Return to Salvador

 We remembered Salvador with less than fondness from our previous visit in 2000. As on this visit, it was just after the end of Carnaval, and we remember seeing just the evidence of the partying in the streets of the old town - port-a-potties and their associated smells, litter, parade floats, and workers hosing down the streets. We weren't quite sure what to expect this time, but at least we were on a guided walking tour and would know what we were looking at!

The original settlement of Salvador, the Old Town, is on the top of a cliff 85 metres (280 ft) high, which was established in 1549. Goodness knows how people got from the administrative and religious part of the city up there to the commercial  and port area in the lower town for 340 years before Senor Lacerda built the elevator in the late 1800s.

The Lacerda Elevator, which was upgraded in the 1930s
from the original, takes about a minute for a trip

There are still lots of small fishing boats in the marina, although Salvador is also one of the busiest shipping ports in Brazil. The state of Bahia, of which Salvador is the capital, produces and exports much of the cacao bean that makes all the world's best chocolate, along with sugar cane and other agricultural products. 

Originally a large part of the commercial trade coming through Salvador was in slaves from Africa. Before the final abolition of slavery in the 1880s by Princess Isabel, as we explained in a previous post, slaves would often escape into the jungles beyond the city, and established their own society there, where they could continue their African customs. Now the African customs have become a part of local traditions and many events from both the Catholic and Candomble calendar are celebrated together by people of both faiths. Our tour guide, who is Catholic, also has an identity with a god within the Candomble tradition.

Once we arrived in the Old Town, our first stop was what had formerly been the main square of the town, with the government building on one side. This was one of those places with the rows of port-a-potties in 2000. Now it is place for family celebration at Carnaval, and they were in the process of dismantling a stage from the weekend's festivities.

From there we walked to what is now the central square of the old city, where you can see no less than four churches at once. The Jesuits were the first to arrive in 1553 after the Portuguese founded the city to convert the indigenous peoples to Catholicism. Eventually they were thrown out, as seemed to happen a lot with the Jesuits, and the Franciscans arrived in 1587 and established the church and convent (although shouldn't it be a monastery??). This area has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985 and is now being treated like one. We were surprised by the extent of police presence, and asked our guide about it. He said there is usually a fairly strong presence, but when cruise ships are visiting, it is increased to make sure that the tourists can feel safe walking around the area.

The Church of Sao Domingo, dating from the 1700s

The Franciscan Church and Convent in Pelourinho, the Old City, is by far the most impressive building in the area. We first went into the courtyard of the convent, which is covered with blue and white tiles from Portugal. Our guide told us that this was his first visit in 4 years, as the courtyard had been closed for restoration. It certainly is impressive and beautiful.

The Square in front of the Church

The entrance to the Convent.

We passed through this room with its original wooden
decoration and painted ceiling on the way
into the courtyard

Here are a few photos of the courtyard. There are apparently 55,000 tiles, all imported from Portugal, within the church and convent.

After that we were led into the church and were absolutely stunned at the amount of gold in front of us. This church and convent has been declared one of the Seven Wonders of Portuguese Origin in the World, and is an integral part of the UNESCO World Heritage designation. And no wonder - it is jaw-droppingly beautiful, beating out many other churches we've seen for sheer brilliance. A church and convent were originally built in 1587 when the Franciscans arrived in Salvador, but were destroyed during the Dutch invasion in the 1600s. The current church and convent were built between 1708 and 1723, with the decoration finally completed in 1755. The tabernacle hangs above the main altar and was made with 80 kg of pure silver, and 1,000 kg of gold was used for the decoration. Unfortunately, that gold has no real value, because it was ground into a powder and mixed with other ingredients so it could be painted onto the carved wood.

After our visit to the church, which only relieved the heat and humidity a little due to the fans blowing across the pews, we were treated to some fresh coconut water from a stand outside the church. It was delicious and quite thirst-quenching.

We continued our tour through Pelourinho and eventually ended up at the Largo do Pelourinho, which seems to be THE iconic site, especially for photos, in the whole town. This area was used as one of the sites for the video for one of Michael Jackson's songs, They Don't Care About Us, released in 1996.

As we wandered up a side street, we passed a couple of drum bands performing with a crowd dancing along. These drum bands are very popular, with the most successful one, Olodum, also having a drum school in the area. Some of our fellow guests went there as an excursion to learn to 'play', and they had a great time.

Near the end of our tour, we visited a museum, the Memorial des Baianas, dedicated to the women who continue the Candomble traditions. Candomble is the widespread Afro-Brazilian religion that incorporated a lot of the beliefs of the slaves brought over to work in the plantations, fields and in construction as the area of Bahia continued to grow with Portuguese immigrants.

