One week in...

We are now just over a week into the trip and are settled in El Salvador, staying with friends. We have acclimatised to El Salvador and got used to the crazy driving, the poorer areas and the street dogs and are now looking for a place to stay. El Salvador is not really geared for tourists and as a result hostels are hard to come by and hotels are few and far between but pretty expensive.

The first day we visited El Zonte it was a bit of a culture shock, the houses are pretty run down and the village is quite poor with none of the pretensions that us tourists are used to seeing. Combine this with the welcome from the guide book saying that El Salvador is not the safest place to be and you can see why we were reluctant to stay anywhere other than behind the safely guarded doors of our friends house. But a few days later and we realise that the El Salvadorian people are (so far) a very friendly bunch of people who don't want to kill us or steal our things and are really welcoming. And so our second trip to El Zonte felt much better, we visited a hostel there and it was really nice, currently the rooms are all taken but I think we will rent one when it comes free. The hostel is right on the beach and has hammocks and palm trees, just what you'd expect really. Sam and Will can surf and I can read in the sunshine.

Today Sam caught his first wave on his new board, hopefully the first of many and Will played in the sea with him for a couple of hours whilst me and James drank fresh passion fruit juice with a view of the sea.

Sam was due to speak with his Dad today, unfortunately the signal wasn't very good and they got cut off which upset Sam a bit. If we could just get over this hurdle I think everything will be fine but it's hard to see him sad and to know that it must be just as hard for his Dad. Still I guess these weeks will be the hardest and in just 10 days he has learned some Spanish, drunk from a coconut, surfed, eaten cevice in an El Salvadorian cafe and seen countless plastic boobs in Miami... so hopefully it will all be worth it in the end!