El Salvador – Because we had to meet my sister, Rose, in Roatan, we only had a week to explore El Salvador. We thought it would be enough time to get a sense of the country considering it was small, and not very many tourists seemed to travel there. Heck, Lonely Planet doesn’t even make an El Salvador guide book – so we had to settle for an electronic copy of the El Salvador chapter from their Central American guide (not very handy when you need a map in the middle of downtown).

El Rosario church in San Salvador
When we arrived at the bus station at 5:30am in Guatemala City planning on catching the 6am bus to San Salvador we were told that there was only one ticket left and that the next bus didn’t leave until 2pm. We really wanted to get on that early bus – the thought of spending eight more hours in Guatemala City and then arriving in San Salvador at night was highly unappealing. The sales clerk took pity on us, I guess, and told us to “just wait and see – maybe there will be tickets.” Sure enough, 10 minutes later, we were forking over the cash and boarding the bus. We even got to sit together.