Hotel Verdemar Salvador

... This group invited or more like forced us on stage right when we sat down. I was first and I looked worse than a participant in the fourth row of a Ric***********s Sweatin to the Oldies video. Rachel was busting up at me but, hey, I can still beat her at tetherball thanks to the killer moves I learned from Napoleon Dynamite. The capoeira guys were ridiculous though asking for money time and time again. One of the guys came up to us claiming he was a ...

... I checked in at the same time as Stacey - an American girl on a nine month trip round South America. We ended up travelling for an eventful week together - a serendipitous encounter. We headed out for a beer and the first of several acaraje (an oyster shaped fritter filled with a satay like sauce, salad and dried shrimp) - street food usually sold by an enormous Bahian woman in a white dress and what sometimes looks like a ...

... Ezekiel and Julio (an older Braizllian guy, slightly creepy!) on the bus. They offered to take me in the evening to a Candoble (religious spiritual African voo doo like ceremony) but I went and slept for three hours dreaming strange dreams instead. They didn’t end up going anyhow so I didn’t miss out, but it’s definitely something I need to learn more about.

That evening we cooked, well Ezekiel did, he’s a chef, it was a delicious Tuna pasta. Five of us ate ...

... the tunes of the band who are playing live on top. The truck is surrounded by hundreds of marshals holding a rope protecting the procession of excited party goers wearing the same polyester T-shirt. The truck probably only moved 150 metres every half an hour so everyone in the Bloco was dancing, drinking and generally going mental. The people outside the Bloco in the grandstands and beside the road were going mental too dancing to their favourite bands as they slowly rolled ...

... think it will be a few more years before you see us at the Beach Olympics.. The nightlife here was, much like Pipa, very very cool and we spent the evenings either wandering along the beach, sitting in the main plaza eating ice cream, or drinking beer by candlelight down by the sea... The journey back, after 5 days of beaches and sun, was a bit of a shock to the system... cue more vomiting from pretty much every person on the boat (not including me and Sam thankfully!)

... around the next corner was another drum corp made up of all kids, up in another little plaza was a jazz orchestra with about 20 members playing samba and mambo, across the road from that was a outdoor plaza overlooking the city and another incredible samba band. By the end of the night the dancefloor was full of people doing that crazy, super-fast footwork that they do to samba music. Such a wicked night! We stayed in the neighbourhood of Barra, which is where some of ...

... the city are 400 yrs old, and now there's grafitti and street kids sleeping on the sidewalks here. That's the other thing, Pelo is a big tourist draw, and rightly so. But when you mix rich tourists with a dirt poor local population, you'll get a huge amount of thieves, beggars and people trying to sell you useless stuff. I've heard there's 50 million people in Brazil that don't have official employment. Half of them must be here. Apparently my tan doesn't ...

... os Santos. Le repit va enfin arriv** et nous offrir quelques heures de fraicheur avant la fournaise du lendemain. Les trottoirs du Pelourihno nous attendent. Malgre la fraicheur, nous sommes les seuls qui semblont avoir repris un gain de vitalite. Le rythme des tongs le long des trottoirs ne s est pas accel**e. Mais celui du son, oui...Le son commence a s'echapp** de toutes les petites gargottes de la vieille ville. Et ...

... says I looked all jerky like a zombie, and I say Jazzie looked all jumpy like a frog - hardly the movements required for Samba Reggae :-) I´m finding that the experience in Bahia is tough - that how I pictured Bahia is actually how Olinda was, and I find it quite lovley that I manifested a certain experience in Brazil, calling it Bahia, but life was much cleverer than that and gave me Olinda - then let me see how Bahia is. Its hard here... The feeling of ...

... David Guetta were on a trio. We resolved to see as much of them as possible and were not disappointed! They were fantastic. We did get a little carried away though as we'd been very careful to avoid massive crowds and areas that were crowded with too many people where little people like us could get crushed and al of a sudden found our selves in a massive crowd in a narrow part of the street with no way out. Finally we managed to find somewhere to stand until the ...