We started thinking about this trip about two weeks before it happened, and ended up booking the flights only a week before it happened. Montreal is always kind of depressing in January and everything always goes on sale since Christmas is over and no one is travelling again until spring break. We were looking at going to somewhere in Latin America since it’s pretty easy to get there from Montreal, but Evan found roundtrip flights to El Salvador with a stop in Cancun for around $300. I was a tad worried that El Salvador was unsafe, but he assured me it wasn’t, Messi was going to be there in the Inter Miami versus El Salvadoran national soccer game, and there was a super cool volcano to hike, so I was down to go. For context: El Salvador used to be one of the most dangerous countries in the world with one of the highest homocide per capita rates of any place on Earth, but since their new president came in and started arresting people the homocide rate has dropped to one of the safest places in the world.
We planned it out so we would have three days in El Salvador (it’s kind of a tiny country), then two days in Cancun since the cheapest way to fly was Lynx, Spirit, Spirit down, Volaris to Cancun and then Flair back up to Montreal – and it was only cheap on those specific days. We had very short unprotected layovers for the way down – 30 minute connections – but Evan assured me it would be fine. We ended up planning to spend two nights in San Salvador, with one of those nights being the night we flew in, one night in Santa Ana since that’s where the volcano was, then the last night in San Salvador and flying early out the next morning to Cancun, where we spent one night on Isla Mujeres and one night in downtown Cancun. On our last trip to Cancun, Isla Mujeres had been our favourite stop as it’s a cool little Island off the coast of Cancun where you get around by golf cart. We’d then fly back Wednesday morning so I’d make my 4PM meeting.
A few days before our trip started, we realized that the Lynx flight we had booked down to Tampa had been coming in three hours late every single day. We had a 40 minute layover, which already would have been tight, but if we were going to be three hours late we were just going to miss our flights and get to San Salvador a day later. We were a little worried and had started to make contingency plans about what we would do if we got stuck in Tampa for the day.
Thursday, January 18th: Travel Day
After watching the incoming plane the whole morning, I left for the airport around 1PM after my first two classes of the day to catch our 4PM flight. Miraculously, for the first time ever in the history of this flight, it was scheduled to depart early?! We couldn’t believe it and were frankly shocked when the plane showed up at the gate around its scheduled boarding time.
Lynx has now gone out of business (makes sense if all their planes are three hours delayed), so it was my first and last time on a Lynx plane. The flight was absolutely amazing though – nicest flight attendants ever, completely empty except for like ten people (probably why they went out of business), and they gave free water?!? Ryanair could never.
Since we each had our own row, I got a ton of school work done on this flight and got ready to sprint to our next flight in Tampa. After landing in Tampa, we rushed to our next Spirit flight which was leaving in about 30 minutes. We had to go through security again for some reason and the security line was super backed up for some reason at 8:30PM on a Thursday, but we finally made it to the gate as regular boarding was starting.
I finally got to see why people make fun of Spirit. It wasn’t awful, but it definitely wasn’t as nice as normal carriers and the seats feel smaller than they do on European low cost carriers with the bigger people. Landing 30 minutes later (short flight) in Fort Lauderdale to catch our final flight to San Salvador, we learned the flight would be an hour delayed, so we set out to find food. Unfortunately everything closed at 10PM, so I managed to get a pretty terrible sandwhich then we sat around for an hour waiting for our 3 hour flight to San Salvador. We also pulled out some USD since that’s the official currency, however the airport ATM gave us 20s which turned out to be a problem later since giving someone a 20 is the equivalent of giving someone a 100 in El Salvador.
