Salvador - April 3rd

The warnings you get about Salvador are so bad that you would be afraid to go into the centre of the city to see the sights.  But the old city is a UNESCO world heritage site so we aren’t going to miss this.  But we need a guide to prevent us from wandering into the dangerous areas.  Yesterday we met Carlos, the guy who does the airport run for the hostel, and he also does city tours, so we booked both, the tour for today and the airport run for tomorrow.  So at 09:00 we get into his jeep (the company is called Jeep Tours) and we head off.

Our first stop is the Forte de Santo Antonio de Barra, which is just around the corner from our hostel.  This is an old Portuguese fort which is also the site of the oldest lighthouse in South America.  It is also a unique place in Brazil, in that as it is west facing over a large bay, it is the only place in Brazil where the sun sets over the sea.  We don’t wait around that long, next we head up to the old town and go to another old fort, this one now called Forte de Capoeira, where we see some Capoeira schools.  This is the martial art disguised as a dance that was developed by the slaves in captivity, and which is now one of the symbols of Salvador.  Of course at 10:00 in the morning there was nobody practicing it.

After this we head into the Pelourinho, the centre of the old city, which is the UNESCO world heritage site.  It is a maze of small cobbled streets, with lots of churches (there are 365 in Salvador, it feels like we saw about half of them) and brightly coloured houses.  We wander around, but you do need a guide because a few of the side streets look less than welcoming.  The highlight of the centre is the church of Sao Francisco.  This church is the most ornately decorated church in Brazil, and this is an understatement.  There can’t be many churches in the world with more gold than here.  It makes the ones in Ouro Preto look poor.  And they let you take photos to prove it.  The tiling around the courtyard was actually impressive in its own right, but you almost forget about it once you see the gold.

You almost need a drink to get over the church, so our guide buys us a shot of cachaca, the local spirit used in caipirinhas. The city of Salvador is built on a high cliff overlooking the sea, so to get down to the port area we get a public elevator down which is pretty cool.  Then we look around the market and see a capoeira show.  After seeing the centre of the city we go off to the North end of the city, to see the church of Bonfim.  This is a famous church in Brazil, associated with many miracles, and where people tie brightly coloured ribbons on the surrounding fence.  It is a sight.  We finish the tour with a trip to a headland to give us a good view back across the city, and then lunch in a local restaurant.  It is probably the best value meal we have had in Brazil, which shows the value of coming with a local.  The tour itself was also really good value, at only 55 Reals (£20) each.  I was concerned that the locals might take advantage of the danger in the city by upping the prices for tours, but this was really reasonable.

The tour finished at 3pm, but we spend the rest of the evening hanging out locally.  Apparently Tuesday is the most dangerous night in Salvador.  This is the level of advice you get.  Carlos is leading a pub crawl in the evening, but we decline and watch TV and get ready to head back to Europe tomorrow.

Salvador - April 2nd

After another bad night’s sleep on a bus, we begin our approach into Salvador at about 06:00.  Like any big city it takes an hour to get into the centre, so we arrive at the bus station at about 07:00.  You get so many warnings about Salvador that it is fair to say we were a bit nervous about getting from the bus station to our hostel, but actually it was fairly easy to get a taxi and find it. 

One of our best decisions of the trip was not to cancel our room for the night we travelled on the bus when we discovered that we could only get an overnight bus.  This is because when we arrive at the hostel we are able to get a breakfast, and then go straight to the room where we catch up on the lost sleep from the night before.  It was worth the extra R$90 (about £33) to keep the room, rather than have to hang around until the 14:00 check-in time.

After that we just headed out locally for a bite to eat.  Although the hostel, like so many others, is behind massive walls, and the area doesn’t look great, it does feel a bit safer than the one in Belo, mostly because there are a few shops and a restaurant on the street.  We go to the restaurant for a late lunch/early dinner, and then we walk a few blocks to a nearby large shopping centre.  But to be honest we know already what shops are going to be in there, all the shopping centres are the same.  I think when you have been in a country long enough to recognise all the shops it is time to move on, so I think we are rightly reaching the end of our trip.  We leave the shopping centre before it gets dark, because although the road seemed OK in the day, we still don’t want to risk it in the dark.

