They were still mopping up the blood when we arrived in La Libertad. The hot, humid air was redolent of death and vibrated with feasting flies.

The people of La Libertad stood quietly in small clusters as if waiting for the next shooting. Was it shock ... or just another day in El Salvador? God knows. Life was cheap enough in this impoverished little country. But figure out a way to sell tickets and you could have made a fortune.

It was still early-1972 and except for a few days relaxing in the coolness of the hills round Lake Amatitlán in Guatemala, my friend, Bill Cleary, and I had been on the road since we left Malibu in January.

To make sure we weren’t tempted by any surf along the way, we’d taken the fastest route down to San Diego, turned left on Interstate 8 across Arizona, and New Mexico and a hard right into Mexico at the El Paso/Ciudad Juárez boarder.

From there it was right down the middle of Mexico, stopping only for gas, sleep and to replenish supplies. Driving at night in Mexico is not advised, so we drove from sunrise to sunset.

Our goal was Costa Rica and we’d left Malibu with the idea of driving straight through. But we were tired of being on the road, tired of each other’s company and needed to get out in the water. We needed to surf.

After being away from the coast, our route through El Salvador took us by El Sunzal, where we were greeted by a perfect right with clean six foot waves. No way were we going to drive past that.

The next couple of days were spent surfing machine-made waves in warm water until we couldn’t paddle any more. It was just what we needed.

We stayed nearby at a small resort, took showers whenever we felt like it and treated ourselves to meals in the cafe. All up it cost us less than five dollars a day. It was bliss.

While we were at the resort we ran into a Salvadorian businessman who invited us stay at his beach villa just down the coast near La Libertad. It turned out that he had gone to California as a boy and, in his teens, had started a shoe shine business in San Francisco that had grown and grown. When he retired and sold the business he returned to El Salvador a wealthy man and now owned six houses and operated a number of businesses throughout the country. Since the best surf we’d found so far was in and around the port of La Libertad itself, the location was perfect.

He wouldn’t be at the beach house himself. It was too hot. So he was staying at one of his houses up in the hills near the capital. But all his residences had a full complement of live-in servants and he would stop by the house on his way past to let the housekeeper and groundsman know of our arrival.

Instead of moving into the guesthouse at the rear of the compound behind the main house, we decided to park the campervan in the shade of a tree near the guesthouse and camp out so we wouldn’t get too comfortable. Even so, we made use of the shower, and the housekeeper insisted on washing our clothes and bringing us amazingly tasty meals.

LESSON ONE

We’d finally gone to La Libertad to stock up for the next leg of the journey and try and find a bank. The shooting took place a few minutes before we got to town.

A bus driver had gotten upset when an ice cream vendor wouldn’t move his pushcart from where he wanted to stop his bus and the ice cream vendor had shouted insults at the driver. So the driver had pulled out a gun and shot the ice cream vendor, who pulled his gun and shot the driver. Both had died there in the street and the ice cream cart and bus were still where they’d been left. So was the blood.

Scary.

We’d planned to leave after a few more days, but the surf just kept getting better and better. Besides, Costa Rica wasn’t all that far away any more. Just a hop-skip-and-a-jump across a little slice of Honduras, then Nicaragua and there we’d be on the Nicoyan Peninsula and all those pristine, unpolluted surf spots.

So we did get comfortable and got to know some of the locals.

One of them was a bright, athletic young guy around 18 named Tomás, who worked at the villa in some capacity. He drove around on a battered little Vespa that belched smelly fumes and sounded like he’d taken off the muffler. He was a surfer and spent a lot of time hanging around our campsite practicing his English.

What Tomás wanted more than anything was to immigrate to California, and, like his employer, make his fortune and return. He couldn’t understand why we’d want to go to Costa Rica and wanted us to take him back to California when we returned. Unfortunately, when we stopped back at the villa on our return trip several weeks later, we were told he'd "gone away" and no one could tell us where he was.

LESSON TWO

One day at La Libertad the surf reached 15 feet, but still held it’s perfect shape with a light offshore wind. Word had obviously got around and the surf would have been crowded, except that most of the people with boards stood around along the stone walkway above the beach instead of going out.

