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Hotel Yang, Part 2

In Hotel Yang, Part 1, I described a couple of favorite hotels and the tales associated with them, and it was probably obvious that the dodgier and weirder the lodgings, the more fondly I remember them. Perhaps when I get older I’ll return from a trip and report that I made all my flights and connections, was admitted without hassle into all the clubs, was greeted by name at all my hotels by obsequious concierges offering chocolate and cheek kisses, and I’ll actually be pleased about it. But if that’s what I wanted I’d just go to Club Med with the rest of the squares.

In the pantheon of yang hotels, my second runner-up is the Tortuga Surf Lodge, near the coastal village of Playa el Tunco, El Salvador (pictured). The first time I went was at the behest of my girlfriend Diana, who had booked this hotel blind, without a photo for reference, and with only a vague notion where the place was. "On the beach, south of town," she assured me.

We bused from San Salvador to the seaside city of Libertad and explored there briefly, shopping in vain for non-kitschy souvenirs and taking in the local color. When a woman lurking in a shabby corner of the central market offered to sell us an infant we decided it was time to go. We rode a second bus to a country crossroads, disembarked and set out afoot in the direction that looked most likely to lead to the coast. Soon we were trekking through stifling woods patrolled by emaciated mongrel dogs. We glimpsed an occasional stick shack sagging amidst the trees, but encountered no people save for a lone rummy who shambled out from the shadows and followed us, entreating us to join him for a drink.

I rarely worry. In fact, it’s only happened twice during my travels, both times in Guatemala: once was the time a friend and I wandered into a secluded town on the slopes of Volcán Agua and found ourselves facing an angry mob that had just finished killing a man; the other time was when the same friend asked me accompany him while he delivered eight-thousand dollars in cash to people in the worst zone of Guatemala City. So I wasn’t worried about a walk in the woods. But since I like to know what to expect, I asked Diana, who had planned this excursion and was more experienced than I at wandering the Salvadoran sticks, to confirm that none of this—dark woods, reeking drunk, evil dogs—was odd.

I believe I said, “Just to check, you do this sort of thing all the time, right? I mean, you aren’t wandering out here just because I’m with you, are you?”

She stared. “Oh no, I’d never be out here without you.”

Great.

So I charged up my radar but picked up no blips. We seemed safe—even the drunk had stopped following us, which I hoped was a good sign.

A little while later we happened upon a man standing at the edge of the woods. What was he doing there? Nothing—you do a lot of nothing when you’re poor and jobless. This is true from Seattle to Barcelona to Rio. We asked for directions. You’re thinking, I imagine, that it’s a terrible idea to admit being lost to a stranger in an extremely dangerous foreign country. Well, you’re right. You’re thinking it’s like presenting yourself on a platter to be carved up like an Easter roast. Yes, it is, and things like that happen all the time—two people had been found decapitated in the woods near Diana’s village months earlier. But you’re either comfortable taking these kinds of risks or you aren’t.

The man did more than just give us directions—he ushered us down the road, into more woods, down a hill, up a hill, and it became clear that, assuming he was leading us to the hotel rather than to be slaughtered in the wilderness, we’d have never located it on our own. Eventually he led us through a crumbling wall, and we found ourselves outside a compound surrounded by a fence topped with concertina wire. The man knocked and a gate opened onto the Tortuga Surf Lodge, which was the smallest hotel I’d ever seen—a four-room house that sat beneath palm trees on a black sand beach about fifty feet from the ocean.

We thanked our friend and he departed with a wave, perhaps headed back to his outpost beside the woods. In life you intersect orbits with countless people and they fade into oblivion, but it’s always interesting which faces stay with you and which acts of kindness you remember. I like to think our guide is still standing there in the heat, aide to lost travelers, eternal as a sphinx, elemental.

Back then the Tortuga Surf Lodge (it's since been expanded and remodeled) had no check-in, no desk, no formalities of any sort. A security guard—perhaps eighteen years old and dressed in shorts and a tank top—gave us a key and that was that. We were the only guests. After we dropped our packs in the room we walked a few hundred yards down the beach to the town of Playa el Tunco proper. It straddled a creek mouth and consisted of maybe twenty residences and a restaurant. Cows stood on the shore drinking seawater. Roosters wandered the sands. The restaurant was empty, but a group of men stood sentinel out front blasting bass-heavy salsa music from a tricked-out Ford truck. As I approached they all turned to gawk.