Eventually we made it San Salvador an hour delayed at 2am. Getting through immigration was quick and we got some nice stamps. Once we got outside though we realized we’d messed up by not pre-ordering any transport. There were no trains, no busses and no taxis at the airport. Literally no way to get downtown. On top of that, since the airport is 40 minutes from San Salvador, no Ubers were connecting, which is what we’d planned to use. We wandered around, with Evan trying to talk to people in Spanish and ask for taxis and even trying to ask some guy who was getting picked up to get taken to a rental car place to give us a ride. After about 30 minutes when we were starting to get pretty desperate, we finally connected to an Uber. The whole 40 minute ride was only $20, insanely cheap and we got to our $45 AirBnB at like 3 in the morning. It was pretty nice, but we’d be moving the next night. We only booked this one because we didn’t think we were going to be in El Salvador that night and it was cheap.
Friday, January 19th: San Salvador Messi Day
We woke up and booked our tickets to the soccer game that night. Since we hadn’t expected to be here this day we hadn’t bought our tickets yet. We ended up getting the tier with reserved seats for $300/each which is absolutely absurd pricing for El Salvador. $300 is roughly the monthly salary for someone living there. I wanted to get the cheaper, non-reserved seats but Evan assured me people would be lining up from the previous day to get those seats, so if we did that we wouldn’t even get in. As usual, I blindly trusted him and we got the higher tier seats.
Our goal for the day was to see the entirety of San Salvador – and we managed to see most of it. There was basically no tourism in El Salvador until recently because of how dangerous it used to be so there was only a little for us to see. We started by taking an Uber to our hotel for the next night and dropping off our bags, then heading to the downtown “tourist” core to get lunch.
The main food from El Salvador is Papusas, which are kind of like savory cornmeal pancakes with cheese, beans or meat in them. We hadn’t eaten real food in a while now, so we got six plus a desert, two drinks and a tamale, each. It ended up a being a little much, but it came out to $10 for the two of us. The papusas were pretty fire, especially with the coleslaw and the spicy sauce that you are supposed to eat them with.
After a nice lunch, we went to walk around the five-ish square blocks that make up the downtown old town area.
Our main stop downtown was the National Palace, which was right off a square that seemed like it was the main square. We hopped on the hour long tour which was only in Spanish, so I walked around taking pictures and Evan would occasionally explain a word or two to me.
The palace was pretty nice and seemed kind of like a toned down version of what you would see in Europe. Less lavish decorations, although the architecture was impressive and it was well maintained. It did burn down in 1875 and get rebuilt though so it wasn’t that old.
After the palace, we wandered through the square and then went to a famous church nearby – Iglesia El Rosario. The church was build in a cool way so when the sun is out it shines through all the different colored glass in the ceiling and creates a kind of rainbow effect inside.
By this point, we had walked around most of the old town area so we decided to walk back around, then Uber to the Botanical Garden before we went to the game.
The botanical garden was about a 35 minute drive from the downtown area, although there was a fair amount of traffic. To be fair though, it seems like there is always traffic because people don’t like to walk here. Our Uber driver told us that people either bus or, if they can afford to, drive.
The Botanical Garden was extraordinarily cheap, under $2 a person, and while it was small, it was definitely worth a visit. They had some nice gardens and they also had a bunch of turtles and some lizards.
After the Garden, it was time to head to the soccer game. We initially wanted to go back to the hotel and shower, however Ubers weren’t picking up and traffic was getting bad near the stadium so we decided to head straight to the stadium. It was a good thing we did – by the time we got there, there was an hour and a half until the game and the line to get into the stadium was all the way around the block – over a mile long!
We walked all the way to the end of the line, then we realized there was another VIP entrance. The upgraded tickets we’d paid for got us in there, so we got to go inside and skip the easily two hour long line. The premium tickets were worth it just for that honestly, otherwise we might have missed the game. Inside they were giving away everything for free – I got a couple beers and a very much needed hat. They had dancing transformers and a bunch of other random things. There was a bar and we tried to get drinks but we’d run out of our cash already so all we could afford was Pizza Hut.
Our seats for the game were pretty good and we could see the non-reserved area across from us that was utterly packed and continued to get more and more squished as the game went on. It wasn’t seats over there, just benches, and they really filled it up.
