Barrapraia Salvador

... staying is car-free (at least while carnaval's on - the streets are full of people marching around in bands, playing trumpets, beating drums etc) so after checking in, the boys walked me to my hostel and then we all went out for dinner. It was incredibly humid and close until a huge rainstorm started while we were in the restaurant - I was gutted that once again I had left a sunny place for a rainy one, but it was a relief that the rain drove all the carnaval bands and ...

... do Flemengo, one chooses a restaurant for the day, and all your needs are taken care of - food, drinks, shade, chairs, showers, and kite surfing lessons. Due to the late hour of our arrival at the beach, Jay didn't get a chance to kite surf; however, we did see an expert skimming along the water and catching air off of the waves. On the way to Praia do Flamengo, we stopped at a festival for the Candomble goddess of the sea. Candomble is a mix of West African mysticism ...

... taking care of different stuff. In the first place, I needed a phone and thanks to Gustavo, an argentinian guy in charge of a nearby hostel, I got one in the black market. Great person this Gustavo, he took me there and ...

... and meandering streets spread across a couple of hills and dotted with old architecture. Some of it is wonderful and crumbling and others a well preserved but the atmosphere is has the effect on transporting you back in time to Portugal instead of the new world. The king of the churches is the baroque Ingleja de Sao Fraocisco (Yeah San Francisco!). We wish we could have taken some photos to ...

... journey progressed I probably got pictures of 20 falls all doing the same; this was just the first one.             After we got to the bottom of devil's throat our trip into the falls was done for the day. We rode an elevator up to the top, hopped on the bus, and headed to our hotel to check-in. The hotel was really nice and we each had a roommate except one of the life-long-learners that was on the trip with us. His name was Daniel and he was actually pretty ...

... disoriented and had no idea where I was for at leat a minute. A very interesting experience indeed. 29th April: I visited Basillica de Bonfim in the morning, an important church to the Candomblistas (despite it being a Catholic church!?!) The church is famous for being able to cure people with all sorts of diseases or whatever. Thousands of people have subsequently left their, or their loved ones, photos ...

... need to keep our wits about us here. <br><br>We were delighted to see that it was very sunny outside the airport, hopefully the bad weather we had in Jeri was just a blip and we'd FINALLY get some decent SUN!<br><br>After getting a quote we decided against taking a taxi to our pousada (88 REALS?!) and instead worked out how to get a local bus into town for 4 Reals ...

... time the police saw them and came over and told us again that we were being targeted (which we already knew!) but said that we needed to just leave the area completely while they kept them away from us. So we were able to leave that street and take the elevator back down and decided to go back to the ship and cool off for a few minutes before going back out. Even with the incident with the couple men, Carnival was no where near as dangerous as they made it out to be. It ...

... for a while, had a few Skols (the Brazilian Beer) and listened to the music. Then at 11 the party began. By this point, the roped off are was packed, and the music was blaring. The mob would get pushed along by the security guards so I felt like I was getting dry-humped up and down to roads of Salvador. It was amazing. All the girls on the ship were told not to go out without a guy or two since some men tend to get a little overly excited, so Dave, Will and I were ...

... brics *nd w*s loc*ted next to the ch*i tent. The entire structure w*s f*scin*ting. The whole set up w*s built from thick b*mboo *nd we*ved gr*sses th*t stood the test of strong winds *nd r*in th*t sometimes be*t the dust down during the night. This r*in kept the p*rty from being too dry *nd seemed to freshen up the site for the next d*ys p*rty. The dome w*s *chieved by we*ving gr*sses together to m*ke f*n sh*ped pieces then pl*cing them next to e*ch other *nd str ...