Entropy

Somedays when travel has not gone so well, one consolation is repacking. You can fight entropy by sorting out disorder; you get to position things for easier access; and you can rebalance the load. You feel better afterwards because you have regained control of a bit of your world.


It seems to me that this is also a valid principle for life. Sometimes you have to pause to reprioritise and reorganise.


However repacking is a lossless operation (if you ignore the obvious rubbish that gets thrown out). To lighten the load you really need to apply the Jettison Principle, to be explained in a future post.

Salvador 3

It's still raining when I wake up. The hostel owner calls the tour operators and confirms that it is off. He suggests that we go to Praia do Forte (Beach of the Fort), about 1.5 hours up the coast where it might be raining less. We take a taxi to the rodoviaria. The ticket clerk stresses to us that the service will drop us off at the entrance where we would have to make our own way 2.5 km in. Unfortunately by the time we are set down, it is pouring. When the rain abates a bit we start walking in. Eventually a man with a van takes us in for a fee.

The complex was developed around a Tamar (Portuguese acronym for sea turtle) protection site. It has good beaches and rows and rows of tourist shops (lodging, restaurants, stores, etc). Unfortunately rain doesn't make the beach attractive and the shops look overplanned. I'm sure it must be more pleasant in the evening when the daytrippers have gone home and the lodgers come out to stroll.

In the event, we don't get time to enjoy it much. Lunch takes too long because the surge of customers overwhelmed the restaurant we chose. The fish moqueca (spicy coconut cream based stew, a bit like a curry) was decent enough.

Pretty soon it's 1600 and we have to leave or we will arrive in Salvador after dark. We find a direct van service and endure a cramped journey back. They filled the van to the brim, even fitting in a couple of standing passengers. At the rodoviaria no Barra bus comes along, so we cross a long overpass to Shopping Iguatemi and catch a microbus which eventually follows the route that the airport shuttle took and I'm able to spot the right place to get off.

I thought that the side trip was a waste of time, but it turned out the Germans from yesterday had an even worse time of it, bored to tears playing cards while it poured.

While waiting until it's time to go to the rodoviaria for the third time that day, I discover that another backpacker is catching a night bus 45 minutes before mine. I scramble to pack my things and share the taxi. I help her buy her ticket and we chat a little until it's time for her to leave. I get on my service to Palmeiras, and that was the end of my Salvador sojourn. I didn't get to see much of it but then again, most of its attractions didn't catch my fancy. I wish I had the time to attend an African culture night and a music bar but that's the luck of travel.

The hostel seemed to be full of travellers passing through: starting their journey, changing from plane to bus, coming back after a side trip, and so on. Maybe Salvador is that kind of place. I myself would be passing through the rodoviaria for the fourth time in 4 days time, switching to a northbound bus for Aracaju.

Salvador 2

I decided to visit the old city. But first to buy a night bus ticket for my next destination, Palmeiras. A Korean backpacker who was going to Rio de Janeiro and I headed for the a tour agency in Shopping Barra which I was told by the hostel owner, and read in LP, sold bus tickets, saving a trip to the rodoviaria which is, as usual, some ways out of the city.

The tour agency tells us that they only sell plane tickets. Other people we asked around the shopping centre said that was the only agency in the centre. What's going on? Is the hostel owner mistaken? We return to the hostel puzzled.

It turns out that the agency serves my bus company, and no other companies. I could have bought a ticket, but not my new companion. So he heads out to the rodoviaria by bus to secure his 20 hour (shudder) ticket to Rio, and I back to the agency for my tickets.

While waiting at the bus stop I spot the group of 6 Germans from the hostel's intake of the day. I follow them into the microbus and introduce myself. They don't mind my tagging along. I feel less exposed travelling in a pack.

I don't have any pictures of the old city. Travel guides warn against taking any cameras to the Pelorinho; such is the level of paranoia. I discover later that tourists were taking pictures with their cameras or mobile phones. I could probably have slipped my snappy camera into my pocket for this visit. At least for the daytime, and for the main streets the warning is pessimistic. But it's no a great loss, the Pelorinho is very much photographed. If you do a search on that word, you will get dozens of image hits. In the pictures, the buildings are beautiful pastel colours, there are few if any people in the street, and the cobblestones look charming. In reality, the walls are somewhat dirty, the street is full of wandering tourists and hustlers, and the street surface is uneven and grubby. At night, the music bars come to life, but visitors are well advised to take a taxi home.

After the Pelorinho we took the Lacerda elevator down to Mercado Modelo which houses many artisan and tourist memoribilia vendors. The Lacerda elevator is an amazing piece of engineering and is designed to move large numbers people quickly about 70 m between the lower city and the upper city. The fare is 5 cents.