There was a rip running that made it easy to paddle out if you timed it right and the waves were peeling off the point. By that time I was back in shape and used to surfing for hours at a stretch. But after an hour or so something caught my eye as I was waiting for the approaching set. I was the only person out!!!

Shit! Where the fuck was everybody?

That’s weird, I thought. Real weird! But I wasn’t about to miss any of those beautiful rides. So I caught another wave, had my way with it and squinted towards the beach just before I rode back over the top. Maybe the crowd was cheering my surfing.

So I paddled into a smaller wave, caught it and instead of kicking out, I straighten off and belly rode the board to a point where the rocks would become a hazard. Then I flipped the board fin up and belly rode it further into the shallows and negotiated those nasty rocks until I got to shore.

Turns out that a very large shark had been spotted cruising around out there and while everyone else had heard the commotion and paddled in, I was sitting too far outside waiting for a big set to notice. On my last big ride, the shark could be seen in the wave behind me just before it tubed and it was estimated to be as long as the biggest waves were high - fifteen feet! The crowd on the beach wasn’t cheering my ride. It was trying to warn me. Guess I was lucky ‘The Man in the Long Black Coat’ wasn’t hungry that day.

LESSON THREE

A day or two later, as Bill and I got ready to walk down onto the rock strewn beach and paddle out, we were approached by a couple of slick young locals in their late-teens or early twenties who had arrived in a new Mercedes convertible. These guys obviously knew their way around the place and walked up and told us, in accented English, that they wanted to use our boards.

Bill replied in fluent Spanish and politely told them that we were just getting ready to go out and were using the boards ourselves. Refusing to take no for an answer, one of the guys put his hand on the rail of my board and I angrily yanked it from his grasp.

One of their friends intervened, suggesting that they could use our boards when we got out. But neither of us was willing to loan our boards to two pushy strangers - especially at a place with so many rocks. So things got a bit tense for a while.

After a good, long surf Bill and I finally returned to shore. The guys were still there with a group of friends and gave us dirty looks. But at least they seemed to have lost interest in using our boards.

Just then I saw Tomás coming down from the parking area with his beat-up old board, and, on a moment’s whim, offered to let him use my board.

It was as if I’d slapped him across the face. "No, please, no ..." he pleaded, looking nervously back towards the group before walking quickly past me to the water.

We were used to having Tomás drop in for a chat at the end of each day and were surprised when he didn’t show up that evening.

One of the other locals we’d met explained it the next day.

"Those boys you met are ricos from the city. They live by their own rules and not lending them your boards made them lose face. Fortunately, they didn’t notice you offer Tomás a board. If they had it would be Tomás who’d they’d make pay ... and these people can get very, very nasty."

When Tomás finally did turn up I asked him about it and although he tried to laugh it off he told me something that I would be reminded of on a later trip when I got involved in a kidnapping in Oaxaca, Mexico.

"They could make me disappear and no one ... no one ... would say a word. Not even my mother."

LESSON FOUR

The surf was still still pumping and we arrived to find the parking area at La Libertad jammed with surfers, wannabes and onlookers. After finding a place to park we were weaving our way through the cars and people when Bill leaned over and said, "Don't look at me, Fig and keep walking. There's a couple of guys back there and I don't think they're friends." Bill then steered me to a place where we could watch the guys without them seeing us.

The people Bill was referring to were two pale, clean-cut gringos standing near a new looking Jeep with what looked like new surfboards on the racks. The two looked like they'd just stepped out of a Catalina swimwear advertisement and would have looked out of place at any surfing beach anywhere in the world. 

The shorter of the two had a couple of 35mm cameras around his neck. One with a telephoto lens that was not anywhere big enough for surfing photos. Yet he was taking shot after shot of all the people around him. Who were they and what were they up to?

We put our boards back into the van and Bill made his way around the back of the Jeep so he could approach them without them seeing him. I followed.

Suddenly, Bill walked right up to the two and it must have startled them because they both jumped back a step. 

It took me a minute to figure out what was going on because Bill appeared to be very friendly, asking them all sorts of questions I had a hard time hearing.

"Hi, I'm Dave. So where are you guys from?" etc, etc.

What the guys told Bill was that they were from Florida and ran a shrimp farm on the Caribbean coast of Honduras. They'd heard there was a swell running so they'd taken a few days off to drive over to La Libertad and catch a few waves.

