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Surfers in Oz are venturing on surf trips all over the world to get away from the current winter cold. While, Indonesia and the Maldives are the most popular destinations for their world-class waves and warm weather. Central America is another favourite for surfers from Down Under around this time of the year. The continent offers a fine variety of waves, a cheaper lifestyle and a fun nightlife (maybe a bit too much fun?). However, Central American countries are definitely not for the faint-hearted, with danger historically been a possibility for tourists.
Below is Tracks Writer Paul Mulshine’s account of travelling all over Central America in the late 80’s. The American recounts his tumultuous experience surfing and travelling in Costa Rica, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador.
The Archive below featured in Tracks Magazine Issue no. 202 July 1987.
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Central America Is Not For The Faint-Hearted
It’s getting cold here in New Jersey, and we have cold that you bastards in Australia can’t even dream about. For example, there’s a bay between my house and the ocean that I always check out as I’m driving over for a surf. Some winter days I get excited to see the bay is perfectly flat. No wind, I figure, the ocean has to be glassy.
But then I see a flag blowing in the breeze and I take a closer look the bay is frozen solid. This bay, by the way, is filled with salt water. So it’s not surprising I should start thinking about Central America, where the water is always 82 degrees and the waves are peeling. I’ve got a board stashed in the storeroom of the Motel Rick in La Libertad, El Salvador, and for the last eight months or so it has been sitting there unridden while waves peel down the point just a quarter-mile away. Meanwhile, the water here is three degrees above freezing. The air is a lot colder. During the worst winters, ice has piled up at the water’s edge. I’ve surfed in snowstorms; at least the wind is offshore.
I’m trying to figure where I’ll get the money. I’ve already got an old Volvo wagon with a rebuilt motor that will run from here to Costa Rica, no problem. Two thousand dollars, I figure, should let me drive down through Mexico, surf Puerto Escondido for a month or so, catch and get over the turistas, let the huge tubes beat me into shape, and in general get ready for that drive a little further south, into Central America.
Puerto Escondido, as the American surf magazines are fond of stating, is the home of the “Mexican Pipeline.” There’s a good 400 miles or so of Mexican coastline south of there, but as far as I can tell few surfers ever venture down that way. The first time I drove to Salvador, I couldn’t convince anyone to leave Escondido and come with me. They all thought I was crazy. Escondido had it all: six- foot-plus tubes every morning, $2-a-night accommodations, loose women from all over the world. Why leave all that for a chance to get shot by some crazed Salvadoran gringo- hater?
Well, there are reasons. Mine was that I had already collected a $1,000 advance from a newspaper for columns about Central America. Otherwise, I probably would have stayed in Escondido, getting shocked into consciousness by two-foot-thick lips every morning before breakfast, sleeping away the afternoons in my hammock, and then heading into town for a fine evening meal, maybe some wine or a pitcher of margaritas.
Yes, Mexico has its good points. On the drive south to the Guatemalan border I saw some more of them. Just off the highway in the middle of nowhere I caught sight of 10- foot-plus waves breaking at the bottom of a cliff in a perfect right point set-up. I was alone and there was a mile or so of swamp between me and the base of the cliff, so I didn’t get to ride it. Whether anyone else ever has, I don’t know. I didn’t see another surfboard until I got to Salvador, two days’ drive if you go straight through.
But I didn’t go straight through. To get to Salvadaor, you have to cross Guatemala. If you’re up on your current events, you’ll know that Guatemala is famed for being run by right-wing military types who in the last five years or so have killed thousands of indians for supporting the guerrillas. The soldiers were so brutal that the US government cut off their military aid. This, I figured, meant there was no particular reason they should be nice to Americans, especially Americans with press credentials, a sure sign of Communist leanings. Like an idiot, I drove into Guatemala on a dark, rainy night through what it turned out is pretty much of a war zone. God knows what the soldiers thought when they saw my old Volkswagen Golf with two boards on the rack pulling up to their checkpoints. If they wanted to, they could have just shot me and divided up my possessions. I particularly remember one big, leering sort looking through my car. I told him I was driving through to Costa Rica. His response was, “You must have an awful lot of money to be driving all that way, no?” I looked at the automatic rifle he was carrying and wondered how many womena nd children he’d bumped off with it. Costa Rica was a long drive and I had just barely enough money, I assured him, none to spare. He eyed my cassette tapes and remarked that I sure had an awful lot of them. His mistake; I realised he was harmless. Anyone who can be bargained down from cash to cassettes that easily has to be bluffing.
