Sometimes I don't want to be bothered with titles

The more agreeable temperatures in Alegria's altitude allowed me to retain fluids, quickly shifting my urine's color from desert sunset orange to clear. With that healthy boost I returned to running, resuming the calf-and-quad killing hill training that has characterized my every run in El Salvador. And when I say hill training, I mean that in the most literal sense. Hill training. A single hill. As in I'm way up in the mountains, so running means flying down then climbing back up. Like 22 minutes straight up. By the end casual observers think I'm running in place. Jabba the Hut slithered by yesterday and looked like a comet in comparison. (What he's doing in El Salvador I'm not sure. I was too out of breath to inquire. Or care.)

From Alegría it was time to investigate Perquin, an old FMLN stronghold near the Honduran border, an area afflicted by ghastly military attrocities during the civil war. It's another tiny blip on the map, nestled high up in the mountains...blah, blah...but with an interesting Museo de la Revolución. (I didn't make the hike to El Mozote, a nearby village that was the site of a wartime massacre, but I plan to trek it with an ex-guerilla guide when I return.)

Perquin is notable for a few other things. We hung out with Peace Corps. volunteers gathered to translate for a group of kindly geriatrics working for Eyecare, enjoying free pie, beer, and wine for our whiteness, thus the assumed association with people affecting the lives of more people than pupusa vendors. We also discovered that not a single person in Perquin -- not even the tourist police or tourist information office -- understands the bus schedule. After waiting for two hours for a bus that, quite simply, never came, someone casually advised, "A veces, cuando el bus esta corriendo tarde, lo no viene aquí.."

Oh.

So we ended up stuck in Perquin for another night, which was far from a tragedy; rather, another "last chance" for pupusas, a circumstance, I'm convinced, was willed by Lord Pupusa so I could stumble and gorge myself upon pupusas de res. With at least four other pupusa variations rumored to be smacked out nightly in remote corners of the country, I'll be back to hunt before long. But first I have to zip to Costa Rica for a few hours to reset my CA-4 (Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras) Visa for another 90 days.

Yesterday morning the bus to Marcala, Honduras decided to show, so we endured what I imagine feels like a four hour earthquake while crammed inside a tight metal closet as we traversed the 50km stretch from Perquin, El Salvador to Marcala, Honduras on a fully-packed chicken bus. The unpaved mountain pass cost a bit more than usual, perhaps, but I attribute that to the fact that the bus driver has to buy a new bus after every trip. The border crossing was the only interruption in the trip, a stampless excuse for border officials to extract an unofficial cash sum from any passing foreigners. Technically, all CA-4 border crossings are free. But on Friday the 13th it cost $3. Hardly worth disputing and feeding the Central American legacy of disappeareds.

In Marcala lunch was devoured and another country's tasteless Pilsener was chugged for a pocket change $2.75. Then I connected to La Paz, told Emma I'd terrorize her cute, single friends in Chile, and ended up in Comayagua. Fresh of the bus and girl-travel-partner free, I was basking in the well-kempt beauty of Honduran city babes. Trying to find a hotel I fell into conversation with a mango-vending 30-year-old with a litter of kids, whose husband has bounced sometime in the last year, and she insisted I take her number within a few sentences of revealing that information. If the kids call me "Dad" the next time we cross paths I might have to cut short my stay in Comayagua, which, regardless, is but a short stopover for baleadas and enchiladas hondureñas on the sprint to reset my Visa.

Show me your pupusa

Chasin' the pupusa again like every gooey bite holds the potential to elucidate secrets of the universe, all I want is a solution to Suchitoto's paralyzing heat. Even standing in the shade my sweatfalls feed the puddle spreading at my feet faster than I can replenish essential fluids. But even dehydration-induced deliria can't distract from the sole purpose in making Suchitoto a late addition to the El Salvador travel itinerary: pupusas de arroz. The rice flavor and more durable construction, how they tend to fragment instead of fold, make these whitish-brown, meat-, bean- and/or cheese-filled discs entirely distinct from their maíz-made cousins.

And how are they? Well, I spent three days in Suchitoto's hellish heat, where sweating is as much excitement and the most vigorous activity you'll see during the sunlight hours. (Though the mix of guys and girls gyrating in partner with their own images in the mirror-walled discoteca makes for amusing nightlife.) As the sun retires, carts and comals and jugs of curtidos, squeeze bottles of salsas and short benches around little wooden tables dot the streets and central square, firing up $0.25 pupusas for all passerbys.

Suchitoto is a silent town of culinary highlights on the beautiful Lago de Suchitlán. Besides being a pupusa-fiend's must-visit, the paletas artesanales (handmade popsicles) are a revelation, especially in the desert heat: the paletas are thick, creamy treats made from everything from sapote to oreo to moraqueso (blackberry cheesecake) to canela. Simply the finest, most refreshing treats I've ever licked.

