2024-11-03 Journal Entry

So far I’m just trying to put together my feelings about El Salvador. It’s my first time in Central America – or anywhere south of the US – and it’s a fun and interesting and strange experience.

As with out past trips, Dan and Tania definitely travel in a way that’s very different from myself. Partially there’s the overhead of having multiple people with different eating schedules, different habits, different tolerances for very long periods in the sun. (I’ve already gotten quite sunburned on our first full day, and Dan remains the most melinated white person I know.)

But there’s various things of note. Being in the tropics, the relative poverty and a unique sociopolitical situation, navigating in a language I don’t know, and so on.

I.

So far, I don’t really know if I love being in the tropics. The humidity doesn’t really agree with me, despite having grown up in a relatively humid place. Perhaps I’ve spent too long in California, but I hate the feeling of my shirt sticking to my skin. One is essentially required to be shirtless here to be comfortable, and on the beach you really need to stay in the water most of the time to avoid the heat. It’s by no means the hottest part of the year here.

But there’s also something pleasant in slowly starting to acclimate to it. I’ve noticed that subtle sterility to air conditioning, which exists only in the bedrooms of the house we’re renting. Otherwise we all sit on the deck or in the main room with the doors opened wide to let the air in. The air outside is much closer to body temperature than I’d like to admit.

I think much of my discomfort is really from my sunburn, since even wearing clothes or putting on my backpack is a struggle. It reminds me very much of the time we went kayaking at Lanikai beach right before my 5 hour flight home. I got extremely sunburned and on top of that really wore out my rotator cuff from several hours kayaking, so my body experienced every type of ache and pain simultaneously, some Lost Child of Omelas swallowing up the physical aches and pains of the world. A bodhisattva of pain.

II.

At least as far as the tourist situation goes, El Salvador seems like it’s got a decent amount of development going on in many of these rural areas, and over the next 10-20 years I could see it becoming on par with a Costa Rica as a tourist destination. Dan was telling me about how El Salvador was historically plagued by gang violence, but that much of that largely dissolved in the last few years. El Zonte certainly has quite a few big projects going on – the lot across the street from our AirBNB is adding a dozen or so shipping-container-looking things that presumably will make a small “resort,” and up the road there’s a four-story building going up. On the other side of town are several bougie hotels and restaurants.

Right now though, the thing that gives me the ick is a certain subpopulation of people here, which is mostly the crypto people. El Zonte seems primarily to be a destination for other Spanish-speaking tourists, but there are also definitely some other Americans and few folks from Europe. Of the white people, a handful of them are remote workers or digital nomads, but since El Salvador made Bitcoin an official currency, it seems to have attracted several crypto-bro types here. Honestly my distrust of them is highly unfounded – I haven’t actually directly interacted with any of them – but I’m distrustful of that particular brand of crypto person who uses that almost primarily as an excuse to fuck off to a foreign country and live off of American money while not attributing it to the fact that they often making an American income and spending it in a place 10x cheaper.

III.

Not going to say much about the language thing at this point, I’ve about hashed that out.

What I will say is that in comparison to Dan and Tania (primarily Dan), my life feels very simple, and I largely like that. It’s election season, and while I generally feel bad for not being politically engaged really at all, I also see how much headspace it seems to take up for Dan, and I’m very glad that’s not the case for me. There’s a feeling that it would be morally “better” to be fiercely political, but also pretty much every fiercely political person I’ve ever met is either extremely jaded or isn’t actually policitally active and is more of an armchair analyst. But so it goes.