Age old festival in El Salvador

    
      When I was in El Salvador with La Ruta Inka I had the chance to witness a magnificent festival.  This festival has been going on between two towns since El Salvador was a colony of Spain.  All the people of one town get the statue of thier saint, San Christobal and hike up a montant to a cave where they camp over night.  The next day the mayor or town leader  puts San Christobal on their back and the whole group hikes back down to the other town.

    At the other town the town's people are lined up waiting with a statue of their saint, San Lucas, for San Christobal to arrive with his people.  Once the two saints get closer a group of people from both towns are dressed up in costumes that represent their Indian and Spanish ancestors start to dance with machetea in the middle of the main street as San Christobal comes into town. 

      The saints are carried buy town leaders and are brought little by little toward each other.  This represents when both the saints met for the very first time to unite both towns.  As they are carried toward each other they stop three times and are tilted forward signifying the three times they greeted each other on their first meeting.

  

      At the last tilt or greeting the crowd that is made up of people from both towns cheer and trow confetti.  After all the cheering, all the people line up in two lines and greet each other, one at a time like two high school teams would do after a game here in the states.  This greet consists of both participants holding each others right hands like a hand shake and raising them up to their foreheads.

     Once every one has greeted each other they walk together to the center of the town and dance traditional dances, celebrate their union, and eat typical foods.

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.

Sleeping on the highest point of El Salvador

              Once we got to El Salvador we were greeted by very friendly people from Ministerio de Turismo de El Salvador or the department of trouisum of the country.   The first place they took us was the city of La Paz where they gave of shirt, had a chance to shop for suverners, go to a musume, and we ate typical food.  After beening in this town for a few hours they took us to the bottlem of the a montant(La Peña Rajada) where we had to hike about an hour hour and hafe to the top where we were going to set up camp for the night.  The top of La Peña Rajadt is the highest point in El Salvador.  They had a little cabin on the top where they gave us Pupusa a typical food and where we all played games as a group.  A few friends and I also played around with some long exposures.

                                    
                                      

                                    

The few days in Honduras

              I haven't posted about the backpacking trip I went on the summer of 2010 because of work other events in my life, and if you haven't noticed I'm really bad at writing.  So from now on I'm just going to write a title of the posting kind of explaining the images and just showing the images.

The Future of a Country

The night before the Ministry of Tourism of Nicaragua(INTUR) took us to a dinner at a hotel were we sat pool side. Just a few minuets after we had arrived the power went out and we had to wait for a couple hours to be able to eat. As we waited the guys of the group went about trowing each other into the pool with their clothing on, I just strip down to my boxers and jumped in so I wouldn't give them the joy. After we ate a youth group dance typical dances for us and then they played music so we all could dance together.

The next day INTUR took us to a few more museums were we saw more archaeological artifacts. The problem with these museums is that they are just a building with a few artifacts in them and that's all, in my opinion if they gathered all the artifacts that each museum has and make a few large national museum it would help to get more tourism and would be easier for to tourist to get more out of their visit. After the museums we were taken to a few elementary schools.

At the school the children dance typical dances for us and we had time to interact with them. I think it's great that there is a goal to teach the youth about their past and customs, maybe they can help this wonderful country be more know in the world.

Once we had finished talking to the children we were taken to a bakery were the make roscones, roscones are small round baked good made from corn some times filled with caramel or cheese. They have workers roll the dough by hand into circles and the place on a large plate to place into ovens that work by burning wood.

While we was at the bakery there was a child there, I'm guessing related to the owners or someone that works there. I was happy to see him there because it means he is learned how to make roscones and he will keep the costume going. I tried to get a good shot of him for a while until he stepped into open shade and the sun was bouncing of the cement in from of him giving me a nice fill as well as crating these wonderful long catch lights. I just had to get this shot.