With Emma, my rum-powered Irish partner in hangover lazyness and food-tourism -- which means our between-meal gaps consist of hours of conversation concerning the next meal, or recollections of other foods we've eaten around the world (and Emma is quite well traveled) -- I've accomplished little during the handful of blissful days since we departed Juayúa. (I remain alone, however, in my passion for "sex tourism," Emma having quickly deduced that strolling, curve-flaunting Central American women are just as responsible for the drool dribblets discoloring the front of my t-shirts as any pupusa mamá.)

Yesterday we finally mustered the energy to mount a bus toward cooler mountainous climes, settling for a few nights in quaint Alegría. It's yet another charming Salvadorean town where the citizens remain unjaded by tourists -- but where we were taken advantage of for the first time in El Salvador, being charged $7.25 each for the type of plato del día (plus licuado) you can find in any Salvadorean market stand or bus terminal for less than $2.50 per plate. Needless to say, I wasn't served the entire cow, plus pound of rice, wagon of tortillas, and garden of vegetables I'd paid for. The only way such a meager meal would cost $7.25 in any comedor is if a $5 bill was served on the side (maybe substituted for a single tortilla).

Living in Juayúa is akin to abusing my digestive tract

Having chicken bussed across crater-littered Central American highways for nearly five months, I'm relatively unchanged. A shade browner, the giant squeeze bottle of sunscreen I lugged from the states the same back-straining deadweight in my pack; and armed with a Spanish language vocabulary sufficient to keep myself fed, sheltered, and swarmed by quickly obsessive females. The kind who begin battering you with lunacy after a week, "¡Eres mi amor!", every time you scurry to the bathroom to relieve the intestinal pressure wrought by ingested parasites a chorus of sobbed "¡Te extraño mucho!"s breaks out in the next room. (To be fair, that might be a simple defense mechanism to drown out the offensive sounds rumbling, tumbling from your gut, invading the apartment through wafer-thin walls.) Those unstable sirens who, mere hours after your first encounter, are comfortable crying in your presence; gushing over your (perceived) sincerity and their luck in stumbling upon the one-in-one-hundred exception to the cruel male rule; singing you love songs in front of the bubbling fountain in central park.

On the other hand, as long as I can suppress comments to the effect of, "Wow, you're really pretty...ummm, insane," I'll at least get a lot of Spanish conversational practice. The cash I save on these free lessons will go a long way in the red light districts across the region.

As it is, I was going to leave Juayúa this morning, but a round of fountain-front tunes and tears convinced me to stay another day. My stomach is sputtering too -- making any rough bus ride a dangerous proposition -- due to any combination of digestive tract abusing factors:

• Since arriving Thursday night eating twenty-four full-sized peanut butter, banana & honey sandwiches (including 20 over the course of 5 consecutive meals, between meal snacks constituted by grease-dripping pupusas and chocolate cake) on combinations of white, wheat, and french breads.
• Taking local advice and drinking tap water.
• My Salvadoran Super Bowl bonanza, substituting a many-pound stack of pupusas from Pupuseria Esmerelda for the usual plates of burgers, nachos, and beer -- downing tres papusas revueltas, an additional one each stuffed with a single ingredient: flor de ayote, pollo, y queso, and something absurd called a Papusa Loca, essentially a maíz-frisbee stuffed with every papusa-loading option (including papelillo, the lone ingredient I'd neglected to involve in the rest of my gluttonous papusa order).

Or, who knows, maybe when Barry and I were splashing around in Pacific at Playa El Tunco, laughing as we slapped water towards each others faces, "Hepatitis, hepatitis," I caught a few contaminated droplets.

The friend who was replaced by by pastries.

My attempts to keep Barry in Central America, questions designed to stimulate a simple missed flight or a fabricated kidnapping -- "So you're really flying home Friday? Soccer season doesn't start until the fall, right?" -- failed to germinate. "So, yeah, how are your girlfriend's pupusas?" garnered, at least, a barely perceptible clinch of the tummy. We split in San Salvador's Terminal de Occidente this morning, sharing first a late breakfast: casamiento, carne, y tortillas, all swimming, of course, in vinegary platebound puddles of curtido heaped from the gallon-sized plastic containers enlivening every table, long since emptied of their original contents and stripped of their corresponding labellings, murky ecosystems swimming with vegetables and chiles and germs from every grubby hand that shares every jug's half-submerged community ladle. And, for my beverage, the 10:30am beer.

