My favorite blog posting from my backpacking trip through Central American with La Ruta Inka.

           In the past few days La Ruta Inka facebook page has been reposting some of my images.  I thought it would be cool to pick out my favorite blog postings and re share them with everyone.  So here they are; in order by date:

1. "First meeting with a tribe"

2. "The art of extracting balsamo"

3. "Age old festival in El Salvador"

4. "The Maya juego de la pelota or ballgame"

5. "Assimilation of Christianity and Mayan religion"

6. "Finally Tikal, Guatemala"

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The art of extracting balsamo

                   While I was in El Salvador with La Ruta Inka the department of tourisum took us to a town that is one of the major exporterters of balsamo in the world.  Balsamo is the sap/oil that comes form a tree, that is used for medicine, chap stick, hair products, and has many other functions.
                  The balsamo farm that we were tooken to was a farm that used very old tecenics to extra the sap and keeps the tree heathy for futrure use.  The way they collect the sap is by climbing up the tree, by wrapping a rope around their hands and the tree to pulling them selfs up it.  When they are up in the tree they burn the top layer of the bark to make the tree extract a sap that it uses to heal its self.  By waving their hat they control what parts of the tree the fire burns.  After they have the area brunt and it's extracting the sap the place rags in that area.  After a few days of the rags soking in the sap they collect them all up and take them to the next process.

                   The reason they use this process is because by burning the bark they are able to let the tree heel its self up and then after a year or so they can do the process again unlike the other way of just cutting the trees down for the sap.

           The next step is to collect all the rags with the sap and place them into a cloth bag that they put into a pulley/lever system.  They pour boiling hot water over the bag and use the pulley/lever system to drain all the water and oil out of the rags.  Once it is all collected the separate the balsamo oil from the water and bottle it up for sale.

Day full of knowledge in El Salvador

                       After having to sleep in the highest point of El Salvador Ministerio de Turismo de El Salvador or the department of tourism took us to La Palma where we went to a museum to seen the history of the Salvadoran currency, from the coffee bean  to the US dollar.  After the museum they had a a huge dinner set up for us that included fireworks.  Once we were done with the awesome dinner they took us to a military base where we were going to camp for the night.  The next day we were woken up by the base's military band, they played while we ate breakfast and pack our things to get ready for a long day.

             The first place the department of tourism took us was to a small town that is one of the largest exporters of balsamo.  As soon as we got off the buses we were greeted by the children of the town and another band playing for us.   Next they had a demandstrtion on how the get the balsamo oil.  Balsamo is the main ingredient in conditioner and is also used for medicines, I will post the whole proses in a later posting(Click here to read about balsamo).  After the demonstration we went to a balsamo farm and showed us how they extract the oils from the trees and some of us had a chance to try it for our selfs.

     

             We had learned a ton about balsamo and we were on the rode again.  The next stop was a small town where we had the honer to be a part and witness a great festival that the locals they have had since when the Spaniards had colonized El Salvador.  To read about this festival click here.