In the evening we watch TV with some of the other guests.  It is strange but there are very few people venturing out after dark.  Everyone seems wary here, which does make you wonder why any of us are here at all.  There is little point in travelling to a place if you can’t enjoy it.  Tomorrow we will get a tour of the city and we will see.

Porto Seguro Salvador Bus - April 1st

Our last day in Trancoso begins in a similar way to the others, with a trip to the beach, sitting under umbrellas, and the odd swim.  Although we are leaving today, as with our last bus journey we are travelling overnight, so we have a half day here.  And the hotel owner has been kind enough to allow us use the shower after we have checked out, so we can go to the beach.

Once we come back and shower, we pay a visit to our favourite per kilo restaurant next door, so we can eat a large meal prior to our long journey, and then we depart.  Our hostess organised a taxi to take us to the bus station in Porto Seguro, the nearest big town, which is about 30km and a ferry ride away.  The journey is interesting because the taxi driver has a different interpretation of the lines in the middle of the road when it comes to overtaking (my heart was in my mouth on a few blind turns).  When we get to the ferry he dumps us out and puts us in a local bus van to take us the rest of the way.  It didn’t delay us, but it was annoying because he got paid the full amount for a taxi journey (our revenge is that we have ratted him out to the hotel owner so he won’t get any more runs in future).

Porto Seguro is point where the Portuguese first landed in Brazil, but we don’t  have time to look around.  We just collect our ticket and wait for the bus, watching some Brazilian dating program in the waiting area.  The bus leaves fairly punctually and for the first time we get films on a bus in Brazil (Hancock with Will Smith, and some weird art house American film with Colin Firth that I still don’t really know what point it was trying to make), and we don’t get any catering stops (or any food).

So once the two films are over all we can do is try to sleep so that we have our wits about us at Salvador bus station tomorrow morning.  But this is easier said than done, because the seats for some reason are quite slippery and I can’t lie on them without sliding off.

Trancoso - March 31st

We woke up this morning to quite heavy rain, so this disturbed our beach routine.  Instead we took the time to blog, read and go into town.  By the time we headed into the main part of the village it was actually quite hot, so once we got back to our hotel we headed off to the beach and back to our chairs from yesterday.  Despite the fact that it is a Saturday, it seems the weather put people off because the beach less crowded than yesterday, when it was already sparsely populated.

Again in the evening we go to a good restaurant a stone’s throw away from the hotel, where a local musician is performing, so we get a show with our meal.  The meal is the local Bahian speciality, moqueca, a type of fish stew, which is pretty good.  But it is the setting that makes the meals in Trancoso so good, with each restaurant situated under its own big tree around this peaceful square.  The only problem is that unlike our time in the mountains, the insects are back biting now we are at the beach again.

Trancoso - March 30th

Because we are in a beach resort you can imagine that today was mostly a case of beach, swim, eat, sleep.   Unlike other beaches in Brazil, we didn’t really have a hike to the beach, it was just a five minute walk from the square.  We got a couple of seats on the beach under an umbrella, although of course we had to buy a few drinks from the guys running the stand to get them, but they weren’t excessively priced.  The beach wasn’t that busy, but it didn’t stop an endless line of beach vendors from trying to sell us food and trinkets.  We didn’t want to purchase anything but they were very relaxed about it and didn’t mind no for an answer.

In the evening we managed to walk slightly further this time, and looked around the village at the various shops before settling on the second closest restaurant to our hotel.  As an a la carte menu place it was a lot dearer than the per kilo restaurants, but this place does seem to be somewhere that attracts a higher class of traveller than backpackers.