Without Barry's banter about fantasy novels and time travel I'll be filling my time with pastries. I'm back in Juayúa, where Pasteleria Anthony's creativity in shaping sugary dough into new shapes to be filled with creams, then glazed, iced, and or sprinkled with coconut flakes continues to confound my waking promises to eat healthily. This afternoon I was only "taking a look." Then my finger uncurled like a puppet aroused, indicating an on-all-sides white-iced cube of (to be discovered after that first rewarding chomp) yellow cake, sprinkled with coconut cakes, topped with a fluff-fence of light cream encircling a strawberry swimming in a swampthick pool of chocolate.

"¿Quieres otro?" mocked the pastry queen behind her glass case. Mouthwatering activated by a remote controller shaped bar with a white chocolate face and a caramel-color packed body, indicating another I stammered, "¿Que vale?"

"Cincuenta centavos mas." And so, sold by caramel, I walked out of Pasteleria Anthony's a dollar poorer but richer in saturated fats, simple sugars and Spanish practice. Seated on a bench surrounding the central park fountain, eyed by jealous kids still attended by health-monitoring mothers, I extracted the pastries from my bag. The cakeish cube was delicious, but tonguetip inspection of the caramel bar revealed complexities, layers of sugary goodness, I hadn't before detected. The white chocolate top was drizzled with meandering creeks of caramel, the density of the bar comprised of delicate sheets of baklava-thin pastry dough enveloping a wealth of dulce de leche, so much that globs dripped out the sides and back like an overloaded hamburger with each and every bite.

Hours later, offended by lumbering gringo-blimps oozing human skinglaze from their pores, I bought two loaves of bread, a jar of peanut butter and a bag of bananas. The purchase satisfied the demands of the the first dream I have remembered in weeks, and -- if I can pace myself with four peanut butter and banana sandwiches every meal, as was accomplished at dinner tonight -- I might be able to stuff my stomach into pastry submission until I venture back into pastry-poorer regions.

The Bartman Cometh, and we get it Pupusa Poppin'

I finally dislodged my lazy ass from San Pedro La Laguna, Guatemala, my backside, I'm sure, still imprinted with routine, bearing the faint interlaced piecrust pattern of cushy hammock straps. My departure was a forty-eight hour whirlwind of house-hopping, issuing heartfelt goodbyes through chainlink fences and seated around comals burning dekerneled corncobs, promising I'd revisit my surrogate families...sometime. As I passed out photos I'd had printed from my digital camera, I was overwhelmed by reciprocal generosity, collecting a variety of handsewn items: a belt paved by stretches of majestic blues and a rainbow colored handbag adorned with a tiny wooden figurine of a Mayan woman in traditional dress; most touching of all was a plastic bagful of well-past-well-worn schoolbooks, broken spined and sans covers, loose pages rearranged haphazardly, accompanied by a stuffed ladybug and a photo in a frame crudely fashioned from a clear plate of hard plastic, tape and a bit of cardboard bent into a stand, all tied together with a red ribbon and two flowers with wire stems, shyly imparted by my recently befriended neighbor Rosita. Mildred gave me, in addition to a pile of handwritten cards collected in my final weeks, a fluffy stuffed puppy wearing a red heart inscribed with the word LOVE around its neck, and the puppy's paw-squeeze activated tune wavers lazily for a battery fading after who-knows-how-long-on-the-shelf-at-who-knows-what-tienda.

All the beauty of my departure created a karmic imbalance that was reset when I stepped off the bus in Antigua. As my eyes scanned parque central, the grand architecture and spewing fountain impressive as ever, I noticed a man, filthy, his head lolling about, sitting on outlying steps. His faded and tattered pants were spattered with, presumably, urine. On second glance I noticed his penis resting in his lap, jumping into action every few moments with as it was flicked or wagged, like some oddity peeking from its unzippered cave. That mental illness and public intoxication are ignored in Central America is distressing but, to be sure, the wealth of crazed men stumbling about -- singing and shouting incoherently, urinating and exposing themselves without regard to audience or location, rooting through garbage cans with no intention other than transplanting waste onto the surrounding concrete -- make the region a more entertaining place.

Barry showed up shortly, and we proceeded to waste several days in Antigua, Guatemala stalking the streets, ushered into every panaderia and pasteleria and grocery store by my addiction to pastries and cakes, especially those iced and or filled with creams and jellies and frostings. We sucked down a liter of Quezalteca Especial over two nights, amd I ate two to three market-cheap sapotes every day to fill the spaces of time (and the cavernous void of nutrition) between meals defined by saturated fats and simple sugars, or by grease and cheese dripping, salsa-mountain buried pupusas purchased for spare change at the food stalls surrounding the bus station. Submitting to the power of the pupusa, we finally embarked toward the pupusa heartland, El Salvador.