It seemed everyone was there just to see Messi, for the first quarter of the game people were just cheering for Messi and everyone went absolutely crazy for him when we came on or did literally anything which was funny since it seemed no one cared about Inter Miami, just Messi. Inter Miami had him play for the first half and everyone was super hyped, but when they took him off the second half people started to cheer for El Salvador. Once Messi was gone though the game wasn’t that interesting and not much happened. It ended as zero-zero.
During the second half they put up a drone show which was kinda cool, but about halfway through the drone show the drones started to just fall out of the sky. Like twenty different drones just tumbled out of the sky and nuked the crowd. After the first couple people started to notice and people were cheering as the drones would careen into poles or trees and things. A couple crashed into the crowd and one even took out a player on the field.
Oh, someone also pulled out a money shooter gun and shot $100s into the crowd on top of us which was pretty cool.
After the game was over, it was dark so we decided to get food and then Uber back to our hotel. We decided to get food next to the stadium and went to a taco place right next to the stadium. It took a while, but they were the best tacos Evan and I have ever had, even better than the ones in Mexico.
Saturday, January 20th: San Salvador and Santa Ana
This day was mostly to see the rest of San Salvador and then make our way to Santa Ana, from which we would be two hours from the volcano. You had to start the volcano hike early so we would do it the next day. We had seen most everything we wanted to see in San Salvador besides the military museum, so we decided to see that and then head. Evan wanted to Uber since it was only about two hours to Santa Ana and a $70 Uber, but I’d read some blog post online that said that the coach buses did it for $1.25, so we eventually settled on the bus.
We got hotel buffet breakfast first in the morning, which was pretty sick considering we paid $85 between the two of us for the hotel. We got fresh squeezed orange juice too which was really good.
After checking out with all our things, we headed to the military museum to walk around for a bit before heading to the bus station.
The military museum was smaller than we were expecting and there was no one else there besides us and some active duty military men patrolling. They were really friendly though and tried to show us around, but I spoke no Spanish and Evan didn’t really understand what they were saying so we just kind of nodded our heads and followed the guy around. We saw a couple old tanks, trucks and planes and then decided to leave to the bus station.
Once we got to the bus station, I had a quick lunch of some traditional beef stew which was really good. We had seen online that we had to take the 201 bus to get to Santa Ana and we were trusting heavily in this blog post since there weren’t really schedules anywhere and none of the transport apps worked since the buses were a lot more informal there. There was also a 201E which confused us for a bit, as well as buses with 201 painted on them that weren’t in the 201 slot, but we ended up just hopping on the one at the 201 stall which was a good choice since it was the bus we needed. The one we were taking was a longer distance coach, so it was a bit more formal, but most of the buses are just repainted school buses from North America that get sent down there at the end of their lives and repainted into fun colors.
The bus seemed to stop kind of randomly and the bus driver would slow down every so often so a vendor could get on, try and sell us things, and then hop off. He would never completely stop for these guys, just slow down and it was kind of impressive how fast they went through the bus. They were selling all sorts of things from plantains to chips to ice cream, and we ended up getting some ice cream since there was no AC on the bus and it was hot.
We caught the lady on the bus taking pictures of me, presumably because she’d never seen a ginger before. We didn’t see any other white people while we were in San Salvador, and I was especially out of place being so pale, tall and red-haired. They also don’t get many tourists and no one speaks English so you kind of have to speak Spanish to visit.
The bus took about two hours and dropped us downtown but we got off before the actual terminus since it ends a little bit outside of the city. We walked for a little bit through a neighbourhood before calling an Uber to our AirBnb to drop our bags.
We’d paid about $90 total for our AirBnb which was a 3-bedroom house in a gated community. It was brand new and pretty nice, although the AC was broken. It was a lot cooler in Santa Ana though, sub-20s versus 27C in San Salvador, so it wasn’t too bad.
