8 Mar 2017 – Salvador, Brazil

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If this is Wednesday, then it must be Salvador, Brazil. This is the equivalent of being in Aruba if you are only looking at position north of the equator. When we made our list of places to visit during our lifetime, Salvador wasn’t anywhere on that list – mostly because we’d never heard of it. Now we’ve been here and can rest at ease even if we never get back again.



It is an interesting place. The population is more than 2.5 million, so it is one of the biggest places we’d never heard of before. There was a lengthy history of events, from explorers making the first real discovery of South America, through a long and much larger slave trade, being the first capital of Brazil (before that was moved to Rio), and finally have plenty of political intrigue associated with the funding spent on the recent Olympic Games.



Our guide Dobo was a German who moved to Brazil 18 years ago. He owned a downtown restaurant for a while, owns a small resort on the coast north of town, and is a part-time tour guide when there is a need for people with other language skills (English was his 3^rd language and he struggled with words from time to time). His German accent pronouncing Spanish names was kind of hard to follow, but he had lots to say. He doesn’t seem to have a very high opinion of the current political situation and his biggest complaint is that Brazilians just accept their unfortunate situation and don’t take to the streets to protest. So maybe you get an idea of his point of view. Interestingly, there was someone with a bullhorn shouting and yelling a couple of blocks from our ship before we sailed, but we don’t know what that was about.



We got up in the morning and ate in our cabin, and then reported to Club Fusion for our 9:00 gathering. We did not get on the bus until 10:00 after a moderate wait and a lengthy walk. For some reason most of the ports we’ve visited consider it as normal to have a lengthy walk between the terminal building and the ship. We were being careful to try not to over-tax Janet’s ankle. She did pretty well today, except that simultaneous to our returning to the terminal there was another cruise ship loading new passengers through the same terminal building (complete with their luggage), which made it kind of chaotic. We finally found the long line to get out to our ship. Janet went to the front of the line and told the person she simply could not stand that long so they let her butt-in to the beginning of the line. She got through quickly but still had to wait for David to finally make it through the line.



Back to the sequence of today’s events - we drove around town for quite a while. This seems to be a combination of the very wealthy and the very poor. There were tall skyscraper pairs where apparently people live in one building and work in the adjacent one (no need for a car to get to work). There are also hovels on the hillside where poor but hardworking honest people live. There are a lot of new buildings built where very old ones have collapsed or been condemned, but there is also the “old town” inside a high wall on a steep hillside. There were some wide highways and a lot of little narrow streets wedged between old buildings. They were still disassembling the street stands from Carnival. It is really a complex environment. Of course all the writing is in Portuguese and we couldn’t read much of anything. There was a long stretch of beaches with a bunch of hotels and restaurants, and there were other areas with lots of open air markets, roadside stalls, or just blankets spread along the streets with things for sale. There are an abundance of churches of all kinds of religions. Most of the Salvador culture can be traced back to the African slaves who originally were brought here, and a large number of black people were in the town, in addition to Latin looking people. Slavery was only outlawed completely here in 1984. The children and elderly were freed first.



Our first stop was a place called “The Church of our Lord in Bonfim”. It was built in 1850 and is famous for the walls of ribbons outside the church tied to fencing. It is believed that when the ribbon falls off, your prayer will be fulfilled. There were lots of people trying to sell is ribbon for this purpose. Inside the church it is not particularly big, but it is very ornately decorated. It was a nice stop but there was a light sprinkle so Janet stayed on the bus and David took some pictures.



Our other stop was at the Mercado Modelo. It is an indoor, 2-story set of small shops and reminded David a lot of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, except it is smaller in size and everything was much more closely packed together. There were a lot of lace and embroidery shops so Janet saved most of her “walking energy” for those shops. This is also outside the giant elevator (Elevador Lacerda) which lifts people from the shore level up 78 meters to the height of the old town. We did not ride on it because we did not have enough steps left in our walking to explore the old town on our own. Many people did and it was an impressive sight.



After we made it through the terminal we still had a long walk along the pier to get to our ship, but eventually we got back on-board. We went directly to the Lido Deck and got a Hot Dog and a Knockwurst, with Fries. They still do not have any lemonade so Janet had 4 glasses of iced tea and David had a coke and some ice water. David got some apple cobbler with vanilla ice cream and Janet got chocolate ice cream with chocolate syrup.



By this time it was almost 3:30 and we went back to the cabin for Janet to rest her foot (which turned into a nap too). David went back up on deck and swam in the pool for a while. It had been about 90 today and the water was very refreshing. About 4:30 he went back to the cabin and we each had a glass of wine. At 5:00 we went down to the Hors d’Oeuvres which was a Shrimp Fountain. Janet got a Cosmopolitan and David had a Heineken with Craig & Debbie.



We went to dinner but only Don and Mary showed up. We had both been on the same tour but in different buses, so we compared our impressions of Salvador. We aren’t sure where Faye and Monte were this evening. There was an announcement that sailing would be delayed while they waited for an ambulance to take someone off the ship, but it’s unlikely to have been our dinner partners. We both had the crab cake appetizer. Janet had a fruit cup of melons and David had a chilled strawberry smoothie soup. For our entrees Janet had the scallops while David had a huge Cowboy Steak. Janet skipped dessert and just had some tea but David had the pecan butterscotch pie.



Our head waiter comes around the tables at dinner and talks to everyone in the evening. We asked him about the lemonade and he just said that South America seems to follow different practices than elsewhere in the world. Princess can sail from America, Asia, Australia, Europe, and many other places, but it always seems to be South America where things get a little messed up. That’s not really an answer but more of a general comment on our overall cruise. “Stuff” just seems to be a little out of kilter from all our other cruises. We are still having a good time, but it’s just not quite the same.



Neither of us particularly wanted to see the show in the theater and the Movies under the Stars is one Janet had seen before. So we settled into the cabin for a restful evening to recuperate for our busy day. Tomorrow starts a series of Days at Sea so we should have plenty of time to take it easy and just do whatever we want, and nothing more.



We neglected to recognize Melody’s role in the 1st grade play. She got to read the Narrator’s part. From what we heard, so did a terrific job. We’ve been telling our friends on the ship about her accomplishment. GREAT JOB!



Having finished our final day in Brazil, we can report that we saw no mosquitos. We had brought a special insect repellant from the US, but did not need it at all.

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Photos

Figures on display in Lake
while we were driving around Salvador