Every country we’ve visited south of the U.S. border, we’ve had to process through a lot of negative commentary. There’s always someone telling us how dangerous it is and that we shouldn’t go. In Belize, someone went so far as to tell us she never let anyone in Guatemala hold her child because they would kidnap her. What?
El Salvador chatter has been the same, but on a different scale. Even among international overlanders, usually the most open-minded bunch, El Salvador is sometimes discussed as a “drive-through country.” Some people cross from Guatemala to El Salvador to Honduras to Nicaragua in one day, trying to avoid the trouble they’ve heard so much about.
So what were we supposed to think?
We always go back to the policy we decided on in 2018, when we were getting so much blowback about driving through Mexico for the first time. This is our policy: don’t listen to anyone unless they’ve actually been there.
That’s our baseline. Once we’ve established whether someone has visited the place they’re telling us about and we find out when they were last there, then we can synthesize their opinion into everything else we know.
So for El Salvador, we didn’t only listen to the people who drove through in one day. We also scoured the social media posts of the overlanders who explored widely. And when we started doing that, we got excited about the possibilities.
In this week’s video, we discuss whether we’ve felt safe in El Salvador, what the roads have been like, how the people have treated us, and we show you some of the things we’ve seen here.
Watch now:
What’s next?
When we were in Guatemala, we mentioned the CA-4 visa and how it limits us to 90 days in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua total. We continue to keep our eye on the calendar and have planned to stay in El Salvador for two weeks at most. We’ve half-way through that time now.
If you’re interested in seeing more of El Salvador, we’re making a lot of short reels for Instagram that show our adventures. You can watch them here. For example, I recently rode a bike across a wire suspended in the air.
Oh, and we also published an article about Overland Expo West if you’re attending this week! The schedule can be really overwhelming, so we’ve given our top 10 class recommendations based on our past experience as instructors and attendees.
Thanks for being part of our community as we continue this grand adventure. Even though you’re far away, your constant encouragement makes a real difference when we face challenges. We appreciate you.
-B
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