After we dropped our stuff, we went back to the central square of Santa Ana. There really wasn’t much to see in Santa Ana except that. Santa Ana is used to more tourists than San Salvador because of their volcano and the nearby hikes, but they still aren’t used to many tourists – although we did see our first other non-Spanish tourists.
The main attraction off the square was the church. We decided to walk in and saw people walking into a hidden door, so we decided to follow them and it ended up being a staircase to the roof. It was $5 or $6 each but it was totally worth it.
From the roof you could see the entire city, as well as the surrounding mountains. You couldn’t see the volcano we wanted to hike though, as that was another two hours away.
After the church, the sun was setting and I wanted to see if we could try and make it to the top of a nearby hill. We walked for a bit away from the downtown, didn’t really find anything interesting and decided to get dinner. We stopped at a Mexican place and had some tacos which were alright, nothing special, and more expensive than food in San Salvador (still cheap though). The pupusa place next door was well rated, so we also stopped in there some pupusas after tacos.
After dinner, we walked back to the main square to see what it was like at night.
Everything was lit up and they had a good amount of security patrolling which was nice. I actually got a crazy amount of stares though as I was walking around, no one had ever seen a person like me before.
We walked about 20 minutes from the square to a grocery store afterwards to get some breakfast and snacks for the next day. The walk was fine, but in retrospect we probably should have just Ubered it. It was dark and they don’t have many lights or people out at night.
Sunday, January 21th: The Volcano
Today was finally the day I had been looking forward to! Most blogs about El Salvador had said to rent a car, but we didn’t end up renting a car so we were going to take the bus. There wasn’t very much info online, but we basically determined that we had to show up at an unmarked bus stop called Sala de Espara (google maps link) at 7:30 and there would be a bunch of other gringos waiting for the 2ish hour long Chicken Bus that would take us all the way to the mountain. The bus would run again in about two hours, but you wouldn’t make it to the mountain before the mandatory 11am start time.
We left our AirBnb and Ubered to the Sala de Espara, getting there about twenty minutes early – enough time to grab some amazing tamales for breakfast at a place right on the street. The bus left a little bit late, around 7:40, but it was good to be there early, especially because it was fairly busy.
The chicken bus took a lot longer to get there than we thought, since we made a lot of stops in all the towns along the way. The bus was pretty full, both with tourists and locals. The route was very scenic, and I’d recommend sitting on the right side of the bus to get the views of the lake and mountain as you approach the start to the hike.
The stop to get to the hike is the last stop and you will get off the bus, walk for a couple minutes up the hill, before you will run into some locals who say that they will be your guide and then explain the rules of the mountain to you. Guides are mandatory and you will have to go up in a group with them. It cost $5 per person for the guide. The guides will walk you about five more minutes to the entrance to the park where you will also have to pay the park fees. Park fees will run another $5 per person.
The hike up isn’t bad, I’d consider it fairly easy. It’s annoying though because there are so many people, so you’re basically walking in a single file line the whole way up and down. You have to stay with your guide and they’ll try their best to make you stay with them. There are also park rangers around to make sure that you have a guide. We went up with our guide, however we left before our group did to try and make the 1PM bus.
The views on the way up were great. There’s a couple smaller volcanoes behind you and you also get some nice cacti along the way. At the top the wind was blowing pretty hard so we got some nice clouds blowing by. The water inside the volcano was a super fluorescent teal colour which was cool as well.
After spending a bit at the top, we realized we really needed to make it down to get the 1PM bus because we had to get back to San Salvador tonight in order to get our flight out early the next morning. So, we took off before our guide and started absolutely hauling down. We made it down in around an hour, exactly ten minutes before our bus, which was luckily a tad late.
Strava link here.
Had a nice two hour bus ride back to Santa Ana, then another nice two hour bus ride back to San Salvador. We had the second bus drop us off at the fire department where we took an Uber to our AirBnb for the night which was right next to one of the nicest parts of town. The firefighters were super friendly and were calling us in to take a photo in Spanish, but unfortunately our Uber showed up right at that time so we didn’t get the photo. :/
Our AirBnb was in a brand new apartment building that was set up pretty nicely. We took an Uber to the nearby shopping mall to get dinner and then went back for our 7am flight to Cancun.