Trancoso - March 29th

This day started out quite early, because not only did they replace the driver halfway in our journey at about 01:30, they also decided to clean the bus while we were still sleeping on it.  Or trying to sleep.  To be honest with the turns and comings and goings, I wasn’t getting that much sleep anyway.  The journey continued to be twisty all the way to Euanopolis which was our departure point from the overnight bus.  Here we would catch the 12:00 bus to Trancoso, our final destination.

This almost didn’t happen because the bus decided to pull in for another clean 5 minutes away from Euanopolis bus station, and so instead of getting there at 11:30 we got there at 11:56, but we did make our connection.  This bus journey was over 2 ½ hours long, and might have been enjoyable if we weren’t so tired from the stress of the overnight bus journey.  They just aren’t as good as the ones in Argentina.

The bus dropped us off in the centre of Trancoso, but this was about 600m away from the main square where we were staying.  It was a long walk in the heat and with our tiredness, but the tiredness at least disappeared once we saw our hostel and its location.  The main square of Transcoso, called the quadranho, is a very large car free area around which are scattered hostels, restaurants and a number of expensive shops.  A white church is at one end, and behind it is a view overlooking the beach.  It is quite simply a lovely location, and even the horses eating the grass (and shitting everywhere) don’t detract from it, they add to its charm.

After dumping our bags, and having a cold drink, we head off to the beach to have a quick dip and sit on the sand.  But as we are now quite close to the equator, and quite eastward in Brazilian terms, it gets dark quite early so we have to get off the beach at about 17:00.  To be honest, lovely and all as this town is, I still wouldn’t fancy being on the beach after dark.  In the evening we eat at a per kilo restaurant right beside our hotel so it is only a very short walk back after we have stuffed ourselves, for an early night to recover from the bus journey.

Belo Horizonte Euanopolis Bus - March 28th

Today we leave Belo Horizonte and Minas Gerais for Bahia and the beach.  But as all the long distance buses going north in this part of the world are overnight buses, we have to fill a long gap between our checkout time of 10:00 and our bus departure at 20:00.  So what do you do with 10 hours in Belo Horizonte, the answer is quite simple, you get out of Belo Horizonte.  The UNESCO World Heritage site of Congonhas is 80km away, and the buses are frequent enough that a day trip is easily accomplished.

So after leaving our bags in the left luggage in Belo Horizonte bus station, we get the 11:00 bus to Congonhas.  This is actually all the way back the way we came from Petropolis on Saturday, so there isn’t much new scenery to see.  The bus station in Congonhas is of course on the edge of town, so when we get there we get a taxi to the square with the Basilica do Bom Jesus de Matosinhos.  This is the actual UNESCO site, and when we get there we see three other tourists leaving, meaning we are the only ones there.  It is pretty bleak, but luckily for us it means that there isn’t much hassle from vendors, tour guides or anything.  In fact the cleaning staff and security guards outnumber the tourists 10 to 2.  The Basilica itself isn’t the main attraction (and it’s not that big, smaller than average for a church) but the 12 statues of various Old Testament prophets outside it are.  These were carved by the local genius Aleijadinho, and are said to be the greatest of his works.  I have to say they weren’t as impressive as I thought they would be.  There are also some chapels with the Stations of the Cross there which I thought were better.

Once we looked around for about 30 minutes that was it.  Because we were going on a long journey we ate a large dinner in a hotel across from the Basilica, where we were the only two customers, and then they got us a taxi back to the Congonhas bus station, and we headed back to Belo Horizonte.  We were back by 17:00 leaving us 3 hours to kill in the bus station, which we are not experts in.  Luckily it isn’t the worst bus station we have been to, so we were able to pass the time before getting on the bus.

The bus journey itself though was not great.  In order to get from Belo to the coast we have to head back over mountains, and rather than a highway, we were on a narrow twisty road.  The road was dangerous, we saw two recent crashes (recent enough that the police were still on the scene) before we decided to try to sleep.  But sleep was hard because the bus was always throwing you around the place, and because of the number of stops to let others on.