Only they weren't surfing ... and, from the looks of their boards, their clothes and their pale, soft bodies, they'd never caught a wave in their lives.

Bill then asked the photographer about his Nikons and the shots he was taking and he said he was shooting them for a surfing magazine.

"Great," said Bill. "Everybody wants to be in a surfing magazine. Which magazine?"

The guy said he really didn't want to name it because he wasn't sure which photos they'd end up using.

Then he raised one of his cameras to take a close-up of Bill and Bill clamped his hand over the lens and gently pushed it down. "No thanks, I hate to have my picture taken. Nice meeting you though."

Without coming back to where I was standing Bill turned and walked away while the two guys where still wondering what the fuck just went on. I met him a few moments later and asked him about it.

"I'm pretty sure these guys are agents of some sort, Fig. Probably with the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) or CIA. They're not taking photos of the surf or anyone surfing. They're taking face shots. Why is another question, but I sure as hell don't like it."

By holding our boards at an angle to obscure our faces, we finally got out in the water and had a good surf. But I noticed that Bill had paddled in before I was finished and found him waiting for me at the van. 

"Those guys still around?" I asked.

"More or less," answered Bill cryptically. "But they'll have to take a lot more photos."

From under a t-shirt in the back of the van he showed me four rolls of film.

"Where ...?" I stared to ask.

"Trade secret," said Bill. "They may be working for some agency or other, but they're both a couple of fucking amateurs." And that was the last we saw of them.

LESSON FIVE

A day or two later, the swell that had kept us in El Salvador suddenly dropped and we decided it was time to move on.

We said our goodbyes and thank yous and headed towards Honduras.

Our first run-in with banditos is described in Banditos Part I.

After that, we put some distance between ourselves and the coast, driving even closer to the border crossing.

It was still light, and Bill spotted what might be a good place to spend the night. There was literally no other traffic on the road and we pulled off next to a new concrete bridge and parked down below the bridge by a shallow creek.

Moving back into our old routine, I moved my sleeping gear outside the van and Bill set up a little camping-Gaz burner on the fold-up table attached to the door so we could boil some brown rice.

As the rice cooked and we started getting dinner ready, we could hear the sound of approaching voices. When they got closer, it sounded like a group of drunks singing and talking loudly.

Bill and I held our breaths and waited for them to pass, but the singing suddenly stopped and Bill said, "Remember that bit in the movie when the drums stop? I don’t like this, Fig."

We could hear people scrabbling down the side of the gully by the bridge and Bill surreptitiously went to the place where we hid my small, nine shot automatic and slid it into his shirt.

Within seconds we were facing seven young men, some of whom were carrying machetes.

For a moment, no one spoke. Then Bill, who spoke Spanish fluently, said hello in the kind of poor, touristy Spanish I used to speak. Clearly he didn’t want them to know his proficiency.

The young men seemed to be amused and after a few minutes of halting exchanges and attempts at communication, they stumbled off, arm in arm, to sit under the bridge to talk amongst themselves.

Since neither of us appeared to be able to understand Spanish, they didn’t bother to keep their voices down and Bill listened in on their conversation for a few minutes before quietly telling me to get ready for a quick getaway.

I was to take the rice off the cooker, turn it off, throw my sleeping gear into the van, jump in and close the doors. At the same time Bill would hop into the driver’s seat, turned on the ignition, throw the campervan into gear and race up the side of the creek to the road.

Hopefully, the men would be too drunk to react quickly. Otherwise, Bill would have to use the gun ... and a small .22 automatic against drunks with machetes would be dicey.

Fortunately, Bill had formed the habit of parking in the direction of an easy exit and everything went more-or-less to plan. I dumped the rice out of the pan onto the ground, turned off the cooker, threw it into the wooden box where it lived, lowered the table, grabbed my army surplus cot, turfed it into the back of the van, jumped in and was almost able to close both of the doors as Bill fishtailed up the hill dragging along one of the men who’d run after the van and had grabbed hold of the surfrack above the driver’s door. By the time we’d hit the tarmac the man had lost his grip and had fallen, but I was too busy trying to get the side doors shut in place to notice what happened to him.

This time we drove even closer to the border, pulled off on a side road away from the coast and into what we discovered the next morning to be a cemetery. Which probably explains why we had no further problems.

