Angie's thoughts:
Left a hot, sunny England and arrived in Salvador after 22 hours travelling to... you guessed it... pouring rain! Very humid and tropical feeling though, so it was different enough to make it all worthwhile.
For a day or two it felt just like we were in a Spanish holiday resort. I couldn't comprehend being so far away from home. We ate pizza and drank Skol to start with. Slowly we seem to be adjusting to the Brazilian way. Thought I'd really miss cider, but the
tasty cheap Caipirinhas make up for it. The Bahian (area of Brazil we are in) speciality dish is a lovely rich shrimp, onion and green pepper dish with coconut palm oil.
Our hostel (penthouse) room is right at the top of the building with a view of the sea from our own terrace. We can see parakeets flying over the rooftops which makes up for the fact that the roof leaks a little during the torrential rain we have been having nearly every night. We drift off to sleep to the sound of drumming, samba music, singing, car stereos and dogs barking, and wake up in the morning to car horns, dogs barking and strange sounding bird calls. It took us a while to place them at first, but then we realised - they're just like Sooty!
Salvador was the colonial capital of Brazil until it moved to Rio in 18-something. Over 5 million Africans were shipped here as slaves between the 17th and 19th century and as such, Salvador is very influenced by their ancestors. It's also the main musical engine of Brazil and we have heard lots of drumming, reggae, salsa and samba. Brazilians love to party and last night, during a free open-air gig we watched the elderly lady who was emptying the bins samba dance with the foxy young minxes.
Salvador has the finest colonial architecture in Latin America (the old centre is a UNESCO World Heritage site) but a lot of the buildings are not maintained or cared for and some of them look on the brink of collapse. It doesn't seem to worry the shop keepers who carry on merrily selling their goods from the ground floor of these derelict, once beautiful buildings.
It's quite mad trying the cross the roads around here. The cars don't look like they're slowing down at all when approaching a pedestrian crossing. In the taxi last night, we worked out the possible reason why. The traffic lights have a count down next to the green light displaying how many seconds the drivers have left to get through before the lights change. I'm sure it just encourages them to cut it even finer!
Darren's thoughts:
On Thursday night we went to a fascinating Candomble ceremony which are traditionally held
to raise the spirits and ask for help advice etc. The one we saw was trying to contact the Jungle spirit. It took place in a private house and consisted of a few drummers pounding incessantly while a group of portly ladies, some younger women and a
few chosen kids danced and sung, barked and yelped until some of them went into a trance-like state and fell to the ground (I suspected that most of it was something of a show for us tourists). There were about 50 tourists piled into a small room and the heat and incense smoke was enough to put anyone into a trance, especially when they started
smoking the 12" cigars and cracking open the beers! If you can imagine the Engine Room
(Streets' band) playing at an after-party at Magnus's then you're half-way there.
The street sellers are persistent and numerous but in a country with 40 million+ living in poverty with no welfare system to speak of, then you have to expect to be hassled, but I am getting a bit tired of saying no and smiling politely and I find the street kids particularly distressing and am trying hard not to give all my money away to them, specially as there's a big drug problem here.
The Capoeira here is exceptional and it's easy to while away an hour or two watching the shows. On Friday we went into the historic city centre and visited numerous churches (dripping in gold) and museums. In the evening we watched a brilliant drumming group meander through the steep and winding streets (the pavements here are almost entirely made up of mosaic blocks, they look great but are a bugger to maintain it would seem). We went to a reggae bar and almost immediately made a friend who insisted on buying me a beer
and chatting away like he was my long lost brother. As with most of the people here he was very friendly but totally unintelligible to us.
Salvador Hotels
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