This place is a hot and dusty place at the InterAmerican highway, which has it's income in salt and sugar. Outside the village we passed kilometers of salt-pans on our way to the beach. The beach was very muddy and rocky, more a mangrove beach, but they had built some pools which would fill up with high tide, and would be good for swimming with low tide. It appealed to us, but after we finally found them, somebody had forgotten to put the plug :-) With low tide they would just as quick empty again..
We also visited the sugar and salt museum, which was only one room with some pictures, and a guide, who could tell us the exact size of those pictures... But he was very friendly and funny, so we had a good laugh anyway (and in Spanish, practising in the wild goes pretty well!)
The hotel we slept in had a swimmingpool, but we were not allowed because some local maffia boss had his pool-party there that night (with the gangster-babe stereotypes arriving..)
We visited the sugarfactory. In the region they grow a lot of sugarcane, because it needs a hot climate and not much water. But with El Nino things had been troublesome. They harvest the cane by setting it on fire, leaves and other useless stuff will burn, but the cane survives. So all around it was thick with smoke. At the factory (just in business three months a year) we were received by a guy who showed us around. Not many people do this, so we were an atrraction to the sugar workers as well. The cane arrived with big trucks, but there were still also some little farmers arriving with an ox-cart with little cane. The machines were huge, but the good thing was that they all ran on the energy produced by the burning of the waist of the cane. In the afternoon it was getting 49 degrees Celsius in the factory...
When we walked our way back, we got a lift to our hotel, it appeared to be the chief of the factory. A nice and interesting man who told us a lot more about the ins and outs of the factory.
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