we found out it was cancelled due to ill health of one of the guys so we had to scrape that idea and decide what else to do.
Fortunately for us, our hostel was right next door to a big up market shopping centre and cinema so we spent the majority of our time there. When we first walked in we felt like we were in 'Elf' the movie as we were so excited to be in a shopping centre with air conditioning, escalators and nice shops (not to mention the free candy…not!). We saw two movies while we were in San Salvador, the first was 'Public Enemy Number One' with Johnny Depp and the second was 'The Propsal' with Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. Both were really great movies and Sammy particularly enjoyed the chick flick much to his denial. It was a very funny movie though and we'd definitely recommend both of them. It was so nice to enjoy a bit of Hollywood on the big screen again after getting used to the 9 inch screen we're travelling with (which has been great too by the way).
On our second day in San Salvador we were on the hunt for a pair of Adidas runners that Sammy really liked but were unable to find them in his size. We also did a bit of a walk around to try and find a surf shop but unfortunately a lot of the shops, including it, were closed as it was a Sunday. There wasn't much else to do so we headed off the following day to begin our Central American surf adventure.