Salvador's Off Beat Tours

Salvador’s Off Beat Tours
Salvador, Brazil

Salvador, Brazil

After beautiful Bonito, the rest Brazil had a hard act to follow and after a mammoth journey of a flight to Sao Paulo a night in an airport hotel and another 2 flights we finally made it to Salvador. You don’t really appreciate the size of Brazil until you start to plan a journey and realise that their bus network is appalling and getting anywhere without wasting a day in transit is near on impossible and even flying is likely going to take a day and will send you on a whirlwind tour of every airport in Brazil. If it weren’t for the fact that drivers in Brazil are terrifying this would be the perfect country to buy a camper van and travel yourself as all the best places are not on bus routes a bit like Australia and New Zealand.

We had received recommendations to visit to Salvador and aside from being a good location to start our journey north up the coast there was not much we planned to see or do here but we were absolutely blown away by what a wonderful place Salvador was.

If you read Lonely Planet the main information that it gives you about Salvador is that it is the most likely place that you are going to be mugged or robbed anywhere in Brazil. I think that this is possibly one of the most unfair statements I have read, there is a chance that you will be mugged or robbed anywhere in any city in Brazil or in fact any city in the world, beautiful Salvador does not deserve this red flag over its name.

Salvador is split into two main areas, the old city or Pelourinho and the old port area of Barra. Salvador was founded by the Portuguese in 1549 and is the oldest colonial town in the Americas. The port town was an important trade route for both sugar and slaves. Salvador is the third most populous city in Brazil after Rio and Sao Paulo and nearly half the population has African routes as a result of the old slave trade. Salvador is more famously known as being the biggest carnival in the world. Lasting for almost one week, 4 million people congregate throughout 25 kilometers of streets to party.

With just 2 days to explore we started with our favourite South American specialty, the Tours for Tips walking tour. Unusually the free walking tour in Salvador is a little different to the standard walking tours as far from taking you to the main tourist attractions like every other tour does this tour takes you off the beaten track. Run by a Brazilian and his Canadian girlfriend who is a photographer they used to spend their days wondering the back streets taking photographs and decided to make a business out of it by taking tourists on their travels. So we set off into the deep, dark and murky underworld of Salvador. We met in the main tourist centre in Pelourinho which was awash with an equal number of tourists, ladies in large African costumes and police with large guns. We bypassed all of these and went past the police barricade away from the souvenir shops and down the back streets where the real Salvadorians live. This was by no means a freak show tour where we were dragged into the slums and shown the worst of the city, but it was just a small glimpse at the reality out of the tourist centre and showed a more genuine city not the façade that we are usually forced to experience. Our first stop outside of the centre was a street lined with old houses which didn’t look at all out of the ordinary until we went up the staircase into these buildings and behind the front façade there was just a network of flats going back and back and back. Pretty much everyone who lives in these buildings are living there illegally and the tour guide is hoping to make a short film about the residents and start a crowd funding campaign to help them buy their small flats within this massive complex and to give them some safety from being moved out at a moment’s notice. As we walked through the streets, it was quite sad to see just a mass of demolished, destroyed and falling down properties. Because Salvador is built into a hill side there are several old elevators around the city to connect the lower and upper city. One of these was totally destroyed after a landslide and is now a shell pretty much beyond repair. Our guide told us that back in the day when the elevator was working the upper classes would have their slaves open the door to the elevator, let them in to commence their journey and their slaves would have to run up the hill to be at the top to open the doors and greet them. A tragic but very real example of the way Brazilians used to live. Interestingly when we were house sitting in Belo Horizonte our apartment had an old maids quarters (now the cats bedroom) which was connected via the laundry room to the kitchen and to the back stair case so the maid could do all her chores and not need to enter the main apartment.

As we worked our way through the backstreets, we saw a tiny fruit market, we passed through an alleyway full of very serious looking men all taking part in illegal gambling, we saw the oldest hairdressers in the city, where they still only use cut throat razors and have had the same chairs since 1920, we even met a rather extroverted and I suspect well connected car wash owner who gave us all a t-shirt advertising his business and had us pose with him in front of his logo. The old city of Salvador is a UNESCO world heritage site, a title that many historic sites, towns and cities would kill to have as with the title comes funding, protection and tourism. Sadly Salvador and Brazil see old buildings as old, damaged and dangerous and would rather have a shiny new multi-storey building than a beautiful old brick building with a Juliette balcony and intricate carvings. As a result many of the stunning buildings in the historic centre are just abandoned and falling down. The main desire for these buildings is to buy them, gut them and use the shell as car parking spaces for a quick buck. Aside from this there is a more serious issue in that under the guise of restoration buildings are being completely demolished and replaced with whatever the city wants in their place, leaving the tenants homeless and the taxpayers footing the bill for the city to be slowly but surely destroyed. One of my favourite places on the tour was a walk up a street which comes with a warning in pretty much every guide book as a definite place to get mugged. It is in fact one of the most stunning pieces of architecture in the city where an old viaduct has had buildings built into each and every archway which are all owned by artisans. At the top of the hill there is a beautiful view over the harbour and ocean and looking back over the city the main elevator which has been restored is towering above. As we looked back a rainbow was coming directly out of the top of it, magical. As we watched the sunset the armed police who had been escorting us pretty much the entire tour gave our guide a warning to get us back to the tourist areas as it was far too dangerous for us where we were. This translates into whilst tourists are here they are not spending money in the tourist shops from which we get a kick back!!! Our journey back to Barra was by far one of the funniest journeys I have ever had. You may remember I mentioned earlier that Brazilians are terrible drivers, well add to the terrible driving at speed down a three lane motorway a driver trying to teach us the words to a Brazilian song whilst he drove at speed down said three lane motorway whilst playing the guitar. Seriously that happened. We were swerving and singing and swerving and swearing…. Despite his fuel meter reading empty and the car chugging at just the sight of any inclines we made it safely back to our hotel, what a journey!

The next day we explored the port area of Barra, so very different to the old city, with a busy beach, people walking, cycling, skateboarding and just enjoying life along the promenade. Barra had a huge shopping mall which was such a stark contrast to what we had seen the previous day, you can only wonder what buildings once stood where it does now! Despite the high tide, locals and tourists were
all set up like professionals on the beach with chairs, umbrellas, bbq’s and even paddling pools?! There was a sand sculpture hard at work and it just felt like a proper holiday beach town.

Our final day we decided to redo everything we had already done, just at our own pace, so we returned to Pelourinho to wonder the streets that we knew were safe to get some good photos and also to tie some ribbons to the old church in the main square. This church was built by the slaves who had been converted to Christianity so that they had somewhere to go and worship. They used other churches as a blueprint and just made their own design. Sadly we were not around on a Tuesday but this is the day of the main mass in this church and it is apparently not to be missed. The front gate and railings of the church are absolutely beautiful covered in brightly coloured ribbons. We were told that you tie a ribbon using three knots and make a prayer and when he ribbon comes off your prayer will come true. We made sure that we made some long term prayers for everyone as our knots were pretty secure so they may take some time to fall off!!

Back at the beach we were in for a shock, as it seemed that at the weekend everyone from Salvador had descended. There was barely 3 spare inches of sand and just a mass of bodies, umbrellas, beer stashes and yet more paddling pools.

Salvador was such a surprise to us, it was fascinating, beautiful, diverse and did not at any single point in time make us feel any less safe than we have felt in any city in the world. I would urge anyone passing through Brazil to pay a visit here for a very different view of the country.

Up the coast we go now to a little town called Maragogi, unsurprisingly this required yet another trip to the airport, and then a journey half way back down to the coast, let’s hope that it is worth it….