Travelogue II: Salvador de Bahia
Mar. 8th, 2004 10:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakStill spoiler-free for Angel, despite strong temptation. But I did give in to another kind of temptation and volunteered for the Babylon 5 Ficathon. Hey, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
andrastewhite threatened to mob me for it anyway!
Now, onwards with the Brazilian narrative.
In his book about travelling in Italy, Dickens railed against the custom of regarding decay and neglect as pitturesque in southern countries while seeing them for the sign of poverty they are in the north. I know what he means, but I must confess I cannot evade the sensation altogether. The old city of Salvador de Bahia is like that. A decade ago, somebody tartly spoke of a “Baroque Slum”, and there is something to it, even now when several of the buildings have been renovated. And seeing grass and occassionally trees grow out of baroque churches and old townhouses which once upon a time must have been wealthy somehow looks beautiful.
The entire old city centre consists of baroque buildings, in faded – and only sometimes renewed – pink, yellow, and blue. There are more churches assembled in a relatively small space than even in Rome, I think. Mind you, St. Francis would have turned in his grave when seeing the splendour of the Igreiya de Orden Terceiro de Sao Francisco, which is golden curves gone wild, or the infinitely elaborate walls in the old monastery next door which consist of white and blue porcellain. Showing scenes that the Indians, and even the descendants of colonials born in the New World, must have found as strange as we would depictions of the life on Mars, because they are so utterly European – strollings through parks, every wig of the walkers detailed, quaint shephards, and hunting scenes. (Poor St. Francis.) But all of this makes for a feast of the eyes.
I did like the Jesuit cathedral, the Catedral Basilica, which while indulging in Baroque splendour with the rest had a somewhat spiritual atmosphere. Moreover, one could sit down and listen to a man practising the guitar for mass. There was an organ there, but they didn’t use it during mass, either; I attended one, and the guitar player provided the entire music and songs.
The church with the most touching backstory is Nossa Senhora do Rosario dos Prestos, painted in blue on the outside. It was build by slaves in what one could call their “spare time”, i.e. the night hours, because they weren’t allowed in most of the churches their lords and masters frequented. A lot of the wood-carved statues there, while being traditional depictions of saints, differ in one respect: many of the apostles and saints are shown as blacks, completely with almond-shaped eyes.
Speaking of whom, Salvador de Bahia was the city where I saw more than at any other place I visited in Brazil, including Rio. (Conversely, the place where the population seemed to be exclusively of white and Indian descent was Manaus and the shores of the Amazon in the wider area there.) This meant that there were a lot of women offering to braid your hair African style. I was somewhat tempted, but it would have taken hours, and when one is a visitor with only a few days for each place, one doesn’t have them.
We didn’t live in the historic city centre, more’s the pity. Bahia was our one and only stop where someone else had picked the hotel, and what a mistake that was. We were somewhat shocked to find us ending up in a hotel on the highway into the City, with the only consolation that it was also none too far from the beach. Sleep, howeover, went on being elusive, what with the cars and the ever going struggle between keeping the noisy air conditioning on or to turn it off and be slowly turned into smoked meat.
Back to the beautiful city centre. One needs a gigantic elevator to get to the harbour, which boasts of two inadvertendly funny statues. One was nicknamed “the Mayor’s arse” by the locals, and the other was a group of people around your avarage heroic-looking thinker in costume. One male figure of the group, but only one, boasted of an anatomically correct shape under his sort-of-toga. An inside joke on the sculptor’s part, I presume.
The main reason for visiting the harbour is of course to get oneself a passage to one of the islands. (Or even to Sao Paulo, but we didn’t do that.) Which we did, and thus came to spent the better part of a day on the Ilha de Tinharé. It’s an island with no tear streets and no motor vehicles except for agriculture. The beaches there were truly gorgeous, but with one distinct disadvantage: the sea in those bays never went higher than a bit above my knees. Which meant that in the most populated bay, people were looking as if they were sitting in a gigantic tub. En masse. We shuddered and quickly walked to the next beach. While we did find lots of sparsely to not at all populated beaches, we did not find an opportunity to swim, to truly swim, I mean. Ah well. Walking on the beach in the sun, getting your feet wet by the sea, has its own charm. When I was small and we were spending our holidays on an island in the Northern Sea, my father used to tell me entire novels that way.
