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We get up, check-out, bus to airport early to deal with paying taxes on our tickets. For some reason you pay taxes at the airport in cash. We pay for the taxes on the rest of our "in country" flights. We fly TAM, The high-end airline which has red carpet rolled out in all of their areas to distinguish themselves from their cheaper competitors. We will make four flights within Brazil for less than $400. We arrive in Salvador without a hitch, watching a video of a concert on the plane of a famous Salvadorian singer. It gets us excited. We get on the wrong bus into town, the longer one, but no matter because this one goes along the water and we are enthralled. The masses of locals out on the rocky beaches, dancing on the dunes, the rocks, there is music everywhere. We arrive out our hotel in the center of the old city and it is silent. Most of the tourists stay at the big modern hotels by the beach. Reading that Salvador is the old colonial capital of Brazil, the original outcropping of the Portuguese Empire from 1500. It remained the capital until the bottom fell out of the sugar market in 1811. Unlike Rio, the old town here remained untouched by development until 10 years ago when the government started investing in retrofitting the old buildings and fixing up the squares and parks to attract tourists. It worked. This area is also the center of Afro-Brazilian culture. The African slaves brought here retained much of the essences of their African culture and adapted them in slavery, unlike in the U.S.. These slaves invented Samba and a dance/martial art form called capoeira.
Craig- We stay at the Palace Hotel, a big old downtown casino that's now just a hotel, and after a bit of negotiating they give us a huge corner suite with lots of windows - the old kind that swing open (shutters basically) with no screens or even glass. The hotel is apparently pretty empty, since we're getting this room for less than the posted price of a regular double room. Anyway, we ask for a lunch recommendation at the hotel, and they suggest a restaurant called Sorrisia da Dada (sp? Dad's Smile?). The directions are vague and the streets are windy and confusing, but after several wrong turns through this fascinating area, and after asking several people, we find the restaurant. There we have the best food we get in Salvador, probably in the whole country. Fantastic moqueca: fish stew in a clay pot with red African palm oil (dendê). We eat in the back, outdoors, with interesting murals to look at.
Deciding rest can wait, we follow the guidebook's advice and call a guide to take us to a Candomblé ceremony, and we take off with him almost immediately. Candomblé is an African cult religion, with a large following in Salvador, 2nd only to Catholicism (the two religions mix, in fact, via saints.) Our guide is a practitioner of Candomblé, and he takes us to his temple.
Geoff-It took an hour for the guide to pick everyone up, we were first which meant we rode with the guide in his car. This allowed us to ask all kinds of questions about the religion. They have many gods, which map to the Catholic Saints, they call orixá. Candomblé reflects mostly religions from Eastern Africa and there are several different sects that go back to the different dominant African tribes that came over. Practitioners celebrate many holidays of the gods. This one tonight is for the main god Oxalá.
The main house or church is a simple whitewashed two story building about 75 by 75 feet square but attached to a compound of buildings. We are escorted to small balconies to watch. Men on one side and women the other. Everyone is dressed in white, as are we and many of the other guests (his is in honor of Oxalá). There are perhaps 40 people participating - mostly older women and all black whose white dresses are full and distinct made of layers of thick lace with billowing skirts. The drums begin and a singer chants out with the rhythms and the loud drums. For the first 20 minutes I was riveted, despite the heat of the room, the sweet smell of sweat rising off the dancing bodies and our lack of sleep the night before. About half of the people present slowly dance/march around a central beam (the only support beam for the thatched roof. Every ten or fifteen minutes as they circle over and over to the steady beat a person falls into a trance. When this happens their eyes roll back in their heads and then they bend over and continue marching hunched. Priestesses go to them and keep them moving without hurting themselves. Eventually they are ushered into another room to rest and gather themselves. After two and half hours Craig and I had had more then our fill and we convinced the guide to send us back in a cab as the event did not look anywhere near to ending. In retrospect we didn't need the guide after all.
Craig-We go back out into the streets of the Pelourinho district and sit at a cafe to listen to some live music. After eating the small pile of peanuts placed on our table by a small boy, we are told it'll cost us R$1 (1 real, which is about 30 cents, but more than the going rate for such a small bit of food), and the boy continues giving us peanuts after we say no - it's hard to be firm with a smiley young boy who keeps giving the thumbs-up, as the Brazilians love to do. Anyway, we also meet a local guy there (Oscar) and chat a bit in our halting Spanish-Portuguese (Portañol, as the locals say). He walks us to our hotel, showing us some restaurants he recommends, etc., along the way. We go to bed, exhausted from a busy day!
Monday - Walk to Mercado São Joaquim & Balé Folclórico & Ivan
We strolled through the Pelourinho, looking at art and jewelry and a few shops, and admiring the stunning charm of this town. Some of the old buildings are restored, but some of them are so neglected that trees grow out of them:
Geoff- Salvador drips with charm. In addition to all the culture it is rich in beauty and history. It is the original colonial capital of this Portuguese colony. From 1500 to 1811 this was the capital - when the bottom fell out of the sugar market the city fell into a decline it is just now starting come out of. The wealth moved to Rio where there were coffee plantations. In the early 1990s the government needed to do something about the high poverty and crime rates. Through tax incentives the government attracted large bio-chemical refineries and some car manufactures to the north of the city. Then they began investing in fixing up this main part of town. The elevator between the lower and upper cities is only a year old and the fountain plaza was completed a few months before our arrival. The colonial buildings on the cobblestone squares are all freshly painted and clean. It is a city to fall in love with.
Craig- We walked out of the touristy areas to the Mercado São Joaquim, a large market with food, clothes, and all kinds of things - lots of interesting-looking fruits (and strong-smelling meat, blood on the ground and all). Geoff bought a pair of sandals from a fun woman who gave a fag-hag vibe, so when she asked if we were friends, I explained that we're boyfriends/lovers. "Ooohhh!," she said with a smile! They gave us lots of fruit to eat while shopping for shoes. At one point Geoff had a juicy piece of sweet watermelon in one hand and mango dripping in the other and no way to try another pair of shoes. When he put them down the mother asked me why he didn't like the fruit. I explained that he just needed to shop.
After exploring the market we took a taxi to our hotel, dropped off our purchases, and went to a dance performance - Balé Folclórico da Bahia - which was sold out, but they managed to squeeze us into folding chairs on an upper edge-balcony of this tiny theater. The show was fantastically energizing - full of fast live drumming with acrobatic dance like we'd never seen. At one point a man had a pot of burning coals balanced on his head, and one in each hand. He spun around faster and faster until the flames from the pot on his head were spiraling upward 8 feet or more. Later, another dancer was doing the rapid flips characteristic of capoeira - jumping hands to feet to hands to feet... He did this so fast that he was a blur before our eyes.
After the show we met up with Ivan, a local guy we had met online, who was very friendly and eager to show us around. He brought along a couple of friends, as well, and we had a drink together with good conversation. Here we are in front of Salvador's landmark elevator between the upper and lower cities:
and in front of another landmark building:
Geoff loved this fountain, which was constantly changing its color and form of water-spray, with music playing (much of it cheesy American classics):
Geoff- There's something funny about walking around in January in 80 degree sunshine with "Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow" chiming out of the musac. At night they put away the Celine Dion and played local music. Thank goodness.
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