This is probably the third or fourth time I’ve made reference in a post to people staring, and you may be thinking that there is nothing strange about black guys with dreadlocks. I happen to agree, but in certain parts of the world my appearance is considered unusual. My hair is about two feet long, which certainly has something to do with it. Also, El Salvador has very few blacks. This is not by accident—blacks were turned away at ports and border crossings until well into the twentieth century. And it’s safe to say that many Salvadorans have negative attitudes about blacks, though very few of them have actually met any. The mythology is passed on anecdotally: “I heard about a black who _______” Insert evil deed of choice.

But as I have mentioned before, for some reason foreigners think the best of me. I don’t know why. In El Salvador, particularly, I am often assumed to be a famous soccer player (though I have yet to see any footballers with two feet of dreadlocks). I’ve had strangers rush up to shake my hand. In Playa el Tunco, as I walked into the only restaurant in the village, past the men who were gathered outside, the salsa music stopped mid-chorus. In the silence Diana and I took a table. A waitress peeked around a corner and vanished. I was aware of activity near the pick-up, and had a pretty good idea what was coming.

And then it happened: as loud as you can possibly imagine, Bob Marley’s “Could You Be Loved” boomed from the truck. The men cheered and waved at me. They toasted me with beers. I don’t fully understand nor can I explain this reaction, but it happens everywhere I go.

Diana and I ate seafood and drank Coronas and the Marley just kept on coming. “Redemption Song”, “No Woman No Cry”, “War”, and our friends knew all the words. It’s an episode I’ll always remember. But time marched on and, because the Salvadoran night is owned by armed gangs, we headed back to the lodge before sunset. By the time dark fell the building was quiet as a tomb. The guard began his all-night patrol of the property, equipped with a flashlight, a rottweiler and a .38-caliber automatic pistol. He’d told us earlier that if not for his presence the gangs would simply climb the walls and wreck the place. Certainly anyone staying there at the time would be in deep trouble. He was surprisingly cheerful for a guy who had standing orders to shoot to kill. His flashlight beam playing among the trees all night was as comforting as firefly beacons, and Diana and I slept securely.

The next morning the guard appeared at our door holding his shoulder, which looked bruised and misshapen. I deduced from this visual cue (and the fact that he was weeping), that he had suffered a dislocation. He confirmed this himself when he said he’d been bodysurfing and a wave had slammed him face first into the shore. He begged me to put his shoulder back in the socket. I’ve seen this scene in a few movies and it didn’t look pleasant. Still, I would have tried save that I remembered something a doctor once told me—a shoulder dislocation looks very much like a shoulder break to the untrained eye, but a break leaves two jagged bone ends near the circumflex humeral artery, which supplies the arm. Jockeying these bones around is an easy way to lacerate the artery, which, of course, would result in the person bleeding to death rather quickly. So I told him no—but I gave him some Advil.

The guard said that, since I had refused, he had an acquaintance who could reset his shoulder. But because he didn’t want to embarrass a friend at work, he waited in pain for several hours. When he finally left, he took the flashlight, the rottweiler, the gun—and left the gate to the property wide open. The pain had obviously disoriented him. Or else he was angry about the Advil. Diana and I locked ourselves in our room, knowing full well the thin doors wouldn’t do much good against armed gangsters. When we heard noises on the property an hour later we assumed the worst, but it turned out our guard had not forgotten his duty after all—he’d sent his rickety old grandpa to guard us until he returned.

The idea of being protected by this oldster was comical, for sure. He would have fluttered away like rice paper if a stiff wind had come up. But he had the keys and was able to lock the gate, which meant no marauding gangsters invaded the property and I survived to get into even stickier situations elsewhere in the world. The guard survived as well. He’s pictured above, the day after his mishap, looking pretty happy considering his arm is in a sling. He said the Advil actually helped with the pain, so consider that a real-life product endorsement. As for the Tortuga Surf Lodge, it receives a rating of four yangs—good for third place on my all time list. There are no amenities, and concertina wire detracts somewhat from the ocean view, but it’s the real El Salvador, and there's no price you can put upon that.

I'll continue this series in Hotel Yang, Part 3, to be posted soon.

posted by Egan Ehlers @ 9:24 AM