I help the Germans buy a couple of acarajés. Acarajé is a Northeastern street snack. A ball of manioc paste is deep-fried in palm oil, giving it its characteristic crispy orange skin. It is sliced and sauces and optionally pimenta (chilli paste, very hot!) spread on the inside. Diced salad and fried shrimp are then placed in the middle and you are handed the messy combination on a couple of squares of grease paper. Someone told me it has 2000 calories and with the palm oil I can believe that. The first one I ever ate was in Rio, on my previous trip, sold by a Baiana (Bahian woman) vendor.

Incidentally Baianas are very visible in the Pelorinho, posing for pictures with tourists for a fee. If you imagine a "traditionally built African lady" a la Alexander McCall-Smith, in a volumous white dress and wearing colourful decorations, you have the right idea.

In the middle of night I heard the skies open up and rain cats and dogs. Not promising for the boat trip to the islands I had signed up for. 

Webjet Brazil 2

In case you are wondering how I fared getting a plane ticket from Recife to Salvador, I am typing this in Salvador so it's a success. Of sorts.


After getting to Recife airport, the story of which I will write in a Recife episode, I headed for the Gol sales desk. This is because Gol has the flight with the time I want: midday which gets me to Salvador while there is daylight. I have to use Portuguese; the sales rep doesn't speak English. It costs a whopping R730+. No way I will pay that. Disappointed, I prepare myself to be resigned to a long bus trip the next night. Wait a moment, I thought, you're giving up too easily. Try Webjet, the time isn't so good, the flight gets there early evening and this makes for a bit more anxiety looking for the pousada, but you might get a reasonable price. And so I did, for R260+, which is about a third more than the online price and twice the price of the night bus but worth it to save time and wear on myself.


1 Real is about A$0,60 in case you are wondering. Fortunately the Aussie dollar is fairly high at the moment.


Why a success of sorts? Well, nothing ever quite goes smoothly in Brazil so you will have to wait for the Salvador episode of this continuing saga to learn why.

Salvador 1

After doing a quick tour of Recife's Boa Viagem beach, I had a shower at the hostel (but alas, relief from sweat is only short-lived in the tropics). Since I needed to dry out the towel a little, I draped it on a chair by the poolside while relaxing on another chair. The pool was full of Brazilian women hostellers, and one kid; a few families from the look of it. Eventually one of the women in the water asked me where I was from. As usual they had thought I was Japanese. She was a bank employee from São Paulo, holidaying with her mother in the northeast (possibly combining her leave with the upcoming long weekend).We chatted a while, she from the water, and me on a poolside chair. Yes, her colleagues were on strike (lots of estamos em greve signs were pasted on windows all over) but she was on holiday. She reassured me that this wouldn't affect ATM withdrawals as restocking the machines was done by a different service. It was an interesting exchange because she was using her English and I was answering in Portuguese. I daresay she was more fluent in English than I was in Portuguese.


I decided to go to the airport at 1100 even though the flight wasn't until 1548. The hostel checkout time is 1100 and I might as well wait in air-conditioning and also get lunch.


As it turned out, the flight was delayed by 2 hours. Probably due to the flow-on effects of rain in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Those poor Dutch women from Pipa were hoping for some sunshine in Rio on their last few days in Brazil. Brazilian services are a bit uncoordinated. I noticed that the monitors said the gate had been changed. I asked a Webjet attendant about this and she said, no change yet. A bit later they announced that the gate is changed, and the attendant told me, yes it's changed now.


This meant that I would get to Salvador after dark. Barra is supposed to be a fairly safe neighbourhood but still one is apprehensive about walking around with a backpack after dark. The shuttle to the city dropped me and a bunch of other backpackers off near the Barra shopping centre around 2000 and fortunately the hostel wasn't hard to find, exactly as their instructions from the website said.


I have to confess that I did nothing tourist-wise the next day, only taking advantage of the shopping centre to buy replacement thongs and to rest a bit. Also I didn't feel up to facing the Pelorinho in the old city, which is a bit trying on tourists, but that's for the next episode.

Installments

One thing you notice shopping around here is how prices are often quoted as a number of installments. You'd be looking at a pair of running shoes and think: R30 is very cheap. Then you see the 5x and realise that the total cost is R150. I asked the hostel owner why people didn't use credit cards. Ah but they do, it's just that the shop will submit 5 (or however many) bills to the credit card account. It seems that this installment system is how people around here pay off purchases over a longer term. Whether this makes people more prudent with their spending, I cannot say.


Now I understand why all the conversation practice I did revolving around phrases like: paying by cash, no down payment, over so many installments, and so forth.

Cellular?

"Carteira? Cellular?" asked the woman at the X-ray scanner, as I prepared to go through the metal detector. My wallet was already in the daypack and I don't have a mobile with me so I replied "Não tenho." She flashed what seemed like a look of pity. Everyone, but everyone, it seems, has a mobile in this country. Even small towns have a mobile phone shop. That's not so surprising when mobile technology can leapfrog landline technology and bring phone connections to the masses in less developed countries, but what impressed me was the coverage of this huge country. Passengers in a bus would be bumping along some dirt track in the middle of nowhere and then you would hear a ring tone.


Then again, it could have been the torn jeans I was wearing.