08:23.91S 034:17.22W Salacious Salvador
Irene IV - World Adventure
Louis Goor
Thu 16 Feb 2023 00:11
SY (Sailing Yacht) Liberty, a co rally participant, welcomed Bonga aboard
with a warm embrace. They needed crew as they had unexpectedly lost a crew
member in Salvador, and Bonga, with his ‘willing to do any job’ attitude,
fit the bill perfectly. Bonga was delighted too, as he can now add another
yacht and another passage to his résumé/CV. We hope to meet up with him
again in Grenada before he flies to Antigua to find a job.
We on Irene IV, welcomed Louis and George back into the fold. We are all
delighted to have our ‘old reliables’ onboard again. So far, George has not
been too annoying about how things are done much better on Serendipity! We
shall see how long that lasts!
We had careful fun in Salvador, always alert and wary, we had been warned.
We engaged the services of tour guide extraordinaire Fernando once again to
show Louis around the old city. The city, at once crumbling into and
reemerging out of the memory of a bye gone time. A visit to the Carnaval
museum shed light on this deeply embedded Brazilian tradition, once the
playground of the wealthy Portuguese whites, now the playground of the
black, white and browns, Africans, Portuguese and all the hues in between,
rich, poor. and intermediate - Carnaval is for all. Carnaval, is an annual,
almost weeklong party, which comes each year the week before Lent – the
extravaganza before the purge. Carnaval is modelled on the Carnival of
Venice and costumes of all sorts are sported. Costumes for Brazilian
Carnaval are scanty! Because we are close to the equator, the temperature
hovers around hot or very hot, all year long. Nudity is against the law, but
Salvadorians find ways to be as close to naked as possible without breaking
the law. The preparations for Carnaval are well under way, it officially
starts on the 17th of February and ends on the 21st, but many cannot wait.
The streets of Salvador are a feast for the eyes of the lecherous and the
artistic alike. We learned that the Samba dance originated on the streets at
Carnival and that a special guitar, the Bahia guitar, was created as a
result of the event here in Salvador.
Beer is the beverage of choice during Carnaval. Dealing with the aftermath
of millions, if not billions of empty cans is a logistical and recycling
nightmare. Many artists have created large masterpieces using the empty cans
as their medium. The recycling infrastructure in Salvador appears to be well
organized, with different coloured bins for plastic, metal, and glass. We
never discovered whether this is for show or for real. If you have read the
Greenpeace research project, “Deception by Numbers”, you might be somewhat
cynical about where the recyclable materials end up.
Pelhouria Square, in the centre of the old city, is the square of shame.
Here in the Middle Ages the less fortunate and the wrong doers were placed
in stocks for days of public shaming. Here also was the place where Michael
Jackson created his video for the song, “They Don’t Care About Us”,
accompanied by hundreds of students from a drum school set up in Salvador to
take children off the streets.
The morning before we left, Louis and I, visited the Bahia Nautical Museum,
on the northern edge of the city. The museum is world renowned, celebrating
and chronicling the centuries of Portuguese exploration and the horrors of
the slave trade. The museum is housed in a disused light house perched high
and prominent on a rock, which sits majestically surveying the huge bay of
All Saints and the sprawling city behind. Afterwards accompanied by our
Antiguan cousin, Dana Nicholson, we visited Almacen Pepe, an amazing
delicatessen, where we had a quick lunch, and bought some last-minute
luxurious provisions. We arrived back onboard in the nick of time slightly
ahead of our scheduled 16:15 departure time.
Now, we are sailing to Fernando de Noronha, in the great company of Seabird,
captained by Jonny. Fernando de Noronha is a small island group 200 miles
off the northeast tip of Brazil, northeast of Recife and east of Natal. We
hope to catch up with Black Lion, Latobe and Yolo when we arrive.
We are sailing on a starboard tack, which has us all upside down. We have
been on a port tack for most of the 33, 000 miles that we have sailed so
far, and our bodies are accustomed to leaning right! With the left lean we
feel like we have 2 left legs, very disconcerting. However, sailing upwind
does help to keep us feeling a little cooler.
Having Seabird as company adds colour to our days, along with more large
ship sightings than on our previous passage, and our constant companions,
flying fish.