San Salvador, El Salvador.

Laura and I on the bus to El Salvador. Ready for new adventures!

El Salvador is the smallest and most densely country in Central America with about 6.5 million citizens. It borders to Honduras in the East, Pasific Ocean to the West and Guatemala in the North.

The capital San Salvador has half a million citizens and was our first stop.

At our hostel we met Nancy who are born in this city, works at the hostel and have her parents and sister living in California.

Because a great part of the population has moved or live parts of the year in Usa, El Salvador has Us dollars as its currency.

During the revolution in the 80s, many people had to flee the country and ended up mostly in California where their kids unfortunately got picked up by the gangs of Los Angeles.

Children of parents who were killed or disappeard during the revolution were taken care of by their grandparrents or other relatives. Many of them failed setting limits for the young boys. These kids formed gangs and began to fight against each other. When the Usa sent the members of the gangs back to El Salvador, the crimes in the streets of San Salvador became enormous. 

Today more than 140 000 young men and some women are a member of a gang. At the moment San Salvador is considered for the world's most dangerous city.

It was no problem beeing a tourist as long as you stayed away from some parts of the town. Some of these photos are found on google since I did not dare to take my camera with me into the center of the city.

Nancy lets me drive her car in these crowded streets.

Nancy showed us many nice local places in and around San Salvador.

One night she drove Laura and me to Santa Tecla, a smaller town just outside the capital. Another night we went to a classical consert at the Museum of Art.

After two days Laura went on to Guatemala and I desided I wanted to stay longer to see more of San Salvador.

We visited a vegetarian resturant in walking distance from our hostel. Here they made pasta of zucchini.

We drove to Boquerón volcano, 1700 meters above sea level. Pupils from the local school told us the story of the vulcano.

In the middle of the town Nancy took me to a beautiful garden with a nice resturant.

Thanks to Nancy and all the fun we had together I got many great experiences in this huge city.