Buffet poolside San Salvador Hilton April '74

On our return trip, flying from San Jose, Costa Rica to New Orleans, from one safe haven to another, our plane touched down in what were unsafe places--mainly for the citizens there--that were about to become even more unsafe:  El Salvador and Nicaragua.  Security at the San Salvador and the Managua airports was controlled by soldiers with automatic weapons.* 

In Managua, walking out to the plane before boarding the flight, passengers were checked with a handheld metal detector.  My pocket knife set of the alarm.  The soldiers took my knife and attached a baggage ticket to it so that ideally it would have been sent along to New Orleans with my baggage.  Not surprisingly, that didn't happen. 

Our next connecting flight, in San Salvador, was delayed for some reason, and the airline had a bus or buses take us to the San Salvador Hilton for a buffet lunch, shown in these two photos. I'd lost the prism or viewfinder to the camera when I was briefly lost on Cano Island, so I took these photos not by holding the camera up to my face but by holding it at waist or chest level and looking down into it.

The infamous El Mozote Massacre in El Salvador took place on 11 December 1981.  Mark Danner's reporting on the massacre took up the entire 6 December 1993 issue of The New Yorker.  This buffet made me think of all the poverty I'd seen on the trip.

*By comparison, security at U. S. airports was only beginning to be taken seriously in 1974, after hijackings to Cuba in the late 60s and early 70s, but not seriously enough that I had to hand over my pocket knife before boarding the plane in New Orleans on the way to Costa Rica.  I don't think we even passed through metal detectors.

On the boat and on Cano island, April '74

I took the photo below on the way back from Cano Island, but I'm using it as a going-to-the-island photo because it's the only one I've found showing all three guides/cooks who went out to the island with us.  The guy on the left, I don't recall his name.  Jésus is piloting the boat, and the guy laughing is the cook, Pito.  There was also a man said to be a recovering alcoholic living in the one cabin on the island.  He had a fairly big puppy staying with him. The seven of us men were the only people on the island.  It's about 12 miles out in the Pacific from Costa Rica, and is now a national park, nature preserve, and popular scuba diving destination, but overnight stays on the island are not allowed. (Limited camping is now allowed.)

 
Above photo was taken as we approached the island. Below photo was taken after we arrived, at high tide. We towed a dinghy behind the main boat (shown here) and used it to come ashore.

This (above) photo provides a good view of the cabin we stayed in.  The sleeping room is just to the left of Mr. José Hardin.  To your left, not his left.

Joe Hardin with his red snapper and me with my mahi-mahi (also called dolphinfish and dorado).

 Jésus fileting a freshly caught fish on the concrete porch of the cabin.  The wooden porch of the sleeping room (in the background) is where I slept, on a hammock.  High tide came right up cabin.

I borrowed Pat Calkins' 35mm SLR camera for the Costa Rica trip.  I'd never used a good camera before and I took about 10 sunset photos changing f-stop and aperture, hoping at least one of my sunset photo would turn out good.  The above one is the best I took, if you don't include the one with puppy (see below).  The second day we were on the island I went for a walk around the perimeter of the island, thinking I'd go all the way around (math question: what's the perimeter--circumference--of a square-mile island if you assume the island is circular?). After getting about halfway around, I found rock cliffs jutting into the ocean prevented me from going any farther.  But in trying to go back, I found the tide had started to come in, and there was one rock tunnel that I'd come through that I couldn't get back through!  I was trapped with no place to go but up into the jungle, which wasn't so easy because unlike the side where the  cabin was, the other side of the island had cliffs overlooking the beach. Plus, although I'd heard that an island like Cano would not have snakes, I really wasn't sure about that, and I'd heard of several highly poisonous Central American snakes, such as the bushmaster. 

