Salvador Brazil

As I sit down to write this up, we are about an hour away from pulling out of Salvador. My time in Brazil has been absolutely amazing. I was fortunate enough to have seen both the rural side of life as well as urban life. For the first three days of our stay, I went on a SAS overnight trip to Praia do Forte, a small village about an hour and a half north of Salvador. When I returned to the city, I was able to catch the last couple days of Carnival; it was an experience that will be difficult to forget. Brazil was the first port that I witnessed extreme poverty. Though Brazil is the 16th richest country in the world, 2/3 of its population lives in poverty. For most, this means living in favelas – poor shanty neighborhoods without any amenities. The shacks are made of brick and whatever materials their inhabitants can get a hold of. The neighborhoods cover the majority of Salvador. Brazil also has a major problem with street violence; most young boys do not see their life make it past the age of 25. Check out the movie City of God for a great portrayal of urban life in Brazil. Because of the violence and crime in Brazil, the administration of SAS heeded many many warnings to us passengers. We were warned not to take digital cameras out into port and there was a strong possibility that we would be held up, robbed, or pick pocketed. Fortunately, I avoided any of these situations, but others weren’t so lucky. Because of not wanting to risk getting my camera stolen, I wasn’t able to get many pictures of Salvador or Carnival. I was able to get some from Praia do Forte and ill be trying to get those put up on my picassa album in Cape Town. Here is the day by day rundown of the last 5 days in Brazil.

Saturday: I got up at 6 to see the boat pull in to port. It was pretty hazy so it was hard to see the city. After docking, I passed through immigration on deck 7. I had to keep my passport on me for my trip, which was very nerve racking. If I lost it I wouldn’t have gotten to sail to South Africa and because of that would miss 20% of the academic part of the program and therefore would have been dismissed from Semester at Sea, not fun.
After getting my passport everyone went to the diplomatic briefing where the US consulate talked for a bit. I then met with the group for my Praia do Forte trip. I was pretty nervous for the trip because I didn’t know anyone going on it and had no idea if it would be worth the $600 I paid. The group included 7 SAS students, the conduct officer and his wife, and a professor and his family.
We got on a little bus/van and met our tour guide Eddie. He was the man and was with us for the whole three days. He was just so nice and helpful and had a great personality. On the drive we were able to see the favelas. Despite how poor the neighborhoods are, it is these neighborhoods that are the biggest part of carnival, they take every penny they make and pour it into creating costumes and floats for carnival, it’s their only passion in life. We also drove past the soccer stadium, it holds 90,000 people, but it’s limited to 70k because of new restrictions. As we got off into the country, we saw horses and cattle just roaming the hills. All the dirt here is bright red, like Arizona. In each town we passed through, the soccer field was always the nicest place, strange.
We got to Praia do forte around noon and checked into our hotel. The village seemed like a popular vacation destination for Brazilians. After checking into our hotel we went to the turtle project. It’s just a bunch of sea turtles in small pools, it was pretty interesting, but not that exciting. I took some cool pictures of the turtles. It seemed like they were always trying to stick their heads up out of the water and look at the people. We even saw some baby turtles that were just a week old and would fit in the palm of your hand. We then headed to lunch in the village. I won’t get into the meals that we had on the trip, but following the trend of Puerto Rico, they were delicious. I hate to say it, but there is a lot better food in the world than in America, so far anyway.
After lunch we headed to the beach where the water was very very warm. There were some Brazilians surfing there and one of them was able to do a headstand while surfing, I got a great picture of it. We headed back to the hotel for a bit, then off to a great dinner. We headed to bed pretty early.

