Salvador, Bahia

We stayed a couple of days in Salvador, which was our first experience of Bahia a large region of Brazil with strong African roots. Salvador is pretty huge, with miles of coastline and a huge bay.

People here were very friendly and we soon realised they understood spanish pretty well, even bad spanish, which was quite helpful at times. Portuguese normally sounds quite unlike spanish with some radical pronunciation differences but enough of the words are similar to spanish to give you a vague idea of what's going on but it works better the other way around, they understand spanish much better than we understood portuguese. Anyhow, this wasn't a huge deal, English is well understood too, just nice to have a fallback position. Kathryn's french was helpful a couple of times too. Brazil is clearly a very diverse country.

For our first night we had a recommendation of a place to eat in the old town, Pelourinho. From this experience we learned a few things. That the taxis are crazy and only some have seatbelts (we later learned that seatbelts could indicate one of 2 things about the driver: safety consiousness (rare) or lunacy) and red traffic lights ignored with gusto. That restaurant names are only approximate - it took about 3 laps of the cobbled maze, and directions from several pleasant but gun totting tourist police before we realised that. Finally, we learned that Brazilian food is excellent. Of course we couldn't make such a judgement on the first night but we ultimately came to this conclusion.

The next day we walked to Pelourinho from the hotel which was great. On the way, as we walked we realised one of the turns had led to an increasingly quiet area so we headed out of it towards Solar Do Unhao which has some modern are and a GREAT restaurant with excellent service.

As we ate some typical food from Bahia sitting out on a little pier thing and avoiding the little rain, we were entertained by a few kids messing around in a boat. Whether they were catching fish or just having fun is hard to say.

This place also still has apparently on display an old Pelourinho (a whipping post for slaves) though we didn't see it because we quickly headed to town to beat the dark and rain.

Later we tried to organise to go to a Candomble ceremony, a religous ceremony with african roots but our timing was not great and there were none going on while we were in town. A later quest for live music was similarly fruitless, as was an attempt to blag our way to the top of a waiting list for a live cultural show (though it was fun to try).