Minds clogged by cheesy pupusas, we nearly handed away our identities at the border between Guatemala and El Salvador, each extending our passports to the decidedly unofficial "officials" clamoring outside the bus' door. But as the images of the pupusa orgy to come began to flicker -- at the sight of our passports being hustled away to some location and with some intention obscured by Spanish, by guys dressed in torn t-shirts -- we simultaneously recovered our senses and snatched back our lives; more importantly our tickets to pupusa heaven.

Hotel Livingston in Santa Ana, El Salvador was our first sweaty stop, one of the first times in my life I haven't bemoaned a lack of hot water showers. We proceeded to pass two days just as we had in Antigua: exercise defined by the miles of cracked concrete walked to various foodstands and the heavy-lifting of pastries filled with thick custards, usually called leche. Genuinely concerned by my inability to refuse cakes and doughnuts (and packages of coconut-cream filled, coconut-flake covered Dinkis) following my departure from cream-and-icing starved San Pedro, I googled diabetes to determine if I could, in fact, overwhelm my system with sugar and induce disease. It seems, assuming I don't forsake exercise entirely and puff up, soft to the touch like any of my favorite pastries, I'll be safe. The halfmoon shaped, blackbean filled pancakes of Pan de Elote, which we devoured hot from the griddle daily in the central park, I have less guilt about eating.

At the end of each day spent sweating toward pastries, the sugar rush and inevitable crash crushing all ambitions but those of appetites unsatiated by white breads and simple sugars, we crawled the ghosttown-come-sunset toward pupusa stands or, on the second night and accompanied by (fellow Davidsonian, friend and current El Salvadoran Peace Corps volunteer) Jim Hooper, toward a local bar. (MS-13 never materialized, but a pirate and a maybe prostitute and a general excess of alcohol dispelled us from that bar rather suddenly.)

Moving southward through Central America, the women grow progressively more tantalizing while remaining completely impervious to accurate-age-determination -- is she 15 or 30? In Juayua, a charming, touristy mountain village on the Ruta de las Flores, where Jim, Barry, and I relocated for it's famed every-weekend food festival, we admired a couple of cute Salvadoran girls who seated themselves across from us while we sipped beers in the central park soon after dusk. We guessed their ages to be no more than 16, but captivated by their beauty and the giggles they unleashed every time we made eye contact, emboldened by a few beers and the fact that hitting on (even severely) underage girls was nothing that would phase the heavily armed police patrolling around the square, Barry and Jim's urgings were entirely sufficient. I approached the duo and ascertained that the first beauty was, indeed, fifteen. But the second, the more stunning of the two, claimed to be twenty, even after confronted with my barrage of stern "No te creo"s. As it was, I found myself a supermodel of a date for the political party sponsored town dance that evening, and shared two hours on a dancefloor, a head taller than anyone else, boring my partner with the same semi-hip-swiveling motion.

And so, Jimbo, Barry, and I passed the time: feasting at the foodstands for the weekend, spending two to five dollars for plates brimming with mouthwatering, generously portioned delicacies: fried yucca and chorizo to rabbit and shrimp, always with a side of thick tortillas. Hiking to a series of impressive waterfalls a few kilometers from town, where many locals were picnicking and swimming, eating too much ice cream and too many pastries, and passing the nights drinking around the town's central fountain. It was vacation, pure and simple, and quite clear that my life could not be better...unless my gorgeous dance partner, Ingrid, emails me, volunteering to nurture my Spanish language development. That is, assuming, my scribbled email address was even legible...

Jim had to return to work and Barry and I have relocated to the stretch of surf spots spanning the Pacific coast. A few chicken bus changes led us to Bus 80, departing La Libertad for Playa El Tunco. The handful of Bus 80s running the coastal route are the usual chicken buses, but ours had been outfitted with a bassy speaker system that showered unwitting El Salvadorans with uncensored American rap, a deluge of odes celebrating the nomenclature of genitalia and the juicy details of romantic strip club encounters. Or maybe the words had been slightly altered for regional appropriateness: "Pupusa poppin' on a handstand."

El Tunco is a quiet beach with a few hostels filled with surfers, a few restaurants, cheap beers, and enchanting sunsets. Walking the road for twenty five minutes we can eat for half the price, and with the all-important option of pupusas, so we trek a few times daily to the dilapitated stands and in-house eateries at the next beach, sharing hours of postmeal conversation seated in the carport/dining area of our favorite mom-and-pop operation.

My vacation within a vacation continues, and I'm completely infatuated with El Salvador, mesmerized by, in this particular order: it's women; their pupusas; and the delightful citizens always quick to converse with a pasty foreigner butchering their language.