Returning in the late afternoon, I had a somewhat humiliating experience. Bear in mind that I’ve been on boats and ships of all sorts, and never been seasick. (I got queasy two or three times on a plane, but those were exceptions in a multitude of air travel, too.) Now, at the age of 34, going back on that Katamaran to Salvador, I learned what it means to be seasick. The first time I rose from my seat and stormed to the proverbial planks, a small but very good looking Frenchman (dark hair, nicely bronzed skin) lay there, sunning himself. He evaded just in time. Now he was good natured about the whole thing, even holding my hand while I threw up into the sea and offering water from his bottle of agua mineral to cool my temples afterwards. I polished up my school French and thanked him. But really. Most embarrassing. Also, would that this had been the end, but no such luck. I threw up altogether five times because of the waves.
On a somewhat different note, in regards to Brazilian food: we were lucky to discover a restaurant which while fleezing the tourists with outrageous prices downstairs offered a first floor where the locals could pick their meals from their combination of choice from a small but good buffet. Musing while munching our potatoes and rice, we concluded that potatoes are unarguably the best thing America ever gave to the old world.
Walking on the beach in the neighbourhood of our hotel, we also tried the local coconut, or rather, the fluid inside which one can drink through a straw once it is opened. We did drink from coconuts before, in Thailand and in India, but there, it had had a somewhat oily taste. Not so in Brazil. Just cool and refreshing. I would dub it “Entdraught”, were it not for the fact I was to drink the genuine article later in the rain forest. But this, gentle readers, is the tale for another day.
andrastewhite threatened to mob me for it anyway!Now, onwards with the Brazilian narrative.
In his book about travelling in Italy, Dickens railed against the custom of regarding decay and neglect as pitturesque in southern countries while seeing them for the sign of poverty they are in the north. I know what he means, but I must confess I cannot evade the sensation altogether. The old city of Salvador de Bahia is like that. A decade ago, somebody tartly spoke of a “Baroque Slum”, and there is something to it, even now when several of the buildings have been renovated. And seeing grass and occassionally trees grow out of baroque churches and old townhouses which once upon a time must have been wealthy somehow looks beautiful.
The entire old city centre consists of baroque buildings, in faded – and only sometimes renewed – pink, yellow, and blue. There are more churches assembled in a relatively small space than even in Rome, I think. Mind you, St. Francis would have turned in his grave when seeing the splendour of the Igreiya de Orden Terceiro de Sao Francisco, which is golden curves gone wild, or the infinitely elaborate walls in the old monastery next door which consist of white and blue porcellain. Showing scenes that the Indians, and even the descendants of colonials born in the New World, must have found as strange as we would depictions of the life on Mars, because they are so utterly European – strollings through parks, every wig of the walkers detailed, quaint shephards, and hunting scenes. (Poor St. Francis.) But all of this makes for a feast of the eyes.
I did like the Jesuit cathedral, the Catedral Basilica, which while indulging in Baroque splendour with the rest had a somewhat spiritual atmosphere. Moreover, one could sit down and listen to a man practising the guitar for mass. There was an organ there, but they didn’t use it during mass, either; I attended one, and the guitar player provided the entire music and songs.
The church with the most touching backstory is Nossa Senhora do Rosario dos Prestos, painted in blue on the outside. It was build by slaves in what one could call their “spare time”, i.e. the night hours, because they weren’t allowed in most of the churches their lords and masters frequented. A lot of the wood-carved statues there, while being traditional depictions of saints, differ in one respect: many of the apostles and saints are shown as blacks, completely with almond-shaped eyes.
Speaking of whom, Salvador de Bahia was the city where I saw more than at any other place I visited in Brazil, including Rio. (Conversely, the place where the population seemed to be exclusively of white and Indian descent was Manaus and the shores of the Amazon in the wider area there.) This meant that there were a lot of women offering to braid your hair African style. I was somewhat tempted, but it would have taken hours, and when one is a visitor with only a few days for each place, one doesn’t have them.