As it turned out, Guatemala is probably one of the safest places on earth to be an American, far safer than Philadelphia, the urban shithole where I work at a newspaper between surf trips. The Guatemalan government is trying to get the tourists back as the war winds down, and the word is out not to harass gringos and Europeans. I decided to check out a little town I’d heard of on a lake up in the volcano fields. The place is called Panajachel and all I can say is, if you’re ever on the North American continent, don’t miss it. It’s on the shores of Lake Atitlan. The lake is about as high above sea level as the highest point in Australia. Towering a kilometre or so above the lake are several volcanoes, shrouded in mist.
You will not find a more beautiful place on earth, and get this: Panajachel has great bars. I don’t know what it is, but you can drive all over Mexico without finding a single good bar. This little town, though, has at least four good ones, filled with weird people from everywhere: Americans hiding out from the law, European hippies seeking psilocybin mushrooms, Vietnam veterans who claim to be mercenaries, girls from the Caribbean coast with no morals, Yank student Sandinista sympathizers heading south-and gret beer (they learned to make it from the Germans) for less than 20 cents a bottle. I’d intended to stay overnight, but it was two weeks before I dragged myself out of the bar and got on the road to Salvador.
Salvador is not as beautiful as Guatemala, but it has its charms. On any given day you could wake up and get tubed, laid-or killed. I came close to doing all three on one particular day in El Salvador that I capped off with a visit to this little darling I met in San Salvador. (There are a lot of hot women in Central America, and they all seem to like men who look like the typical surfer.) I was driving along the outskirts of the city when we rounded a corner and came upon some soldiers patrolling the roadside. The combined effect of my speed and my bright driving lights evidently startled the poor guys. and one of them raised his M-16 and started to aim. By the time my little sweetie pointed it out we were already past the whole deal, still alive and still drunk, laughing.
Things like that do not happen here in the northeastern part of the United States. It’s true that some bastards in the cities will kill you as quickly as a Salvadoran soldier, and with even less remorse. But as for getting laid, it amazes me that anyone around here even succeeds in doing that anymore. The women are all aspiring business executives – “men in skirts” as one Yank in Panajachel described them. Plus, all anyone does in the U.S. any more is watch TV. With 80-station cable TV set-ups and a videocassette recorder in every home, there’s no need to actually ever move your body. In fact, motion may be on the verge of being outlawed. The poor skate- boarders seem to get banned from every place they find, and we’ve got this 55-mile- per-hour speed limit for drivers.
In Salvador, you can drive as fast as you want, the faster the better, in fact. The guerrillas are always declaring what’s called a “paro”. This means they threaten to shoot everything that moves on the roads. You would probably be dead before you knew what hit you, another nice thing about Central America.
Once you make it to La Libertad you realize that this place is pretty much the Wollongong of El Salvador. (I know the feeling well since New Jersey, where I live, is universally recognized as the Wollongong of the United States). La Libertad used to be the main port of Salvador but waves kept wrecking the pier, so now it is a fishing town that doubles as a resort for the people who have just enough money to get out of San Salvador on weekends, but not enough to make it to the nice places up the coast.
Yes, La Libertad is a dump. The beach is lined with crappy restaurants that sell overcooked fish and nothing else. The highway through town has a couple dozen liquor stores so the rich Salvadorans can buy booze on their way the hell out of La Libertad. The poor Salvadorans buy swill called Tic- Tack, a debased form of rum that will get you staggering drunk for about 25 cents. The only thing I ever found to do in town other than surf was to play basketball with the local kids. They’re pretty good at it.
