Salvador
Seventy years ago I read the words Funicular Railway in an article about Switzerland. Crazy, but I remember that. Today I experienced my first ever funicular railway, a rickety little tram that takes you straight up a bluff.
Once upon a time, Salvador appeared on maps as Bahia, and you still see “Bahia” chiseled into some stone buildings. Like Port Townsend WA, Salvador is built on two levels, the waterfront and the uptown. Shuttle buses take you up a narrow street from lower to upper, or you can take a quaint funicular railway, or you can take a long escalator that at one time was hot stuff but now is quaint as well. Unlike Port Townsend, Salvador is the third largest city in Brazil.
The old church from the back
Portuguese, Spanish, and Brits all had a hand in making the city what it is today, starting in the very early 1500s. Some of the churches and palaces from that distant beginning are still in use. Most are in disrepair but still picturesque. A good example is the old church I passed. Its roof tiles are all colours from yellow through the terra cotta spectrum and I’ll bet the almost-black ones are original. It puts on a brave front, but in back, the four- and five-storey attached buildings stand hollow, roofless.
Old city wall
As you know, I am into birds. Salvador is nearly devoid of birds. I walked up the abovementioned narrow street looking for park areas to which birds might be drawn. Nada. There are pigeons, but Seattle has twice as many pigeons per square foot as Salvador. Some are pigeon-coloured and some are all black, even the rump. There was one neotropical cormorant flying across the bay. I saw no gulls. None. This has been a city for five hundred years. Surely the gulls would have found the city dump by now.
Tugboats always accompany us in port even if they don’t tug on anything
But you shoulda seen the bee. It was a bombid, a family relative of bumblebees and twice the size of any bombid in North America. It was all black, and like bumblebees everywhere, extremely clumsy in the air, nearly unable to fly. It cruised around a vine with dried-up flowers; obviously the vine was finished blooming for the season. I’d hate to see it hit a windshield.
I am certain the traffic is much better when you don’t have 2000 tourists getting off the Queen Victoria and taking shuttles uptown. The stream of buses choked the street. I could walk faster than they moved. But the locals seem accustomed to this glut of motorized vehicles. Nimblest of course were the Vespas. Lots and lots of Vespas zip in and out of cars and buses, sometimes hopping up on the sidewalk to get past. I’m surprised they don’t lose a dozen Vespas a day to horrific accidents, but somehow, it all works.
Salvador early morning skies
But the tourists on the buses miss the real Salvador. Gaping holes await you here and there on the mosaic tiled streets. Women and men are friendly, the children shy. One lady sells chilled bottled water to people sitting on buses that are stuck in traffic, doing trade through open bus windows. She was doing okay, too. People push pushcarts around and lots of sidewalk vendors will sell you sunglasses and knockoff designer handbags. I know two words in Portuguese, thank you obligato and hi, hola. But I got by okay with my horrid Spanish because most here know Spanish also. Indeed, English is in common use.
My takeaway lesson? Be with real people. Don’t take the bus.