Going to The Salvador

All year, my boss and I have been making jokes about El Salvador. Or rather, one joke. It's pretty simple and childish, but that's never stopped us before, right? Basically, it goes something like this:

JY: "El Salvador! Which means ..."
LG: "The Salvador!"

and we laugh like crazy. (For the uninitiated, it's a play on a Saturday Night Live sketch where Chris Farly refers to himself as El Nino, which means The Nino. Trust me, it's funny.)

So I finally got to experience The Salvador on our final international road trip of the season. And although the result of the game - a loss to a bad team that ended our chances of advancing - kind of spoiled the trip, I learned that The Salvador is a pretty cool place.

We flew into San Salvador, the capital (imaginative name, huh?) on Tuesday night, which meant that we didn't get the dramatic approaching view from the plane. Instead, we were greeted with generic Central American airport No. 2. I mean really, the terminal looked just like the one in Panama for a bit.

And as in Panama, dollars are accepted currency. In fact, El Salvador has done away with its own currency (Panama still finds occasional use for the Balboa) and just uses the U.S. dollar. Not sure if that's a good thing, but it's helpful for international travelers like myself. Of course, it costs money to enter Central American countries, which nobody warns you about, so our team admin stood by in the immigration line passing out $10 bills.

When the team went last year, it stayed in San Salvador. This year, however, our game was in Metapan, a small cement-mixing town in the northwest corner of the country less than 30 minutes from the Guatemalan border. So arriving under cover of darkness on Tuesday, we squeezed into a bus - my suitcase served as a footrest for our trainer because there wasn't enough room in the bottom storage area - and headed for Santa Ana.

Now the bus may not have had much storage area - or a bathroom, which allowed our guys to use their best ?Donde esta el bano? - but as one player said, "This thing has the sickest DVD system I've ever seen." It also had great air conditioning, so once we figured out the language barrier - I had to show our equipment manager to use the remote control for the player itself, not the monitor - we were able to watch I Love You, Man, in air-conditioned comfort for the two-hour, up-and-down, hairpin-turn drive to Santa Ana. I was told I was missing great scenery in the hills/mountains around San Salvador, but I really had no idea. With the help of a police escort, we made the drive in about 90 minutes, better than the two hours we had budgeted.

We also got armed military members standing at the entrance to the hotel's open-air lobby. There was internet in the lobby but only in some double rooms, and I had a single, so I spent plenty of time on the couches in the lobby working. We also got maybe 100 channels in the rooms, definitely more than some hotels we've stayed at in the United States. We probably had more channels in English, even, than in some hotels in the U.S.! I briefly sampled the Hispanic version of The Amazing Race (they put little flags next to each team to show their country) but mostly settled on ESPN Deportes and soccer.

Though it was mid-October and cool in Houston, El Salvador had temperatures in the 80s despite the mountainous terrain. On Wednesday, spent the day working until it was time to take the minivan to the stadium with the trainer, equipment manager, and my boss (I needed his cell phone to communicate with the radio station at home).

We quickly realized we could not fit all the equipment bags and the four of us in the tiny mini-van. It took some creative packing from the guys (leaving some bags to come on the team bus) to allow the four of us to squeeze in. I was squeezed into the back with our equipment manager, braced against bags at my back and on my left, covering the window.

The drive was fun - nothing like a small space to breed camaraderie - and amazingly beautiful. I don't think I can do it justice in words or with bad cell phone pictures, but it was amazing. Even more dramatic than Panama (although less harrowing, given the lack of rain). On the early part of the drive, when we were driving by poor homes, our equipment manager made a good point: "This kinds of puts it in perspective. We were just worried about fitting bags in an air-conditioned bus." Definitely a different world.

Once we got into the more rural terrain between Santa Ana and Metapan, supposedly a 40-minute drive, it was really gorgeous. We went up and down roads winding around mountains while looking at even more stunning mountains of varying heights staggered in the distance. Just when you got tired of peering and looking up, you looked down to discover a perfectly blue lake breaking up the green floor of the valley between those mountains and yours. As we arrived on the outskirts of Metapan, we saw kids playing barefoot on a makeshift field squeezed underneath and next to the highway and overlooked by a dramatic rock formation, all with mountains in the background. Absolutely amazing. Like something out of a storybook. I almost wanted to go play. I could have managed that with my Spanish, right?

We arrived in Metapan and kept looking for the stadium, but we kept driving on smaller and smaller streets until we arrived at the town square, very similar to one I saw in a gaucho town in Argentina. We drove by a dramatic churchfront - a bigger, not demolished Alamo - turned by the Palacia Municipal (LG thoughtfully provided a translation for us gringos), and turned another corner to pull up next to an adobe facade just like any other.

It turned out that facade was one side of the stadium, and we were less than 20 yards away from our locker room. It was truly amazing how the stadium was squeezed in right next to the center of town. Enthusiastic kids came over to shake our hands and eventually help us carry bags into the stadium - a very warm welcome indeed.

We checked out the locker room (tiled floors!) and the field (very bumpy and with high grass) and the press box (surprisingly nice, despite the occasional splinter and the ant problem). Initially they brought us a wireless phone, but after LG explained that we needed a phone line to properly connect my equipment, they ran a line into the row below us, and we hooked two of my phone cords together to connect.

That ran fairly smoothly all night, with the exception of 10 minutes near the end of the first half, when I was knocked off the air and missed one of the more remarkable goals in team history (scored by our goalkeeper from 70 yards away).

One of our marketing employees is from El Salvador, and she came down and brought friends and extended family a long way to the game, renting a bus to do so. They were all dressed in orange and cheering for the Dynamo (just their luck, on this night), so that was a pleasant surprise. She even got interviewed and later helped me trade for a Metapan scarf after I had despaired of finding one.

After the game, we wanted nothing more than to get home asap. Riding back on the team bus - with a police escort - was virtually wordless from all 30 people riding. Not a fun time.

On Thursday, we got up and out pretty early to give ourselves plenty of time on the way to the airport. This time, we got to see the scenery around San Salvador, and while it was impressive as well - the city really sprawls through its valley - I preferred the wild terrain in the northwest. We actually made the drive in about 75-80 minutes (this guy was braking for nothing, even on winding roads!) and wound up with a lot of time to kill in the airport after our flight was delayed.

But with a little free internet connection, time passed quickly. I gave up my first class seat to a player, settled in to sleep (since the power in my row didn't work), and enjoyed going home. Don't know when I'll need a passport next, but I'm certainly looking forward to it.