She looks a little scary, doesn't she?

In Candomble, the women create the social hierarchy, and are also the 'priestesses' of the belief system. It is a very interesting, but complex, society, and our guide tried to give us a brief overview as we looked at the exhibits. In these costumes everything has a significance, from the colour of the dress or skirt and sash, the colour of the beads in the necklaces, the number of bracelets and even the way the turban, which originally came from the Muslim religion, is wrapped.

Just as an aside, one of the Condomble women who moved from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro in the early 1900s was the one to bring the Samba dance to Rio. No one knew of it there, and she established the first Samba School. Now there are hundreds, and, as they say, The Rest is History!

We have to say that we were very impressed with how Salvador had changed since our other visit. Unlike some of the other cities we've seen, where historical sites are being left to fall into ruin, and valuable heritage is being lost, Salvador is proud of its standing with UNESCO and Portuguese World Heritage, and is bringing as much of the history as it can find for present day visitors to enjoy.

We were on our verandah for the 11 p.m. sailaway. One of the interesting sculptures we saw during the day was a Fallen Cross up on the square near the Memorial des Baianas. It is beautifully lit at night, and signifies the loss of the original cathedral of the diocese and later, archdiocese, of Salvador, dating from 1587, which was demolished to make way for a streetcar line in 1933.

And a final look back to Salvador as we sailed toward Recife:

Carnaval in Rio!!

We arrived at the pilot station at Rio de Janeiro at about 6:20 on Monday morning. I was already outside on the balcony to watch proceedings as Rio is one of the world's most beautiful sail-ins. 

Arriving in the Rio area. It encompasses about 600 square
miles with 7 million residents

Sugarloaf Mountain

The pilot boat leaving after dropping off our
harbour pilot

Inside Guanabara Bay with Sugarloaf from the other side

It looks like we'd just had a thunderstorm because
the background was completely clouded in

                                      

Over the three days we will be in Rio, we have booked a tour to Corcovado to visit the huge Statue of Christ the Redeemer and an evening on Sugarloaf Mountain to see the sunset. After the fiascos of our previous tours, we cancelled the 6 hour Imperial Petropolis tour for Wednesday. As it turned out, some people we had met on a previous tour were booked on that one as well, and the itinerary had changed substantially because of heavy rain in the area beyond the Corcovado Mountain where the tour was going. An excellent call on our part.

We set out on the Corcovado tour at 8:30 in the morning, and the first thing we saw out of the port was the startup of a morning Carnaval party. Apparently these street parties, which are sanctioned by local authorities, will go on for 4 or 5 hours and then shut down, so the revelers move on to another party that starts up when the first one ends.

We also got to drive by the Carnaval float 'parking lot' on one of the main thoroughfares of the city. We had no idea how the whole parade thing worked until our guide explained it in great detail. There are 12 Samba 'schools' in the upper tier of the Carnaval competition. These are the ones that compete in the big parades at the Sambadrome. They work for 11 months each year to perfect a 70-minute performance in the parade, for which they are subjected to some very strict judging. Points are given for all aspects of the float and performance, including the design of the float, the costumes (I don't know if the points increase with the scantiness of the outfits), the singing, dance moves, and unison of both among all the performers, as well as their timing. The timing doesn't sound like a deal-breaker, as a team can be docked tenths of a point for going over or under their 70 minutes, but in the past few years, the difference between first and second place was just those tenths. So in the end, it may look like a lot of fun, but there is some serious business among these teams to deliver the perfect performance and gain bragging rights for the next year.

Here are photos of some of the floats we passed. This isn't even the full size of some of them. They need to have the tops taken down so they can be moved in and out of the Sambadrome.

Our drive up to the cog rail station at the base of Corcovado went well considering Carnaval was still in full swing. The tour company had things well in hand and being able to go through the group line all 32 of us managed to get on the same train. The ride is about 15 minutes long through part of the Tijuca National Park. A lot of the vegetation there was very familiar from Mom's winter garden, except, of course, her plants were very much smaller!

A view from the trip up

Our first full view of this famous monument. The
last time we were here it was having its
once per decade facelift and was covered
in wooden scaffolding.

And yes, we were both here!

The views from both sides of the viewing area are spectacular. Christ has his back to Copacabana and Ipanema beaches, which are on the ocean side of the city. Good thing, because the bay is still quite polluted and none of the beaches around it are used for swimming. I guess he just didn't want to see all of those skimpy bathing suits!

The long beach there is Copacabana

This last photo was taken from the ship with the excellent telephoto lens on my Canon camera. It is quite often the case that Christ the Redeemer is peeking out of the tops of the clouds. Corcovado Mountain is 710 metres (2,300 ft) high and the statue is another 38 metres (105 ft) high on top of that. When we arrived, it was so clouded over that we couldn't tell exactly where Corcovado even was, but by 8:30 when we met for our tour all the cloud had burned off. It started to build up again later in the afternoon.

