Chasing Cars

I feel like I’ve spent most of the last 2 weeks looking for a car.

I ended up going down “carros traidos” route – cars brought down to El Salvador from the USA… There aren’t that many other options here.

So I trailed the city under the scorching sun, going from one auto-lote to another. It’s pretty big business here and the way it works is kind of interesting:
1. There are alot of car crashes in the USA.
2. Cars are written off (too expensive to repair).
3. Salvadorean entrepreneurs buy them cheaply.
4. They bring them to El Salvador.
5. Once in El Salvador cars are repaired and often resprayed.
6. Salvadorean number plates are sorted for them.
7. Cars then get put on the market.

So, the first thing you do, when you see a car you fancy, is ask which bit of the car was hit or damaged when it crashed… and then you go from there.

In the end, after test driving quite a few that weren’t quite right, it turned out that Yesy’s neighbour “brings cars”.

And he had a 2002 silver Kia Sportage.

At last I got my car.


(Yeah, I’d never heard of Kia either before coming here… Korean apparently, which brings the price down – Salvadoreans tend to want Nissans or Toyotas. Actually she’s kind of posh and a bit big. I feel strange and somewhere between a poser and a fraud… But, safer then I would in a little car, and glad of the air conditioning, which not only keeps us cool but avoids the having to put the window up at every single traffic light hassle, and also pleasantly cuts me off from the mayhem outside.)