Monday, January 22th: Isla Mujeres
We got a driver this morning from our AirBnb host since we were worried about getting picked up by an Uber after a couple of our other Ubers. It ended up being cheaper as well so everything went well. We weren’t sure what to expect from the airport since Latin American airports can kinda be slow sometimes, but it ended up being fine. We couldn’t get online boarding passes because we didn’t pay our Mexico tourist tax online, so we had to check in at the airport. The line was a little slow and we ended up having to pay $40, but we got upgraded to the premium bulkhead seats for the whole flight.
Evan wanted to get a real breakfast in the airport so we ended up going to the fanciest place there since it was only like $10 for an eggs Benedict. We were already pretty close to our boarding time and they were really slow, but we ended up making it to the gate with a couple minutes to spare. Because the plane was so empty they finished boarding really quickly and we were really really close to missing the boarding
Our flight had a stop in Guatemala City, however it was the same plane the whole way through which meant we got to stay on the plane.
On the landing into Guatemala City, there was one guy who had no shoes on and had opened his own beer on the plane who tried to get up and walk around while the plane was literally wheels down maybe a thousand feet from the runway. The flight attendants absolutely freaked out and started yelling which was probably the only time I’ve seen them so pressed.
Landing in Cancun, we took a bus into the city and then went looking for lunch. We ended up this neighbourhood called “The Hood” right next to the bus stop where we got some of the best tacos we’ve ever had. They had like 8 different sauces and we got all the types of meat. It was a good change from papusas.
Next we caught our Uber from the taco stand to the ferry terminal to get to Isla Mujeres. We hadn’t thought there would be anybody in Cancun since it was some random week in mid January, however all the ferries were absolutely packed (mostly with drunk Brits). The ferry over was fun, mostly cause it was gusting 35 knots and so the boat was leaning super hard and everyone was getting sprayed.
Once we got to Isla Mujeres we set out to try and rent a golf cart. The hotel we had booked was a super high end resort that was one deep discount (normally $400/night to about $150), but it was fairly far from the downtown of the island, as the island is about 5ish miles long so it takes a while to get around on it. The first person quoted us $90 for a golf cart for 24 hours which we thought was absurd and so we started shopping around. We’d seen online prices around $60 so we thought we could do that, but after going back and forth for a bit, we eventually ended up paying around $85. One guy quoted us a lower price, then when we went back quoted us a higher price, so I guess it pays to take the price if it sounds good. The place that was the cheapest had already rented out all of its carts so maybe book ahead.
The hotel we got was definitely nice, but probably not $400/night nice. We took our gold cart and went to the beach next since that’s what you do. Beach was grey and windy, just like home. We (or mostly me cause Evan can’t) swam around for a bit, then it started to rain so we headed back to the hotel to head out for dinner.
We’d gone to this super good Mexican place when we’d come two years ago with super cheap drinks so we decided to try and find it again. We found it on google maps and headed out in the golf cart. Just as we got there it started to absolutely pour. We were on the roof of the building and the rain was blowing sideways into us which was really fun for a bit although we eventually moved downstairs inside.
Food wasn’t as good or as cheap as we remembered, so we won’t be going back if we ever do end up going to Cancun again. Drinks were fine though, I had three.
Afterwards we set out in our golf cart to find ice cream and ended up at this really great gelato place. After dinner, we headed back to our hotel and along the way we found that the main road had flooded. Driving the golf cart through the puddles was so fun we did it a couple times before we actually ended up going back.
Tuesday, January 23th: Cancun
Today was our last full day and it was our day to move from Isla Mujeres to downtown Cancun.
I woke up really early today and so I went out to go catch the sunrise with the golf cart since we were really close to the East end of the island so I thought it would be really cool with the clouds. I ended up being a little late for the sunrise but it was still pretty nice. Did a little hour long loop, then went back and met Evan for breakfast.
