Carnival and fun times in tropical Afro Brazil
Trip Start
Oct 07, 2010
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42
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Trip End
Mar 13, 2011
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Salvador, State of Bahia, Brazil
Friday, March 4, 2011
Crazy town alright! It's definitely an Afro Brazilian party. 5 nights of following floats, samba, rhythms and boogying. It took some time to find the groove of the place. Particularly once I went to the old town did it feel like the real thing.
There are 3 tours in parade, the main one goes from the lighthouse on the coast, down the coast road and is usually big commercial trucks with groups of people ahead and behind the trucks in things called blocos. These can be pricey, ranging from 100 to 800 USD a ticket. On the only slightly cheaper option are the camarotes, places on the side of the road where booze is included and thats usually 100 to 350 USD. Needless to say, I didn't go to any of them The streets can be a little risky for pickpocketing, so no camera or phones out. That said, if you were careful it wasnt so bad. I did have to chuckle when about 5 people came up to me and chatted as though I spent days with them and yet I can't remember for the life of me who they were. Guess that's carnival or maybe I look a lot like other peeps
Some of the interesting parts
- jeez there is a lot of steroid use. Plenty of very big, hairless ripped guys
- it's definitely an Afro Brazilian feel
- the party along the beach was more of the white Brazilian culture whilst up in the old town had more rhythm and traditional. Whilst very diverse - a number of the trucks had white crowds an all the peeps selling alcohol on the side were black (the sellers were universally black)
- the police had about 5 different types of uniforms, funnily enough they were called military police. They were usually huge and walked in lines of 6 through the crowd. Though the policy changed recently to have one woman per group, which apparently reduced excessive violence, they had mean looking batons that they had out menacingly. Aggressive, agile through crowds, they were an integral part of carnival in providing safety. I doubt a fist world country would do it this aggressively but in the environment on the streets it was certainly effective
- apparently it's the largest street party in the world. Numbers vary but it's somewhere between 1 to 3 million
- most of the time in the days was spent at the beach locally, with a few hours in the area in the early evening and some evenings across to the old town
- it was an interesting crowd at the hostel. My room was 100 USD a night and had 2 Brazilians and one Basque/Spanish. The rest were predominantly Aussies, though of the CUB variety that I didnt chat to much, some Americas and Canadians and UK folks