Other than that you can hang out at Bob Rotherham’s restaurant. He’s a surfer from Florida who married a local girl and settled down here about 10 years ago, building a restaurant at the base of the point. The beer is cheap and cold and the butterfly shrimp are about the only thing worth eating in Libertad. You get sick of them, too, after a while.
But then there’s the surf. Imagine a point like Lennox Heads, only hollower. Imagine it breaks in 82-degree water. Imagine that for a month it doesn’t drop below four feet. And one more thing: On some eight-foot mornings, there’s just one surfer in the lineup, none if I’m not there, which I’m not at the moment.
The routine goes something like this: Get up at dawn, wax up and stretch out a bit, maybe catch a cup of coffee (generally awful despite the fact that El Salvador’s main export is coffee) and head to the point. It’s about a quarter-mile walk along the rocks.
The paddle out can be interesting. Like Lennox Heads, the point is lined with large rocks so perfectly lined up they resemble a jetty. The rocks are covered alternately with slime and barnacles. Slip on the slimy ones and then lose skin on the barnacle-encrusted ones. It took me a month to get the hang of it, and my board and body still bear the scars.
Once in the water you’ll find that the lineup takes about 10 seconds to figure out. The swells peak at the tip of the point and then peel for a quarter-mile or so. The takeoff is a nice, juicy drop. Then it’s a matter of figuring out if you want to get tubed or just rip. To get tubed, just drag a hand and wait for the lip to appear overhead. The tubes are usually more oval than round, so you generally have to contort yourself a bit to get really far back.
If you just feel like jamming the lip and ripping cutbacks, then accelerate off your bottom turn and ponder the beauty laid out before you, like a lovely Latin woman. Kick out when you’re done and paddle back for another in the clearly defined channel. There may be another place on earth with waves this good and no crowds, but I haven’t heard of it.
In the ’70s. this place used to be crowded with Californians and other such human detritus. But when fighting broke out one of the favourite pieces of gaffiti was “Matar a los gringos”-matar means kill and even the surfers were smart enough to take the hint. The only one who didn’t split was Rotherham, and as a reward he has the sort of set-up every surfer would have if there really was a God. Point waves, tropical water-he doesn’t even bother paddling out unless everything is just right. He also has become something of a folk hero. Periodically the Associated Press runs a story on the incongruity of surfing in El Salvadaor, and he’s always interviewed. There was even a character directly based on him in the Oliver Stone movie “Salvador.”
The funny thing is, as Rotherham will tell you, La Libertad is really one of the safer spots a surfer could visit. The war in Salvador is being fought for control of the farming areas inland. The people of La Libertad have their backs to all that, and they make their living from the sea. Neither the guerrillas nor the army cares much about this part of the country. And the airport is only about 20 miles away. A surfer could fly in from California, for example, take a cab to La Libertad, and surf in perfect safety until he felt like leaving. This is why I did not write this article for a California surf magazine. If they only knew…
I don’t mind telling you Aussies. Not enough of you will bother to come all this way. and the few that do are probably the kind of characters that would be worth meeting. Latin America is even safer for Aussies than Yanks, because no one there resents an Aussie. You’re barely even gringos. Once in Mexico, my friends Brad and Bob from Ulladulla were driving up the coast after we’d spent a couple weeks at this unreal point called Chacahua. With typical Aussie foresight, they had neglected to clean the seeds and roaches from their car before pulling up to a Mexican military roadblock. A bust like this in Mexico can often lead to the loss of all your possessions and some time in the slammer. But a $20 bribe covered it when the soldiers found our Brad and Bob were Aussies and not Americans. They were laughing about it the next day when they showed up at a rivermouth break called Tikla, and we all got drunk on cold beer, real cold because the Mexicans keep it on blocks of ice in villages that don’t have electricity.
