Today was the first day of our vacation in Salvador de Bahia! Angelika and I had a flight out of the smallest of São Paulo’s three airports at 3:15. We decided to get to the airport fairly early since we were not familiar with the Brazilian airport regulations and line wait times. Angelika took a cab over to my apartment where there was a regular city bus that left from Nove de Julho and went straight passed the airport. We left at 11:50 and had a short wait, 10 min, for the bus to arrive and it was a super easy ride to the airport (thank goodness…I was due some good transit luck!). The money taker on the bus was able to show us the right stop and all we had to do was walk on the pedestrian bridge to get to the right side of the road. From the outside the airport looks a bit Podunk. However, on the inside it had all the essentials and it was actually super efficient, with almost no lines to get our boarding passes and check our bags! Once we were in we still had plenty of time before our flight so we did a quick ATM run and then got lunch and a sweet snack at a bakery on the mini-concourse. Alessandra had sweetly made me a lunch before I left so I just invested in a treat that looked strikingly similar to the Arenal Lava cake that I loved in Costa Rica. It was not exactly the same but it was still pretty good!
Once we passed through security (again no line!) we waited at our gate for another hour before our flight was ready to board. Since it was a small airport we actually took a bust to the plane and then walked on board. Our flight was only about 2 hours and I was able to nap most of the time. We arrived in Salvador at 5:15 and were able to collect our bags and get to the buses to head towards our hostel in Barra. It took us a min to find the bus stop as they were not listed on any of the signs in the airport, but we asked the nice police officers where they were and they pointed us in the right direction and said that they were across the road on the right. We took that to mean all the way across the road which put us in the parking deck. While we were walking around looking lost, a guy working in one of the food stands stopped us and put us back on the median between the two roads to catch the bus.
Once we finally made it to the right place, we did not have too long of a wait before the local bus picked us up and we road down the coast for about 40 min to arrive (the airport is a good ways out of the main point)…near our hostel. We got off the bus at the right location but since it was getting dark and we had luggage we caught a cab with the help of a valet parker to go the remaining few blocks to our hostel. The hostel is located on a small street so that our cab driver did not recognize so we had to make a few circles looking for the road before we found it. Our hostel is a very interesting place. It is in an old house that has been converted into a small hostel that is run by a group of artists as a co-op to support their NGO which produces documentaries on cultural movements in Brazil.
Once we were settled we met up with Olivia and Daniel, who were staying in a hostel two blocks away, for dinner at a local restaurant. We kept it simple and just had a late dinner and then came back to our hostel to chat with the other patrons and take advantage of the movie room before going to bed.
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