I arrived to Salvador as planned, 6:30am, after a night of reasonably decent sleep – as good as one can expect from sleeping on a bus. After checking in to my AirBnB, I set off to spend a day walking around town.
Salvador old town is really nice – it almost seems like a European city with narrow streets, low and decent-looking buildings, churches, cobblestones, and all that jazz. As the first capital founded in 1540’s, it was basically built around the same time when most of surviving old towns in Europe were built, so this is no surprise. Still, it has a distinctly colonial feel in its architecture.
However, as soon as you peek out of the historic centre, things go downhill really quickly. That’s both metaphorically and literally – the centre is built on a hill, so steep that on one end there is an elevator 50m high to take you down. And because of that you can really see the rest of town from above and appreciate just how poor and ugly it is. Most of the old buildings outside of the historic centre are left to rot and are basically in ruins. They are surrounded by the usual multi-storey monsters of concrete and glass and peeling paint and rusting metal which I assume was built in the 70-80’s. It’s really pretty depressing. Salvador is not as big as Rio or Sao Paulo, but even so, outside the historic part it’s just as ugly. But here, again, graffiti comes to the rescue!
Ugly, of course, is a function of poor. And you can really feel it here, and all over Brazil. Did I mention that the five last mayors of Rio are in jail for corruption? That there are many places each city where I wouldn’t go even in daylight, because poverty breeds crime? You can tell that ‘They don’t really care about us’ here. You should listen to the song now, with the clip – it was recorded in Salvador.
I spent the morning waiting for places to open – I was out pretty early. Once they did, I visited a couple churches, including a Franciscan convent museum with some pretty bad sculptures and interesting wooden structure aiming to imitate European stone and plaster forms. I checked out a history of Bahia exhibition in the Palacio Rio Branco, and a really cool interactive museum about magnets, electricity and light which allows you to play with exhibits and learn about physics and renewable energy sources through play.
In the museum of Brazilian music I found out about the recently open museum of the carnival, where I went. It turned out really great, showing the history, the people and the music through a number of short videos. As the end we were invited to a video room where we could pick some costumes and do a surprise dance class of samba moves. Pretty sweet!
After this I took the elevator to the ugly seafront/harbour part of the city, walked a bit around it, check out a big market hall and found a capoeira group performing, failed to find the Museum of Rhythm, and saw another church. The contrast between the parts of the city is really quite stunning – the touristy old town with neat low build historic buildings and cobblestones, versus the land of shabby multis with ruined old buildings tucked between them, asphalt streets and a clear atmosphere of poverty. The fact that the former is above and the latter below, only adds to it.
I took the elevator back up to see the sunset from the Fallen Cross square. This is it – the sun sets over Salvador, and so it does over my journey – I’m heading home now to pack as tomorrow begins the journey home.
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