The Most Dangerous City On Our Trip

Well, our arrival in Salvador wasn't promising - having to wait an hour for our ride to the hotel, only to then be called over the tannoy system and informed that TWO cars had been despatched, but the first had broken down and the second had crashed. And could we find ourselves our own cab instead. And by the time we finally arrived at the hotel, it was impressed upon us that we were under no circumstances to walk anywhere at that time of night (9.30pm), as the area around our hotel was the domain of crackheads and hookers, and that we'd be best off getting another cab even to get a snack! (This pretty much tallied with the stories we'd heard from every friend of ours to have visited Salvador, all of whom had been mugged.)

So when we eventually ventured out into the big bad city the next day, it was with a sense of wariness, which soon turned to excitement - Salvador is basically, one of the most exciting places I've ever been to, and we both felt overwhelmed in much the same way we did when we first arrived in Rio. Our first Bahian meal (acarajé, vatapá, moquecas and all) was again hugely exciting, and dangerous - another of the things we'd been warned about was the dendê (palm oil) used in most of the cooking, which tends to have a dire effect on foreign stomachs.

So surviving that, and our first night out, was heartening - especially as we actually managed to have a fantastic time, wandering into a locals' samba hangout and seeing first-hand how you only need about 10 Bahians to get a party going! Brilliantly good-natured also, which was the general vibe of our stay, interspered with the expected edge as well. That might have got to us a bit if we'd stayed longer, but as it was we were gutted to leave.

The baianas who sit on the street corners selling their exciting and dangerous street snacks all look pretty adorable, but they definitely have a savvy streak -when we asked one if she minded us taking a photo of her, she demanded five reais, so we left it! In fact, photos in general would prove to be a bit of a sore point, but more on that later...

The local cultural identity is strong in Salvador, (much like the pimenta - possibly the hottest pepper sauce in the world!) and it clearly spans the generations. We felt pretty awestruck by it, hearing the ominous polyrhythmic drumming everywhere we went, and even being lucky enough to stumble across a private moonlight candomblé ritual, where we saw women, chanting and ringing bells, fill a boat with offerings for lemanjá, the Goddess of the Sea, and then sail it out to sea... Becka took a couple of photos of this before being informed by a bystander that this wasn't the done thing. Mysteriously, by the end of our stay in Salvador, somehow our memory card with all the photos that had been taken of the ritual just disappeared - with neither of us able to explain how! I blamed it on having offended lemanjá, which was possibly a convenient explanation, but seriously, after a couple of days here, these things start seeming more and more real...!

Later on that night, my Chile top aroused a considerable amount of interest - on our bus ride back, a cachaça-fuelled local maniac felt the need to yell the names of every Chilean team he could think of at me (he got as far as Audax Italiano before hitting a block), and then the results of all our matches in the 1998 World Cup. I wasn't sure how I was supposed to react to this, but noticed to my relief that half the bus was shouting at him to shut up, and the other half falling about laughing... It was all so entertaining that I was oblivious to the fact that the bus driver totally ignored every red light (Becka filled me in on this later)!

So, feeling like perhaps we were missing a trick after all by not staying for Carnaval, and heading for "beautiful, sleepy" Olinda, we were alarmed to arrive and find a pre-Carnaval blowout going on, which was like Sodom and Gomorrah, (only less fun) or perhaps a pissed-up festival in London, with a hundred stag and hen parties converging, gobbing, pissing and vomiting everywhere... Maybe we'd made the right choice after all in sidestepping Carnaval? Thankfully, the next day things in Olinda improved - but more on that next time!