4 September 2026 · Playa Toluca and Surf City, El Salvador
Day five, and the first guest arrived before I did: a garrobo, a black spiny-tailed iguana the length of my forearm, sunning himself on the block wall like he'd paid for the month. A yearling green iguana was under the palm by the rancho. The big tree over the hammocks turns out to be an almendro, a tropical almond, and it drops fruit on the roof all day. There was a possum in the ceiling the first night. Nobody asked for rent.
Lunch was on the surf strip, at a palapa with a bamboo roof, red cloths on the tables and a terrace hanging over a point break — one of the breaks the World Junior Championship is being surfed on this fortnight. Shrimp and calamari on rice with melted cheese, a salad of cucumber, tomato and pickled red onion, a tortilla, a lime, and a tall lemonade squeezed while you wait. Six dollars a plate, two for the lemonade, two on the table for the kitchen. Nine dollars a head, all in, for that food with that view. Somebody at the table said he'd had better. I hadn't.
On the coast road north of La Libertad a stand was selling pitahaya, dragon fruit, four for ten dollars. I've eaten dragon fruit in Canada — the white-fleshed one that ships from Vietnam — and it tastes of very little. This is a different plant. Cut it open and it's magenta right through, no white centre, and it actually tastes of something. The supermarkets here want four or five dollars each for the same fruit. Roadside was half that, and it stained the cutting board, the paper towel, and me.
Then the supermarket in La Libertad, because we were having a barbecue. Sixty-seven dollars and ninety cents. Three pounds of New York strip at eight dollars ten a pound — call it eight or nine dollars a steak, where the same cut is twenty-two to thirty-five dollars each in the prairie town I left last week. A strip here costs the same as a pack of five pork chops. Two pounds of chorizo, beef patties, grated cheese, a bottle of barbecue sauce, two bags of charcoal, fire starters, rice, cereal, a bottle of orange drink and two boxes of ice pops. Nine dinners' worth of protein, and the charcoal to cook it on, in one bag. At home that money doesn't get you out the door with one bag, and the bag has no meat in it.
It isn't all cheap. Supermarket produce is the expensive column: a head of lettuce at five-fifty, eggs at five-fifty a dozen in a country where chickens walk down every lane. The trick, I'm told, is to stop buying eggs in a supermarket. The local price is the tray of thirty from the corner tienda, and that's the number I'm chasing next.
The barbecue was on the Selectos charcoal, under the almendro. The man who looks after the place ate a steak with me and a pitahaya after, then did the dishes while I dried. I don't have a key to the gate yet, so he opens it and closes it every time I come or go, and I'd started to feel that as a problem — mine, not his. Five days in, the lesson isn't about steak prices. It's learning to depend on people and let them help, without translating every kindness into what it might be for. Mutual respect and appreciation, no angle behind it. A breath of fresh air that has gone missing in North America and much of the world, and it's the thing I'll remember from this day long after I've forgotten what the strip cost.
Ledger: pitahaya $10.00 (4, roadside). Lunch for two $18.00 incl. tip. Groceries $67.90. Sixty-eight dollars of dinners still in the fridge.