I head to El Zonte today, better known as "Bitcoin Beach," where it all started in El Salvador. You can take a 25c bus here, which drops you off by the main road, or hire a car for ~$5.

🏖️ El Zonte: El Zonte is also undergoing development, and most places have either been recently renovated or are currently undergoing renovation. There are also a few new resorts going up. The town is surrounded by mountains and cliffs, but has a very nice beach with fine black (magnetic) sand. The town is divided by the coastal highway. To the north of the highway are primarily private residences, south of it are mainly resorts and the ocean.

There is a river dividing the town into an eastern and western part as well. There are only two options to cross this river: The highway bridge, or wading through it by the beach, where it is shallow. The eastern part has one section that feels a bit like a simple beach town, while the western part, where I am staying, doesn't have any character at all. It's just a one-way road looping through town, with walls along it on both sides. There are streetlights at night, but for the most part everything shuts after sunset. Two years ago, this one road was not yet paved.

The town has a very different vibe than El Tunco, with most localities being part of small gated resorts. There are a few pupuserias and convenience stores, but they appear more like shacks. There aren't many small businesses in El Zonte, but unlike in El Tunco, none of them accept cards. Bitcoin is the only electronic form of payment.

🌮Merchants: I walk along the main road towards Pupuseria Mama Blanca, reportedly the first place in town accepting Bitcoin payments. It's still closed, and I vow to come back later. I continue on the road to Hope House, which serves a similar function here as the Bitcoin Center in Berlin, but also find it closed.

Crossing the river highway to the western part isn't exactly the most pleasant experience, as the road is busy and the sidewalk slim, but there is a new and solid set of stairs up from the Hope House, which I had not seen on my previous trips.

The first shop on the other side is the Bitcoin Hardware Store, where I find the owner. It's a well-sorted shop selling hardware wallets, seedsigners, small miners, tshirts, USB sticks, SIM cards and other electronics. The owner is a Canadian-raised El Salvadorian Bitcoiner who started the store to educate locals while providing people with the basic tools needed to use Bitcoin. He says people drive from far away to find his shop. He also has a locally built K1 Bitcoin ATM, and while I'm there a local comes in to buy Bitcoin. I buy another Bolt card, which comes set up with Tiankii, a local web wallet and payment processor. I'm told I can erase the card and set it up with my own node using LNbits, but fail to do so.

He recommends Garten for lunch, an upscale restaurant and hotel where I probably have the nicest meal of my trip, a grilled red snapper that takes half an hour to make and I'd highly recommend. I pay with Bitcoin through Blink wallet.

I had back to my hotel, where I try out the hotel bar. They are also using Blink wallet (they used Strike on my previous trips), and I have to head to the reception to pay (as one would have to for card payments), then take the stamped receipt back to the bar as proof of purchase.

On a later stroll, I visit a small convenience store and pay with a Bolt Card to their Blink account. There aren't many places outside of El Salvador where you can do this, and I'm told that Bolt Cards are seen as a serious alternatives to debit cards here. I'm not sure they are safe to hold or use, but then, neither are debit cards.

🌎Meetup: Tonight was the monthly Bitcoin meetup, which attracted a sizeable crowd. Some come all the way from San Salvador, and the attendees seem to be mainly foreigners who are either visiting or live in the vicinity. There are multiple talks, and I also get to share about the emerging Vancouver circular Bitcoin economy. The hotel hosting the meetup is using IBEX Pay, the first time encountering this payment processor that is otherwise much more common elsewhere. There is a 20% discount to those paying with Bitcoin, which seems to be a bit of a hassle to calculate manually and doesn't seem to be consistently applied.

After the meetup, the high tide and large waves made crossing the river back to my hotel impossible, and I have to walk up all the way to the highway to cross the river there. Walking to my hotel, I encounter another small convenience store, where the clerk does not have a mobile phone or tablet to process Bitcoin payments. Instead, I scan a QR code containing her Blink Lightning Address, and she watches me enter one dollar into my wallet. Unfortunately my phone loses connectivity halfway through and my friend has to make the transaction for me. We show the successful transaction to the clerk, but she has no real way of verifying whether we really paid.

I also come across two more places that are open. One is a small resort using PaySea to process payments, the other seems to be affiliated with the asian fusion place in El Tunco, but I cannot consume anymore food or drinks for the day.

Tomorrow, the local Bitcoiners are organizing a bus and boat trip to Pirraya, about 2-3h away. The area is dubbed "Bitcoin Island El Salvador" and might become another sizeable, more remote, circular economy. On Sunday is the local farmers market. I'm sad to be missing both of these events.