Salvador :: Brazil
There's enough culture here to make you feel like a proper tourist looking at it.
Places: Salvador & Morro de Sao Paulo.
Coolest thing I did: Flew into Salvador on a clear enough day to see the whole expanse of the city and bay on the way in (it's been a slow week for cool stuff).
Coolest thing I didn´t know: It's estimated during the whole Atlantic slave trade the US imported only 10% of the number Brazil did.
If I look back at the last few weeks in Brazil with the hindsight of having now been to Salvador I'd say the thing that was lacking from the rest of the country was a historical culture that can be shown off to package tourists. Salvador more than makes up for that. It wasn't the first place the Portuguese landed in what would become Brazil (much like Captain Cook in Australia, they looked at it and then left), but it was the first place they finally set up a colony. They then proceeded to grow the cash crop of the time, sugar and like the southern states of the United States imported slaves from Africa to do all the back breaking work involved in growing the stuff. For nearly three centuries, until the rise of mining and coffee around Rio and Sao Paulo, Salvador was the capital and most important city in the Portuguese New World, and the second most important city besides Lisbon itself.
This influence of having massive amounts of Africans around the place manifested itself in different ways than it did in places like Haiti, but it did produce it's own unique religions, foods, music and even a martial art. It's this culture, and the ways it's manifested itself over the following centuries that you find tapped for the tourists all over the city of Salvador itself. There's an old historical centre with ornate churches and other restored civic buildings that I've been told has been ethnically cleansed of locals and pacified by the inclusion of military police checkpoints on many corners to provide one of the only parts of the city that it's practical for tourists to walk around and be safe at night, which apparently was a big problem back in the day when old town Salvador still was inhabited by actual Salvadorians. There is still a fairly strong effort by the police to deter you from walking too far outside this cobble stoned Disneyland of colonial splendour.
The city has beaches that are worth swimming in only a bus ride from the centre, with Barra at the very point where the bay meets the Atlantic doubling as a serious backpacker ghetto, with hostels spread all down the beach. I hear that during Carnival it was practically impossible to escape the blocos in either the old part of town or Barra as they were outside your door 24 hours a day, unlike Rio where you had to go looking for them. As far as I can tell Salvador's Carnival may have been even more manic than Rios.
Even though it does seem to jump out on you everywhere I do quite like watching capoeira, which is the only surviving indigenous martial art in the Americas, and is practised with varying skill levels anywhere you might accidentally see it and be asked to contribute money to those doing so. It's set to percussion and a single stringed instrument (much like the ones the Chinese use to play only miserable songs with) and has been heavily ritualised into a dance, with alternating kicks and flips making up most of the proceedings, only stopping when one party manages the trick the other into showing enough shin on the ground to be swept with another shin. I also have discovered there are a crazy amount of Israelis who seem to have done capoeira for years and the Brazilians humour them by letting them have a go too.
In order to have not spent my last few days in Brazil in town I decided to get the ferry out to Morro de Sao Paulo for a few days, which is confusingly nowhere near Sao Paulo. It's a stomach churning 2 and a half hour ride out of the bay and down the coast, which for some reason I can't quite get my head around is worse on the way back than the way in. I still managed to keep my no-motion sickness record for South America intact but even I was dry mouthed a little bit on the way back in. I think most of the boat was doubled over sick bags for most of the way in and out.
Morro is a tropical island fringed by coral reefs and covered in jungle that is slowly giving up the goods to large scale tourism. It's main town is still reassuringly small, but that's changing as the concrete takes over sand paths and the quality of lodgings keeps getting better. Also, for some reason that remains a mystery to me it's the Bali or Costa de Sol of post-military service Israeli younguns. There are hostels where the signs are in Hebrew, and you can't help but be taken aback by the packs of young Israelis roaming the beaches. Why this particular island and none of the others in Brazil I've been to escapes me, but fair power to them I guess.
Due to choppy conditions the snorkelling wasn't at it's best, with the water visibility pretty poor, but taking a boat around the whole island one day it's pretty hard to relax when there's like 20 other boats doing the same trip, so there's about 1000 people (ok, I'm exaggerating, but it felt like 1000) in the water with you. The coral is in pretty poor shape, but when you see everyone standing on it and kicking big bits off you kind of see why. It's a pity watching places like that loved to death. Thankfully there's a lot more reef out there they don't take the tours to, but I wouldn't think diving would be worth it.
Really the best thing to do is walk all the way around to the imaginatively named Beach 4 (while crossing Beaches 1 to 3) and see an expanse of white sand and turquoise water stretching away from all the development. It's a nice place to put the subtle paranoia of crime the big cities in Brazil tend to induce in you and sleep off the fact Morro is also a big party island. At night Beach 2 is lined with fruit stalls that make about a million different combinations of fruit and booze, and on the big nights they put a DJ booth at the end of the beach and everyone dances. I bumped into 3 young English blokes I'd been in the same hostel in Florianopolis with and helped them dispose of all the left over booze they had before they had to leave the country. Now at home I had thought a Caipirinha was a fairly posh drink, and cachaca (Brazilian rum) must be something exotic, but I've since found out it costs about $3 a litre in the supermarket here. Whatever you do don't try and help students with no money polish off a bottle with basically no mixers beyond Sprite. The hangover that resulted was probably just short of a nose bleed.
So I'm back in Salvador for one afternoon before flying out to Bogota in Colombia tomorrow, sitting here listening to people playing drums down the street and yelling at each other at the top of their lungs (for some reason the discreet mobile phone use that has infected Rio and SP hasn't quite reached Salvador yet - it seems to save you time and money to just yell everything down the street). I've spent much longer in Brazil than I expected to, but due to it's sheer size I feel like I'm constantly hearing about more things I should have seen. Apparently there's this big river here somewhere, called the Amazon? Anyway, that'll have to wait for next time.