When you consider how many Aussies save up for years just to travel to horribly boring places like England, it’s amazing that more don’t hit this part of the world. Mexico and Salvador not only have good surf, they offer true $5-a-day living. It could be done even cheaper. And, whether you want to or not, you will have more adventures in these places than just about anywhere on earth. The Central America region is, in fact, where many of the things that make life interesting originate. All the great stimulants come from there, which is somehow fitting. Cocaine, coffee-there would not even be such a thing as Indian hot curry if not for Central America; the chilli pepper originated there. There would be no chocolate for the Swiss or tomatoes for the Italians if it hadn’t been for Central America.
As soon as you enter this part of the world you are taken over by the energy. When I was in the US making my plans. I would sometimes lie awake at night worrying about death squads. I’d be stopped on some road in the middle of nowhere by a gang of armed men. I’d show them my press credentials and try to convince them I was a journalist. The leader would spit in the dirt and motion to his underlings to finish me off…
Once I was in Salvador I slept like a baby. The only nightmares I had were when 1 dreamt I was back in the States. A certain state of mind takes over in Central America. It you have food, surf, beer, music- you don’t think ahead. If they kill you, it will be quick. They don’t torture gringos.
Odd things happen. Me and a guy from New Zealand, who everyone called Kiwi for some reason, were sitting at an outdoor cafe in San Salvador with a couple of girls, getting drunk. Suddenly there was a commotion. It turned out that a woman who’d been sitting a few tables away had gone to her car to get something. Two armed men had been waiting there and they took her, and her car. No one knew where. The girls went over and joined the crowd asking questions. By the time the police came everyone had forgotten about it and the mariachis were playing.
I drove down to Nicaragua with another Yank. We had to travel through the worst war zones in Salvador, and the “paro” was on heavy. We passed the hulks of trucks and cars that the guerrillas had burned for violating the ban on travel. At any moment, automatic weapons fire could erupt from the bush. I wasn’t worried it was his car. Death by machine gun is bad, but at least it’s quick. Car repairs in Latin America kill you slowly.
There’s a lot to be learned in Nicaragua, I found out. The first thing I learned is that, even though they hate the yanquis, the Sandinistas will only take American dollars at the border if you want to enter their country. They made me change $60 into roughly enough cordobas to buy a hot dog and a Coke. Then, adding insult to injury, the guy in the next booth wanted to see if I had enough. money to enter his country. Enough money? Pal, I’ve got sixty bucks worth of cordobas.
I resented that sleazy little manoeuvre, and! resented just about everything else I saw in Nicaragua. I went and talked to the guys at La Prensa, the opposition newspaper that has since been shut down, and they told me how the Sandinistas censored them, cutting out articles about rainstorms and similar trivialities just to harass them for not being good party members. A lot of people around the world are making the Sandinistas out to be some sort of heroes, but let me tell you this: If it was up to guys like this there would be no Tracks magazine and almost certainly no surfers. We’d be fucked.
I had no great desire to stay long in Nicaragua, contributing money to a revolution that seemed to have the goal of ridding the earth of people like me. But if you’re interested in superpower politics, Nicaragua is the place to be. Watch first hand as Ron and Gorby fight it out through their stooges. Watch the Russian military hardware cruise the streets. See the Russian automatic rifles on every street corner. The party has things sewed up nice and tight so you can enjoy the fine local beer in peace when visiting with the various “internacionalistas” foreign supporters of the Sandinista party. Most are misguided American rich kids, playing revolutionary for three months or so. Bring up Lenin’s name over diner, complimenting him on the wonderfully sturdy system he devised. Watch the shit fly. It’s a laugh, and a good education, too.
They say there’s some surf in Nicaragua. I wasn’t there long enough to check it out. I also didn’t get down to Costa Rica, which has surf on both the Pacific and Atlantic sides. As soon as I could I flew back to Salvador, just in time for the yearly surf contest, which drew about 50 local and gringo contestants. About the contest, I have this to say: I was robbed.
