El Salvador is a country that is both raw and provocative. Considering what is going on in the news with stories of immigration and the flight from crime, it can seem like a strange choice to visit El Salvador. But it is an amazing experience; it is a country that works very hard for the relatively little tourism it receives. Your visit here is special, and as a visitor, you feel that. I took this picture on the Road Scholar program for which Holbrook is the program provider to El Salvador. We stopped at a roadside sugarcane processing stand near the town of Suchitoto. Locals stopped to buy molasses in different forms. Everything about this process was incredibly labor intensive. So many things that other countries have moved offshore or automated, in El Salvador are still done manually. Economically, this may not be a boon for El Salvadorians, but seeing the tremendous skill and labor of the people left a deep impression on me.

Andrea Holbrook, President, Holbrook Travel

El Salvador