Salvador, Day 11
We met Sayuri at 9:30 at Bahia Cafe and set out on foot to see the sites of Salvador. First stop was the Lacerda Elevator, a pretty spectacular bit of public architecture, though from our angle (at the top), wasn’t much to see. First built in the mid 19th Century and renovated in Art Deco splendor in 1930, the elevator is more than 200 feet high and connects the upper city to the lower city. The skyway to the elevator itself launches from a great town square with a number of imposing historical buildings along its perimeter.
We strolled up the square, stopping for a few minutes to watch a demonstration of Capoeira, a Brazilian martial art that’s acrobatic enough make for good street theatre, but also looked like it could break your jaw. Sayuri also introduced us to one of the several Baianas -- ladies dressed in the traditional garb of Bahia State -- strolling the square looking for dorky tourists willing to pay to take selfies with her. The costume is a hypnotic combination of hoop skirt, African headwrap and white openwork lace. It combines hideousness with impracticality and a splash of fantastic discomfort. We dutifully overpaid for selfies, because anyone willing to spend a 98 degree day in that outfit is clearly desperate.
And then it was time to see where all the gold they failed to hang on to in Ouro Preto ended up. The Igreja Sao Francisco (San Francisco Church) in Salvador is indescribable. You’d think having already seen several Baroque/Rococo Brazilian churches would have rendered us a bit jaded about the whole “slathered in gold” thing. Sao Francisco in Salvador made Sao Francisco in Ouro Preto look like an exercise in minimalism. But what made the church really memorable was the blue and white tiled courtyard -- scores of large tiles, all imported from Lisbon, illustrating scenes from the Old and New Testaments, the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, and an eccentric series depicting a list of “values” that seemed both random and highly eclectically sourced. Considering the simple, ascetic ethic of the saint it honors, the whole church is more than a little ironic.
We made a quick stop for water, caffeine and peeing at an ice cream place without a single familiar flavor on offer, and then took a fun walk through the Pelhourinho, making quick stops in a small museum of postcards, a gallery where Saruyi knew the artist/proprietor and a couple of interesting shops before arriving at the church with the greatest name of all time: The Church of the Third Order of Our Lady of the Rosary of the Black People. The beautiful, robin’s egg blue church with twin bell towers anchors the most colorful, picturesque street scene in all of our travels in Brazil. It was opened in 1709 as the church for the enslaved people of Salvador. It’s a much simpler church than the others we’d visited, but it’s the one I’ll remember.
After our short look around TCOTTOOOLOTROTBP, we met up with Silent Dan who drove us up through a fantastically cool looking neighborhood called Santo Antonio and back along the waterfront to the Barra Lighthouse, an impressively fort-like structure with a classic striped lighthouse poking up from it like a single great big birthday candle. The view from the top of the lighthouse is wonderful, but the highlight of the visit is the maritime museum housed in the fort. The cross section model of a slave ship will haunt me for life, but a few minutes spent in the awesome chronological display of ships in bottles cheered us up.
We had lunch in another mammoth, almost entirely empty seafood restaurant clearly designed to accommodate big busloads of people who were mysteriously absent. Again, the English menu was available via iPad, but there were plenty to go around and the waiters were sweethearts. Mary and Holly spent lunch trying to get Sayuri to participate in a conversation rather than deliver a monologue with only limited success. But the food was quite good and the view of the beach was gorgeous.
We drove back north, passing Pelhourinho, and made a stop at the lake with the big people apparently dancing on its surface. These turned out to be statues of African gods and goddesses in highly stylized clothing that indicated their identities. Cool looking, but actually more impressive from the road than up close.
Our final stop was at the Basilica do Nosso Senhor do Bomfin (the Church of Our Lord of the Good End, another bit of religious irony -- it’s a term for the crucified Christ), which is Sayuri’s church. It’s not as beautiful as the blue church, but it’s clearly a church in constant and dedicated use, and deeply loved. (Sayuri told us about a festival that takes place every year in January -- the height of summer in Brazil. Tens of thousands of people dressed all in white walk 8 kilometers across the city to wash the steps of the church.) There’s a wrought iron railing surrounding the courtyard of the church and tied to it -- fluttering in the steady breeze -- are countless colored ribbons printed with "Lembrança do Senhor do Bonfim da Bahia.” We added our own little ribbons, thinking of the slips of paper tucked in the cracks in the Western Wall, the spirals of incense burning for a week at a time in Vietnamese pagodas, and the little dishes of rice and fruit in every temple in Laos. It was extremely moving.
We asked Sayuri and Silent Dan to drop us off at a fun little bar in Santo Antonio that we’d spotted on the way to Bomfin and said goodbye (very warmly and with lots of thanks. Sayuri was a lot, but mostly in a very good way). We walked into the funky bar, through a little dining room and onto the patio where we discovered exactly why Salvador needs that elevator -- the drop from the back patio to the street below was about 150 feet! Let’s have drinks!
It was happy hour so caipirinhas were even cheaper than usual -- we enjoyed another spectacular sunset while what appeared to be an Israeli mafia family set up for a child’s birthday party a couple of tables over. This involved several men with extremely aggressive tattoos along with half a dozen women of different ages but equally magnificent cleavages smoking six or seven thousand cigarettes and drinking a lot of drinks while a little bouquet of balloons floated mildly above a very ornate cake that was slowly melting in the rays of the setting sun.
Then we walked back to the hotels along R. Direita de Santo Antonio, poking into interesting shops, bars and restaurants. Holly bought a very cool old woodcut in a place that also had on offer a mobile made of Barbies riding colorful dildos. It was getting dark and the dilapidated and even outright decaying buildings seemed interesting and eccentric (a pretty good description of the people as well). There was a service taking place at the blue church as we approached, so we stopped and watched (and listened) for a while. The drumming and singing seemed organically perfect to the setting. After a while, the priest leading the service began what started to seem like it might be a long homily so we drifted toward home.
Dave and I had ambitions to see music in Rio Vermelho that night but I had run out of gas and an Uber ride back across town just wasn’t in the cards, so instead we decided to have a date night. There was a drum circle right on our block with people swapping in to create propulsive rhythms on a variety of drums and shakers (including one young woman who was clearly a crowd favorite). There was also barrel beer on offer, though this was not quite as interesting as it sounds. It was just guys selling cans of cold beer out of big barrel shaped coolers that doubled as makeshift table tops.
We walked to dinner at one of the paces Sayuri had recommended (and that we’d passed on our walk down Santo Antonio). Pisco Bar Restaurant also had the quintessentially Salvadoran feature of a not-much-to-look-at entry that opened to a back patio with a spectacular drop off and view. There were no tables outside, but with help from Google Translate, Dave conveyed that while we’d be happy to sit inside, if a table opened on the patio, we’d like to move outside. With impeccable timing, we got our outside table just before our entrees arrived. The food was Argentinian, and it was excellent (risotto with squid ink for me, octopus and potatoes “with lots of olive oil” for Dave).
We finished our date with a final caipirinha beside the pool at Amarelindo, though any romantic atmosphere was dispelled by the Frisbee-sized bats swooping down to snatch insects off the surface of the water. They were so freakishly fast that it happened three or four times before I figured out it was bats (though now that I write this I realize maybe I was just clueless as a result of that final caipirinha).
