A DARK, HUMID HEAT welcomes us to El Salvador. We drive north along the Pacific coast with the windows rolled down, sweating, marveling at the visceral deliciousness of a warm night.

Say "El Salvador" and many Americans still think of guerrilla warfare, but the bloodshed ended 14 years ago, and the country has been quietly rebuilding ever since. Lush and studded with volcanoes, El Salvador is the smallest country in Central America—roughly the size of Massachusetts, with a population of nearly seven million—but it has the third-largest economy. Coffee and sugar are the main agricultural exports—in our ten days there, we see hundreds of semis overloaded with sugarcane barreling along well-paved highways—although the garment-assembly industry is now bigger than both. Tourism is on the rise, with almost a million people visiting last year.

Ten miles north of the coastal fishing town of La Libertad, and half an hour from the capital of San Salvador, we check in to a small, inexpensive palm-thatched resort called Atami. The rooms are spartan—single beds with threadbare sheets, no A/C, few fans. What matters is that they're built on a 100-foot cliff that juts out into the sea; to either side is a protected cove and a pristine black-sand beach. The grounds high upon the bluff are like a park, featuring thick grass and coconut palm trees, a round swimming pool, and a pet monkey called Comastú. But the real attractions are the open-air gazebos along the cliff's edge, hung with hammocks where you can swing in the breeze and watch the waves.

Best of all, there's no telephone, no TV, no radio, no Internet, no newspapers. By chance, we've found ourselves in total media seclusion. It's just as well: I didn't bring my laptop and I've vowed to abstain from writing a single word while I'm here.

Our first night, it seems as though the heaviness of the tropical air flowing into our rooms has drugged us. We sleep till 10 a.m.—later than I have in years—then hit the beach.

The west coast of El Salvador is not the easiest place for novice surfers: In early spring, the waves can be big and break badly. In the first three days, we manage to destroy three surfboards. Pat snaps one perfectly in half, Johnnie rides a wave straight into the beach, ripping off the fin, and Erika, in a theatrical sand-and-surf smash-up, partially delaminates the top of a big yellow board.

No worries. Papaya, at Papaya's Surf Shop, in Sunzal, a laid-back beach village, shrugs with a "God, these gringos" sigh and rents us three more ancient fiberglass longboards.

Surfing proves to be the perfect prescription for a mind and body and soul fatigued from overwork. I'm terrible at it. Having grown up in mountains a thousand miles from the sea, where a full bathtub is considered a sizable body of water, I'm an irreclaimable landlubber. I've vomited spectacularly on every ship I've ever had the ill fortune to board. Furthermore, I have never snowboarded, and my few attempts at skateboarding were pavement-whacking, coccyx-cracking affairs.

At first I try paddling my board "outside" and hanging with the real surfers, who manage to catch a wave almost anytime they feel like it. Most of them are on extended hiatus, like the bronzed Swiss attorney I meet one morning who is taking five months off to surf her way up Central America's Pacific Coast.

"My work will be there when I get back," she tells me between rides. "I trained someone to do my job before I left. It's no problem."

Unlike her, I find that I either miss the wave or get devastatingly pummeled. At one point I vow to hire an instructor and really work at getting good. But then—something is definitely happening to me—I think: Why? I'm on vacation. I'm not supposed to be working at anything but not working. I decide to chill. I'll stick to the whitewash and leave the big stuff to actual surfers.