La Ruta de Flores
La Ruta de Flores is a winding 36km road linking several colonial mountain towns in a regions famous for coffee and wildflowers. Our home base for the Ruta was Hotel Anahuac in Juyua, which we highly recommend if you ever find yourself in El Salvador - the coffee they served was fantastic (hard to find people here using French presses).
Juyua
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| La Iglesia Santa Lucia, where we viewed the famous image of the Black Christ of Juayua. |
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| Enjoying breakfast and coffee overlooking the garden at Anahuac. |
Los Chorros de la Calera
Just a short walk from the town of Juyua we found Los Chorros de la Calera. Los Chorros is made up of numerous spring fed waterfalls, chutes, man-made dams and natural pools, which flow through volcanic rock crevices and through to hydroelectric power generators. The chutes all feed the Santa Lucia River.
Apaneca
Apaneca was our second stop on the Ruta de Flores. We strolled through the cobblestone streets of this lovely little town and enjoyed the perfect temperatures and the beautiful scenery.
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| The grid you see on the mountain is made up of windbreak trees to shelter the coffee plants when they are young. |
Ataco
When we arrived in Apaneca, it became apparent that the afternoon rains would soon be rolling in, but we rolled the dice and decided that we would attempt to make it to the mirador with views of the city before the rain set in.
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| The colorful church at the bottom of the trek up to the mirrador. |
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| A view of the village before the overlook...and before the rainstorm |
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| And it rained. |
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| We were boxed in by flooded streets on all sides, but at least we had some entertainment. |
El Imposible
From Juyua and the Ruta de Flores, we traveled further west to the town of Tacuba and Hostel Mama & Papa for one purpose and one purpose only, to visit El Imposible.
El Imposible was named for the perilous gorge which used to claim the lives of farmers and pack mules transporting coffee to the Pacific port. El Imposible sits in the Apaneca Ilamatepec mountain range between 300m and 1450m above sea level, and includes eight rivers which feed the watershed for Barra de Santiago and the mangrove forests along the coast.
Based of a recommendation (that went something like this: ¨you have to do this, it is unlike any other¨) we signed up for a tour through El Imposible. The tour started with a one hour ride standing in the back of a pick-up truck, which alone was worth it for the incredible views of the valley as we climbed up and up into the forest. Once in the heart of El Imposible our ¨tour¨ had us hiking,j umping, swimming, wading, sliding, crawling and boot scooting through one of El Imposible´s most exhilarating river gorges.
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| View of Apaneca and Guatemala |
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| View of the Pacific Ocean. |
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| One of our guides and the last picture before we secure our camera for the journey down and through the river. |
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| Looking down from the top of the 50 meter waterfall. |
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| Using a rope and a few helping hands we climbed down the right side to the base of the waterfall. |
Friends & Family at Hostel Mama & Papa