We were far too shaken to eat after our second run-in with banditos and had a couple of beers and some peanuts before trying to get some sleep.

The next morning, Bill told me that what he’d heard the men discussing was how they would rush us while we were busy eating, kill us with their machetes and steal our money and belongings. Regardless, he was concerned that the man who grabbed onto the boardrack and fell onto the road at the top could have been injured and that, unlikely as it would seem, he and his friends might report us to the police. We couldn’t get out of El Salvador soon enough.

We got to the border crossing early and were relieved to be passed through without difficulty. Then we shot through Honduras, stayed only one night in Nicaragua at a pension just off the main road, bought a few hammocks and drove on into Costa Rica, where we finally relaxed again.

* * *

After what we’d been through in El Salvador, Costa Rica was like a safe. peaceful haven. In fact, it was just that, and we spent a couple of wonderful weeks surfing perfect waves around the Nicoyan Peninsula without seeing another surfer.

We camped out at several places and stayed in a beachfront "hotel" on Playa Tamarindo that consisted of an old, solidly built two-story building fashioned from rough hewn hard wood. The huge square supporting posts and beams had been sandblasted over the years so the hotel looked like it had been there forever.

The ground floor consisted of an open room sunk in below the level of the beach to keep it out of the wind and sand. That’s where the owner’s cook prepared our meals and where we ate on a table with benches that looked as old as the hotel itself.

We slept above the ground floor in a large room that was open on three sides. Except for a few small tables and some old armchairs, the room was otherwise empty and we slept in two of the twenty or so hammocks positioned to take advantage of the cool breezes off the sea. There was no electricity, so we read by candlelight or an old Coleman lantern and woke at sunrise to be greeted by the day’s surf out in front of the hotel.

The cook was a part-Chinese, part-Afro Costa Rican from the "other side" - or Caribbean coast. The man was a miracle worker.

All his meals were prepared in a heavy old wok around three feet in diameter and made of thick smoke-blackened iron. While the rice and beans we had with every meal cooked on nearby gas rings, the wok sat on a platform of stones above a charcoal fire. And almost without seeming to move, our chef would skillfully move the meat or eggs, or vegetables up or down the sides of the wok to control how they cooked. Lastly, the small tortillas that are normal in Costa Rica would be thrown in around the sides so that everything was ready at the same time.

The menu was as simple as it was delicious. Rice, beans, tortillas and eggs for breakfast. Rice, beans, tortillas and fish for lunch. Rice, beans, tortillas and fish, chicken or beef for dinner - with veges and other seafood delicacies, like lobster and shellfish thrown in when available.

I wish I’d learned what he put in those beans to make them what I looked forward to most. They were the best I’ve ever eaten. And since we bought fresh fruit and coconuts from local sellers and I kept us supplied with fresh alfalfa sprouts, we had a nicely balanced diet.

Good thing, too. Because we surfed and surfed and surfed on empty waves that made up for their 3-6 foot size by being perfectly shaped.

Never, in the entire time we spent in Costa Rica, did we feel the underlying violence we felt in El Salvador. In El Salvador it was palpable. In Costa Rica it wasn’t there.

On the other hand, El Salvador and its people had suffered under years of government repression, cruel military dictatorships, class privilege and what would eventually erupt into a bloody civil war. Since that civil war ended and the country became more stable, I understand that things in El Salvador have improved and the level of violence has lessened dramatically.

All I know for sure is that I met some remarkably generous and friendly people while I was there and that this played a major part in me deciding to ignore the "banditos" and accept the offer of a job being assistant manager of an international hotel in the capital city of San Salvador.

The offer had unexpectedly come from the manager of the hotel, who we'd met at one of the beachfront resorts on our return journey to Malibu. I'd got talking about my experiences working at the Kaanapali Hilton on Maui in the late-60's and what I thought were just some funny stories ended up being a job interview.

Had it not been for being delayed in Oaxaca, Mexico on my way back down, however, it is very likely that I would have been with the manager when he and two other hotel employees were murdered shortly before I was able to get to San Salvador and take up the job.

It shouldn’t take my little voice to tell me that four close-calls with death in El Salvador were enough. But despite all this, someday I would like to visit this country again and enjoy all the good things El Salvador has to offer.