Salvador

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´Thank-you for flying on our next generation aircraft´ were the words we heard as we touched down in Salvador. Again, it had been an appalling landing (seems to be the norm in South America), but the best thing was the ´next generation´ aircraft we´d just flown in was clearly older than the placement students at work! Still, we´d saved ourselves a 24 hour bus journey and we´d survived!!

Salvador is probably one of the favourites for the scariest Danger & Annoyances section in the Lonely Planet, beating even Rio! We stayed out of the historic centre in one of the safer areas by the beach in Barra, but in the end spent the majority of our time in the Pelorinho (the historic centre with brightly painted colonial buildings).

Again, this was a proper whistle stop tour, a tell-tale sign that our trip is coming to an end. We spent a day trying to chill on the beach in Barra. We set off totally unprepared as the weather was awful, but within 10 minutes the sun was shining brightly. After we´d walked along the beaches and choosen a good spot for some relaxing we went back to the hostel and changed into our beachwear. By the time we got back to the beach the weather has changed dramatically and shortly afterwards the rain started pouring. Disheartened we started walking back to the hostel, only for the sun to reappear!! The rest of the day was spent sitting on the beach soaking up the rays inbetween the torrential downpours. The weather here is just crazy, one minute there´s clear blue skies without a cloud in sight and the next it´s covered in black cloud and is pissing it down, we´ve never seen anything like it!!

The hostel we stayed in was very sociable and we met some nice people and had a couple of great nights out in the Pelorinho. None of them were big drinkers, but that was fine because Andi and I did enough drinking for all of us! Tuesday night was the best, a big party night - the main square was packed with people, make-shift bars (selling the strongest vodkas!) and even a band. The atmosphere was amazing and not at all threatening.

Salvador was also the place where all of our blogs got deleted! This really upset Andi (they are her baby after all!), but they managed to recover most of them eventually (and we had a good back-up plan - her very organised mum had printed them all off!)

Salvador is a great place, much nicer than we expected. With only two days here we were limited in what we could do, but we still had a lovely time and got a good vibe fom the place.

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Photos

Paul in the Pelorinho
Hold onto that camera!

Barra Beach in the Sunshine - Yeah!
A quick photo of the beach before the rain started!