It was mid-afternoon when I found myself in this dilemma.  I'm pretty sure I took a photo of the "tunnel" of rock, with waves crashing on it, that I'd come through and I decided was too dangerous  to go back through after the tide started coming in.  It may be that I was only thinking that the camera would get ruined by seawater if I went back through.  Whatever the reason was, I decided I had to climb up the vine covered cliff overlooking the little beach where I was stranded.  It was steep enough that I had to use the vines like ropes to help pull myself up, crouching and kneeling as I went. Then once I was up and able to walk, I was in thick underbrush.  If I remember correctly, I found a stick that I could use to kind of beat the bushes in front of me to scare away any snakes or other, unknown, dangerous critters.

After I took the photo below with Pat's camera, the detachable "roof prism" or whatever it's called somehow got knocked off.  It's still there on the island unless someone found it and took it (unlikely).  The camera still worked without it, but I had to look down into it from above to see an image.

I encountered an old, rusted bulldozer in an open area--which had been bulldozed, I guess--on my little lost journey back to the cabin.  There had been plans to build a resort on the island, but for some reason that never happened.  I found and followed a stream in the jungle, remembering that there was a stream that flowed out of the jungle near the cabin.  It was almost sunset when I got back.  Daddy was worried about what had happened to me, and everybody else was surprised when I came out of the jungle behind the cabin instead of coming up from the beach.

The last two photos are ones my dad took.  When we were coming back into the mouth of the Sierpe river that emptied in to the Pacific, we had to wait for an hour or more for the tide to turn and the ocean waves to become calmer. But the waves didn't become much calmer and we nearly capsized coming into the river from the ocean. The rope holding the dinghy to the back of our boat broke during this moment of near-capsizing and the dinghy floated back out to sea--no way we could go retrieve it.

From San José to Rio Sierpe April 1974

Below: Joe Hardin and me, taken by my dad as we were leaving San José after spending the first night there. My T-shirt is from Warehouse Sound Company in San Luis Obispo, California, formerly known as Stereo Warehouse, the place I got my first good stereo system from in 1972.  I wore long pants the whole trip!  Just wasn't into wearing shorts back then except cut-offs to swim in.  But I didn't even bring any cut-offs, and didn't swim or snorkel in the beautiful clear Pacific Ocean at Cano Island.

Above and below: Our hotel in San Isidro.  The full name of the town is San Isidro del General.  Here's a recent photo of what appears to be the same hotel. Notice in this above photo the wide stride of the fellow on the sidewalk in the background.  Dad and Joe Hardin more or less posed for this picture.

I was using a good 35mm camera for the first time. It was a Miranda (yep, Miranda, not Minolta) that I borrowed from my friend Pat Calkins to take on the trip. I guess the reason I took this above photo was to have before and after shots. Also, now the guy walking on the sidewalk seems to have his head down slightly, giving the appearance of movin' on, somewhat like his wide stride the previous photo.  And another person had come out on the balcony in a room at the hotel as compared with the previous photo.

The only way I determined this was taken after San Isidro is the clothes (shirts) Joe and Dad are wearing are the same as the previous photos.

The Costa Rican country kids photos of my previous post were also taken on this day, just before or after the man-leading-cow photo above.  The speedboat shown at the dock here is not the boat we went on to Cano Island.   Ours was a bigger boat, but more utilitarian, with a homemade plywood roof on it. Three "Ticos" were our guides, and the six of us plus our gear didn't uncomfortably crowd the boat.  Next time I'll post few photos taken on the boat, plus a few from our stay on the island.

Costa Rican kids April 1974

Shoeshine boys in San Isidro, the only city we stayed in on our way from San Jose to the dock on the Sierpe River where we boarded an open boat to go to Cano Island.

Our rental car was a Corvair ("unsafe at any speed" said Ralph Nader).  These were country kids at one place we where stopped briefly on the way to our river rendezvous.

I don't know how the lines in the above photo came about, but it's the way they were printed, not because of later damage.  Could have been the film was damaged by being x-rayed in San Salvador or in Managua.  Soldiers and high-security and maybe some paranoia were present in both those airports on our stopovers back to New Orleans from San Jose.  In San Salvador for some reason our departure flight was delayed, and the airline put on a big outdoor luncheon for us at a nice hotel, maybe a Hilton.   I have two photos of the outdoor food buffet.  They'll be posted at the end of this Costa Rican trip photo series.