We didn’t live in the historic city centre, more’s the pity. Bahia was our one and only stop where someone else had picked the hotel, and what a mistake that was. We were somewhat shocked to find us ending up in a hotel on the highway into the City, with the only consolation that it was also none too far from the beach. Sleep, howeover, went on being elusive, what with the cars and the ever going struggle between keeping the noisy air conditioning on or to turn it off and be slowly turned into smoked meat.
Back to the beautiful city centre. One needs a gigantic elevator to get to the harbour, which boasts of two inadvertendly funny statues. One was nicknamed “the Mayor’s arse” by the locals, and the other was a group of people around your avarage heroic-looking thinker in costume. One male figure of the group, but only one, boasted of an anatomically correct shape under his sort-of-toga. An inside joke on the sculptor’s part, I presume.
The main reason for visiting the harbour is of course to get oneself a passage to one of the islands. (Or even to Sao Paulo, but we didn’t do that.) Which we did, and thus came to spent the better part of a day on the Ilha de Tinharé. It’s an island with no tear streets and no motor vehicles except for agriculture. The beaches there were truly gorgeous, but with one distinct disadvantage: the sea in those bays never went higher than a bit above my knees. Which meant that in the most populated bay, people were looking as if they were sitting in a gigantic tub. En masse. We shuddered and quickly walked to the next beach. While we did find lots of sparsely to not at all populated beaches, we did not find an opportunity to swim, to truly swim, I mean. Ah well. Walking on the beach in the sun, getting your feet wet by the sea, has its own charm. When I was small and we were spending our holidays on an island in the Northern Sea, my father used to tell me entire novels that way.
Returning in the late afternoon, I had a somewhat humiliating experience. Bear in mind that I’ve been on boats and ships of all sorts, and never been seasick. (I got queasy two or three times on a plane, but those were exceptions in a multitude of air travel, too.) Now, at the age of 34, going back on that Katamaran to Salvador, I learned what it means to be seasick. The first time I rose from my seat and stormed to the proverbial planks, a small but very good looking Frenchman (dark hair, nicely bronzed skin) lay there, sunning himself. He evaded just in time. Now he was good natured about the whole thing, even holding my hand while I threw up into the sea and offering water from his bottle of agua mineral to cool my temples afterwards. I polished up my school French and thanked him. But really. Most embarrassing. Also, would that this had been the end, but no such luck. I threw up altogether five times because of the waves.
On a somewhat different note, in regards to Brazilian food: we were lucky to discover a restaurant which while fleezing the tourists with outrageous prices downstairs offered a first floor where the locals could pick their meals from their combination of choice from a small but good buffet. Musing while munching our potatoes and rice, we concluded that potatoes are unarguably the best thing America ever gave to the old world.
Walking on the beach in the neighbourhood of our hotel, we also tried the local coconut, or rather, the fluid inside which one can drink through a straw once it is opened. We did drink from coconuts before, in Thailand and in India, but there, it had had a somewhat oily taste. Not so in Brazil. Just cool and refreshing. I would dub it “Entdraught”, were it not for the fact I was to drink the genuine article later in the rain forest. But this, gentle readers, is the tale for another day.
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no subject
Date: 2004-03-08 01:23 am (UTC)Tease!
no subject
Date: 2004-03-08 04:41 am (UTC)(Sounds better in the original French, i.e. in Halevy's libretto for Offenbach's La Belle Hélène, but I certainly won't push my luck with my bad memory and a native speaker.)
no subject
Date: 2004-03-08 02:44 am (UTC)Bad luck on the sea-sickness. Catamarans can bounce a lot, and even the big ones they use on the Channel crossings don't sail when it's rough.
Now it's settled
Date: 2004-03-08 04:38 am (UTC)Heat: I couldn't take it the entire year, but for a visit, I don't have a problem.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-08 03:38 am (UTC)Ah. Goodness. Thanks again, enjoying this.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-08 04:42 am (UTC)Ah Fair One
Date: 2004-03-08 06:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-08 06:59 am (UTC)