El Salvador - The Unknown National Park

September 10

Hello everyone!

A month back in El Salvador for round two in Central America’s smallest yet most densely populated country. Much of this has been spent working or at the dentist - the side of life not often seen in these blogs. The dental ordeal will come in the future. Why would you want to see that when you could see this?

This is in a national park called Walter Thilo Deininger. I know what you’re thinking: that doesn’t sound very…local. If you’re predicting that he’s German you would be…wrong! Though he studied in Hamburg, he was actually born in Guatemala, and spent most of his life as a businessman and philanthropist in El Salvador. In a classic example of not believing everything you read, a Wikipedia page says that Deininger settled in El Salvador in 1885…six years before he was born…

The park was set up in 1970, shortly after his death

Wikipedia: flawed, as I always tell my students!

Whatever he believed in, I’m sure Deininger probably didn’t expect to be remembered over fifty years after his death in the form of an adventure park near the beach. I’ll happily admit that I had never heard of this place, which doubles up as a national park, until a few days ago. The reason we were here was to take part in a run…which I assumed was a trail along the nearby beach.

The drive is about 30 kilometres

It wasn't a huge event, with numbers probably in the low hundreds

Partly this is my own naivety and ignorance - I didn’t bother finding out what the ‘WTD’ of the ‘WTD Challenge’ was, only knowing that the run was taking place near Surf City. This in itself is a strange concept, as there seems to me to be more than one place calling itself ‘Surf City’. However, I took the location to mean that we would be off-roading near a beach.

No surfing in this park, for sure!

The interesting colour of the race shirt

Technically true, I guess. The entrance to the national park is less than two kilometres away from the beach. But it is a very different world inside those gates. 

The park has two types of forest

Within the grounds you can find lots of different wildlife

I had collected kit for this run the day before in San Salvador. At this point we still didn’t know the route for either the 12 km or 6 km trails. With hindsight, I can see why they didn’t share them in advance. It wouldn’t have made much sense. After all, it’s hard to mark on the map the times when you’ll be vaulting over fallen tree trunks or scaling slippery rocks…

Logging has been an issue in the area, though
this probably fell due to natural causes!

This was a rise of over 150m in less than a kilometre

Being relatively close to our home in Santa Tecla, we didn’t have to overnight somewhere before the run. The flipside of this was a 4:30am wake-up, being on the road in the dark by 4:45am to drive a group of us down from almost 1000 metres above sea level to…well, pretty much sea level. Lovely sunrise, mind.

Candyfloss sunrise over the car park

The race was well-organised and started pretty much on time

Our run begins and starts serenely, a flat dirt path covered by wiry trees. The path soon seemed to transform into rocks on a river bed…which soon became a river.

This is a tributary of the Rio Amayo, which empties
into the sea a short distance from the park

The rocks were not the easiest to 'run' across

After skipping over another large trunk, I said to a friend something along the lines of, “I might regret saying this but I’m really enjoying this so far!” The regret came about 500 metres later when the route, marked by orange ribbons, started to head up the side of a steep hill.

The hill had a gradient between 15% and 20%

I had learnt my lesson from Ataco. There was no valiant attempt at running up this, particularly with the added kicker of it being slippery due to us being in the middle of rainy season. Breathing heavily, I got up to the top, was told to turn right…and then had to run up higher. At least this part was on a path.

Slightly easier but still uphill!

The uphill stretches kept coming until I reached a large boulder. At this point I was told to stop and have my photo taken with the El Salvador flag bizarrely perched nearby. It is Independence Month, I guess. The stunning view reminded me of how hot it can be nearer the coast so I got a move on, hopefully downhill.

The orange markers hanging from trees showed us where to go

Seems apt during Civic Month!

If I thought downhill was going to be easier, I was once again very naive. Rainy season and areas which don’t receive much light due to the trees = mud. This became particularly perilous when our 12km route joined back up with the 6km cohort, swelling the number of people trying to get down some rather steep and slippery slopes. At one point, to get around a group of walkers who were using poles, I took an alternative path and slid down on my rear end. It was probably the fastest I travelled down a slope in the entire run.

Some Salvadoreans are a bit...what's the
word...suicidal when taking on downhill sections

Plenty of weaving through trees in the second half

Strangely, not all of it was downhill. There were more slopes to ascend. With my legs being a bit heavier from previous inclines, I managed to trip over a tiny tree stump and fall into the dirt. Twice. On the same slope. 

View from near the highest point of the route

Being rainy season, it was lovely and green

Slightly muddy, I ran across the finish line and quickly jumped in the shower. Friends ended up on the podium for the 6 km races; I was very surprised to find I actually finished fourth in the 12 km version.

Apparently I'm 'smiles'

Originally I thought I was fifth - either way, miles away from the podium!

It wasn’t the run I was expecting. It wasn’t the place I was expecting. But Walter Thilo Deininger National Park was a surprisingly lovely place to spend a few hours on a Sunday morning, and somewhere I’m keen to return to in the future.

Love you all,

Matt