But before that, we had to get back to the ship! And that was an adventure in itself. When we arrived back at the base of Corcovado, we had about 45 minutes of extra time for the tour, so the guide and driver thought they'd add a drive past Copacabana Beach to the tour so we'd have a chance to see it.

Copacabana Beach is 4 km long, and from the bus it looked
like one beach umbrella after another at least 10 deep
along every one of them

We don't know who is responsible for them, but there were even a few really interesting sand sculptures along the way:

As well as the ubiquitous 'I am here' sign. It doesn't look like there are any tourists around since nobody is posing on or in front of it. One of our guides told us that about 50% of Cariocas, that's residents of Rio, don't care for Carnaval, and those who can will get out of town for the weekend if possible. From what we saw, it looks like most of the partying is done by the younger crowd.

As we started back toward the port, we also started to run into the traffic caused by road closures and blockages. We passed some of the infamous favelas, or shantytowns, along the periphery of the downtown area. These are communities of immigrants from the rural areas of Brazil that were built up between the 1940s and the 1970s when they couldn't buy land or homes and became squatters in the hills. As a tourist, this is a place to steer clear of, as over time each community has developed its own social system, and the Rio police can't do much against the criminal activity that runs the favela economy.

As we slowed down in some traffic on a side street - we couldn't use the main street because of floats being moved for the evening's performance at the Sambadrome - we started to see some very interesting local costumes.

And after about half an hour of creeping along the street, we finally figured out why we weren't getting anywhere, and where all these costumes were going:

That was an unauthorized street party that took over a whole intersection, and the revelers blocked the road so the traffic had to inch its way through. Had it been authorized, there would have been police to make sure traffic could get by, and there would also have been sanitation and medical support available. There was neither one here, and it was obvious that the driver and guide had not known about this party, or they would have taken a completely different route.

A float being moved for one of the parades.

We finally got back to the ship about an hour and a half late and grabbed lunch at the Pool Grill. Then I went down to S.A.L.T. Lab for a cooking class. There are 9 cooking stations, and the chef instructs on simple dishes local to the area being visited. This time we made Vatapa, a shrimp stew that was created by West African slaves in the Bahia area.

The ingredients

The final product. It was delicious!

We were in our suite, preparing for the evening, when we started to hear a lot of noise and a heavy beat. We looked outside and found this:

A huge Carnaval party just outside the port buildings. There must have been 5,000 people along the streets and in the square. Our ship moved a little farther along the pier at 6:00 after another cruise ship left, so we were spared the noise later on when we tried to get to sleep. We have no idea how long the party went on.

On Tuesday we had no plans until the evening, when we were going up Sugarloaf for the Sunset, Cocktails and Appetizers. The bulk of the Carnaval celebrations were over, so there wasn't much traffic to impede our trip to the cablecar station.

The cablecars come from Germany and hold 65 passengers per lift. Our guide told us they do 1,800 full trips per day in high season at an average price of around $50US equivalent per ticket. So that's 1800 x 65 x $50, or gross revenue of over $5.8 Million per day!! Around 1910, one entrepreneurial family asked the state if they could put the cablecars up to the summit to create a tourist attraction for the city, and they were given a permanent concession to do so, as long as it remained in the family, which it has.

The trip is actually over two hills, the first is Urca, where there is a restaurant and some shops, and then the higher is Sugarloaf itself. The summit is 396 metres (1,100 ft) above the city, and offers amazing views over the city. It turned out to be a little too cloudy to get a good sunset, but it was a great experience nonetheless:

An MSC ship on its way out to sea

This is the view over the city at night from the terrace at Urca, the lower hill. As the sun went down we noticed some heat lightning flashing in the distance, and wondered if that meant a thunderstorm was coming. It did hold off until we were back on the ship, and then the rain was whipping around so much that it looked like snow.

Our tour also included cocktails and appetizers at the restaurant, and this is what was served along with Caiphiranias or whatever else we wanted to drink.

On the left, salt cod and mashed potato fritters, and
on the right, beef empanadas

Provoleta, the provolone cheese appetizer
we had made at S.A.L.T. Lab last week

This was a corned beef and mashed potato 'pie'
topped with cheese

We didn't need much of anything for dinner once we got back to the ship!

That was it for our tours in Rio. We spent Wednesday on the ship, and are leaving today, Thursday, at 1:00 p.m. after three and a half days here in port. It is a very hot and sticky day with a lot of haze around, so photos may be a bit of a challenge. I'm glad I got them on the way into port on Monday morning!`