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| giant street art |
Weather…28 degrees, occasionally overcast then sunny bits,
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| more giant street art |
some showers and then torrential ‘tropical rains’, quite sultry
Today was our first time on land in 2 days. As soon as we docked, we were greeted by a Brazilian band and a few huge pieces of street art – bom Dia!
This morning’s 4-hour city tour started at the 1698 Fortress of San Antonio and Salvador’s last working light house. Meandering through the city streets – music, street art, and the people on the streets make Salvador’s Afro-Brazilian heritage obvious.
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| lighthouse |
Salvador de Bahia (the city’s full name) was the first capital of Brazil, from 1549 to 1763. The first slave market in the New World was also here starting in 1558, with slaves being brought here to work on the sugar plantations. We stopped for a brief time in front of Salvador’s most infamous pillory (whipping post) Largo do Pelourinho where the slaves were punished – we probably would have heard a bit more about this if it weren’t pouring at the time.
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| bay view |
The bulk of today’s tour was spent on foot in Salvador’s old city with a guide. Walking over cobble stones we visited 2 churches – a 17th-century Cathedral Basilica and the Church of São Francisco. These churches were over the top with gold decorations. There was so much gold it was hard to concentrate on what I was looking at, it was just gold, gold, and a whole lot more gold. BTW…masks are now required in Salvador’s (or maybe all of Brazil’s) churches.
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| gold church |
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| church ornamentation |
The most interesting thing about today’s tour was driving thought Salvador’s neighborhoods, just seeing people on the streets, peeking into their auto mechanic shops as we drove by and seeing the many bananas and coconuts for sale on streets corners.
As is typical of all tours we eventually found ourselves at a typical souvenir shop for a ‘comfort’ stop’. We didn’t buy anything but did notice quite a selection of culturally ‘inappropriate’ souvenirs.
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| and more... |
Just as we were headed back to the bus it started to rain, not crazy rain, but enough that I was glad to have a hat with me. As we got back to the boat and wanted a pre-lunch ‘cool by the pool’ cocktail it
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| more gold church |
became torrential! And just as quickly as the rain came it ended and the sun shone again. After lunch we found a sunny break to sit at the pool bar – we could actually see the wall of rain bearing down on us and 5 minutes later…torrential.
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more street art
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