Surfing Sipacate

After a couple of false starts, I finally set out for Sipcate, on the Pacific Coast, for some surfing. More precisely, I was headed for El Paredon, a small spit along the Pacific Ocean, with an even smaller town and surf camp.

The staff of the surf camp was a little sketchy on travel directions. They explained that from Escuintla I should travel west to La Democracia, south through Siquintlá and La Gomera, to Sipcate, then east again to El Escondite and finally further east to El Paredon

What they failed to mention were the modes of transport, as well as the lengths of the legs. As it turns out, Escuintla to La Democracia was one leg and La Democracia to Sipcate was another leg, with a little layover in both of the towns. It took almost four hours to travel a little over forty highway miles. As I arrived in Sipcate, the sun was beginning to set and I was beginning to worry.

There were no other buses in Sipcate, so the next logical step was to take a tuk-tuk to El Escondite. I hired a driver, and away we went. And went, and went, and went. We drove down a dark and deserted dirt road, with no houses, power lines, or other signs of human habitation. There were just sugar plantations and potholes, as far as the eye could see. After four or five miles, the road abruptly ended, dead ending into the water. (Which I would later learn is called the Chiquimulilla Channel.) I paid my driver, slung my backpack over my shoulder and stepped out of the tuk-tuk to survey my surroundings. Before I could ask anything, in the blink of an eye, the driver accelerated into the black night. I was alone, in the dark, at the end of a deserted dirt road, at the veritable ends of the earth.

After a few moments of carefully reasoned, rational freaking-the-fuck-out, I realized that my driver would not have left me alone in the dark to die, eaten to death by mosquitoes. Boats must pass up and down the channel periodically, even past dark. So I sat down to wait. And wait, and wait, and wait. I'm a patient person, but after an hour or so, I was beginning to get a little panicky. I was beginning to wonder if swimming down the channel to the Pacific and El Paredon would be preferable to plodding back down the dirt road to Sipacate.

Finally, I heard a low buzz from up the channel. Lo and behold, there was a boat! A little, leaky lancha, with cracking and peeling red paint, rusting hardware, and a reappropriated Gallo Beer banner for an awning, was puttering up to me. The pilot pulled up to the pier, and helped me aboard, over a huge heap of fish. I helped him unload his catch, tossing the fish to the bank by their tails, and then we were off to El Paredon.

As it turns out El Paredon was actually only five minutes up the channel. And so I arrived, at the beach exhausted and mosquito bitten. The next day, this is what the channel looked like. The chanel and surf camp actually show up on Google Earth as well.