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Hi all,
Hope everyone is well at home. We got to Salvador veeery early yesterday morning - we ended up getting another overnight bus from Itacare, which left at midnight and dropped us at an island just off Salvador at 6,30am yesterday. We got a ferry then for forty mins over to Salvador, so we were at our hostel (or what we THOUGHT was our hostel!!) and all for 8am. We had breakfast/showers/unpacked, then went to do washing in another hostel nearby, when we realised that that was where we were actually meant to be staying... doh. So we repacked and explained to the very nice owner that we were leaving after our one hour stay, ha ha!
We both picked up some kind of stomach bug in Itacare, apparently it was flying around the town. Obviously we were dreading having to get on a bus for seven hours, and we´d had to check out of our accommodation at 11am that morning... Our hotel owner was just lovely though, he set us up on his terrace and let us stay there until it was time for our bus. Jay got hit worse than me, but we´re both feeling much better today.
Tuesday is the day for street parties here in Salvador, the drums were starting already when we were (re)checking into our hostel! Our room balcony is over the street, so at about 3pm there was a whole samba band moving up the street - it was just AMAZING - both of us had a tear in our eye, just incredible to see it. We hit the town last night, but as neither of us had eaten all day, we were pretty tipsy on a couple of drinks, we went for food but that didn´t go down very well, so we had an early enough night - so annoying lying in bed feeling sick and hearing the parties going on down below!!
We´re going to go down by the coast today and see that area, Salvador is a strange city - complete contrast between rich and poor, so you´ll see some poor street kid going through bins, and then another Brazilian family doing the tourist thing right beside them - quite hard to see. We obviously stick out a mile (we haven´t seen one other Irish/UK/US person here), so we were hounded by street peddlers and beggers in the main square last night.
We need to figure out how we´re going to get down to Iguazu Falls today too - flights are very expensive, but only alternative is to spend around three days on a a bus... :-( We head up to an old diamond mining town tomorrow, we´re going to do a couple of hikes/tours of the waterfalls and natural swimming pools (wow!) when we´re there.
We have LOADS of pics, so we´ll get them up asap, promise!
L x
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