Breakfast was a great buffet, the fruit is always great whenever you go more South. Plus the omelettes were really good.
After breakfast, we went out to go and do the exact same golf cart loop I had done earlier again so Evan could see it. The park on the end of the island had some mermaid sculptures that we took some photos with. Saw some fire lizards and then ended up walking around on the beach, wishing we could go swimming because it was actually hot and sunny today. However, we were fully packed to leave with all our stuff so we were walking around on the beach in our shoes.
We ended up deciding to go back to our hotel and bum around by the pool until our golf cart rental expired and we had to hightail it back to the mainland.
Got to sit on top of the ferry on the way back and it was actually cooking. Hopped in an Uber to our hotel which was downtown to drop our bags. The Uber did the typical Mexico thing were it has to hide from the taxi cabs and we had to run around through a gas station to find it. Checked into our hotel which was about what we were expecting for $50, then Ubered to the Mall of the Americas for the food court which was the highlight of our culinary experience on our last trip to Cancun.
We sampled like three different restaurants, a fish taco place which was absolutely incredible, then two other Mexican places which were also good. It’s mostly locals that eat at this mall and as a result everything is really good and really cheap.
After our lunch, we Ubered over to the downtown Cancun market to try and haggle away the rest of our money. Evan wanted an apron that had a dick that popped out the bottom, and I wanted to buy a turtle. The places were starting to close by the time we got there, and the vendors weren’t really haggling which made our little amount of pesos not go very far.
We decided that we wanted to go the restaurant we went to downtown last time where we got the 3 foot tall margaritas. It was only 6pm tho so we decided to head up to our rooftop bar to see if we could play some pool. We ended up getting the most watered drinks we’d ever had, but they had swings overlooking the city.
The restaurant we went to downtown was just as great as last time and we bought the photos with the sombreros this time while we were getting serenaded by the mariachi band.
When we went back to our hotel after, we got to the entrance and there were approximately 50 military guys in full riot gears with assault rifles and 3 of the flat bed military trucks sitting outside of the entrance to our hotel. We were kinda scared so we walked up to them and they just kind of ushered us inside and just said “stay in your room” so we went back up to our room scared shitless.
We sat in our room listening for what was going on and we heard lots of heavy footsteps going up and down our hallways and a bunch of doorways getting knocked on. We ended up deciding just to go to sleep and we woke up the next morning for our flight so all was well.
Wednesday, January 24th: Back to Montreal
Today was just a flying day since I had to get back to make my 3:40PM meeting in Montreal.
We headed to the bus station for our 5:30am bus. The tickets I had bought for the bus online didn’t seem to work or weren’t for the scheduled bus, so we were lucky to get the last empty spaces on the bus. Pro tip: just buy your bus tickets from the counter there and then you’ll definitely make your bus unless us who almost missed it.
The airport was fine, a lot better than our experience two years ago where it took us three hours to check in because of our PCR tests and visas. I had some terrible breakfast from an American chain called Johnny Rocket, then we headed to our gate.
Flair was actually doing size checks on the personal items. Usually budget airlines will only inspect you if you look really out of size, but today they were checking everyone. The guy with the sizer was being really chill and if it vaguely fit he’d let you go, but they were still catching people. Evan ended up take some stuff off and putting it on since his bag was wayyyyy out of size, and I just tried my luck since my bag was pretty much in size.
It ended up being fine and we both made it on the plane, albeit with a bit of bag crushing.
Cancun was very pretty to fly out of and it was a nice flight back which dropped us off in Montreal at noon thirty, perfect timing for me to go get lunch then get to my meeting.
Overall, it was a great trip with very minimal class missing. El Salvador was amazing to visit, and I’d definitely like to go back and rent a car so we could go to some more mountains. Cancun on the other hand – we probably won’t be back. It was super expensive and felt kind of unsafe compared to El Salvador.