Sunday: We got up early at 7 and had breakfast at the hotel and got picked up in this big 4x4 jeep vehicle and we knew we were in for an adventure. We had another guide named Eric to lead this part of the trip. We rode in the 4x4 for about a half hour and through a little dirt road village. We walked down to a river where there were 3 person canoes waiting for us. We canoed for about an hour down the river, stopping to swim along the way. We started passing these huge sand dunes and began see the coast. We brought our canoes ashore and walked over a sandbar and all of a sudden we were on a pristine beach. We went swimming for a while, then got back into the canoes and paddled further down the river where the truck was waiting for us. We headed back to Praia do forte for lunch and showers.
We then headed to castle de torra (I think that’s it) a castle built in 1551 by a very rich landowner. It was mostly built buy slaves and took 27 years to build because the rock was imported from Portugal. It was pretty awesome and we got to walk all around inside. The slave trade in Brazil was much much worse that it was in the US and Brazil imported over 4 million slaves from Africa.
Next, we drove further on and got out of the truck for a hike through the rain forest, we got to see spider monkeys, hummingbirds, all sorts of different trees that Eric told us about and also ran into some fire ants (OUCH!!! I got bit on the leg once). Part of the trail was flooded and we had to wade through this area, everyone was pretty scared but Eddie assured us (jokingly) that there were only small crocodiles in the water. We finally exited the trail after about an hour and a half of walking/wading and got back on the truck. We took a drive through some terribly poor villages, rural versions of the favelas. We saw families bathing and washing their clothes in the water and living off the land the best they could. It was a really devastating thing to see. We did, however, run into a mini carnival celebration where people were dressed up as a TV crew and proceeded to run down our truck and pretended to interview us. We headed back to the hotel for showers. The power went out and was out for about 3 hours. We walked to dinner in the dark, and began ordering in the dark as well before the electricity came back. After dinner we headed to bed as there was another early day ahead of us.

Monday: After breakfast, we took a 4x4 ride through this really thick brush a little ways from PDF. The soil was thick beach sand and the road was really narrow. I thought for sure that we were going to get stuck in the sand, but our driver was very capable and got us through all of it. We got out to look at some of the plants; some very interesting cacti and flowers. The truck then dropped us off a little further down the path and we walked through a mangrove. We ended up at some sand flats that were covered in crabs. JR (our conduct officer) put one in his mouth. We got to another river and all got into a huge 12 person Indian canoe. We paddled down river, stopping to swim. We ended up at the mouth of the river where there was a very popular Brazilian beach. We got out here and back onto the truck for the drive back to PDF to head back to Salvador.
That night I met up with some friends who had been in Salvador the last couple days and we headed out to a Brazilian steakhouse. I know I said I wouldn’t talk about food anymore, but i've never had so much delicious red meat in my life. We had a great time at the restaurant and for $25 American I think I ate enough for the next week. After returning to the ship, I headed out to Pelirihno (Old Salvador) with Kyle and Laura hoping to get a little taste of Carnival. We were a bit too late, however, and not much was going on. We came back to the ship around midnight.

Tuesday: Kyle and I went to the market in the morning to pick up some souvenirs. It was my first try at bargaining and it went fairly well, I managed to talk most of the retailers down to half of what they originally asked. Kyle had a SAS trip planned before noon so we headed back to the ship. It seemed everyone was off on trips for the day so I ended up spending the afternoon resting and relaxing.
After dinner onboard the ship, a group of four of us headed Barra, the oldest and most popular location for Carnival. The night was amazing. For anyone that doesn’t know what Carnival is, think mardi gras combined with Woodstock on wheels. Huge trailer trucks stuffed with sound equipment and a band on top crawl through the streets while 2 million people dance around them throughout the night. The music is high energy and non stop. I had a great time.

Wednesday: After sleeping in, a group of us headed out to the market and to Pelirhino and got to see Sao Francisco, a famous church built in the 1700s. Its inside is completely crusted in gold leaf. We spent a while admiring the church and all of the artifacts that were housed in it. We spent the rest of the day just walking around, made some phone calls back to the states. (Mom and dad you really need to stay off the phone, it’s always busy)

Anyway, this entry is far too long. We have 8 days at sea until South Africa. I’m looking forward to our lectures from Archbishop Desmond Tutu enroute.