The Night Bus To Salvador

Settling into the business class back row seats of the night bus to Salvador, things look good. The chairs are huge - wide bucket seats that recline almost horizontally & have soft fold down footrests - and this is in second class. I imagine first class at the front to have Playstations & pole dancers. There isn't a steerage class. Tonight Matthew, we are the great unwashed. Each of our seats has a blanket & headphones in a sealed bag and gratis espresso & water available at the rear. Emergency exits are located here, here and here.

We were warned they like to crank up the AC on these flush buses. They do, but fortunately we've donned troosers & have spare tops. The only downside we can see so far is that we're next to the bog, which while bearble with the door closed, lets out an almighty honk when the door is used. Another minus is that it's Feb 14th - Valentine's Day - and I'm sat on the back row with a beardy man.

When the movie fires up it's nice to see it's been poorly dubbed into Portuguese, and that only one of my headphones work. Close but nae cigar. While I could do with the linguistic practice, I settle into finishing up my James Bond 'novel'.

Meanwhile, it seems the bus has two speeds. Real slow and lethally fast. A caravan of buses seem to form on the road to Salvador, and trundle along for 20 minutes to pull into any empty bus station for a 30 minute cig break. No wonder this journey takes 12 hours. I say that till we break free of the pack and old drive drops a cog & tears off. Jesus. All of a sudden, in the darkness of the bus I watch my demise appear to unfold before me. This man must have had a few too many redbulls. The fear of the bus being hijacked at gunpoint by bandits is quickly replaced for a very real fear of rolling off the half finished road off a cliff or into a forest. I ponder if saving 40 quid on a 12 hour night bus instead of a 2 hour flight was really worth my life? How much is life worth? Probably at least 55 bob. Shame on the 1st class passengers. They have paid more to get dead first and to soften the impact for us.

I generally find the only way to survive mental bus trips is to force oneself to sleep. But when it's so scary you've got to sleep it's also generally too scary to sleep. Catch 22. Furthermore, as soon as I'm halfway off, drive smashes over crater in the muddy road and sends Zesh sprawling into the armrest dividing us, which spears him into a comedic spastic fit, delivering me a good slapping. While this doesn't help my drifting off, I do finally managed to board the bus to the land of nod, and have all sorts of vivid dreams about natural disasters & getting slapped.

As I'm cuffed back into consciousness at 6am I get my first sights of Salvador. It appears to be a gently rolling hilly landscape covered, literally every square meter, in unorganised favela housing. Not the worst tin-roof-in-a-rubbish-dump shantys, but home made brick and concrete half-finished stained buildings. They look a little like the pretty whitewash Greek island houses weird sleazy uncle. They roll as far as the eye can see and for a good two more hours before we his the equally ugly, if higher rise centre. I'm later informed that the locals joke that Salvador is three nice bits swallowed up in one ever growing favela.

This is where we've come to party. Carnival 2007. Let the mayhem ensue...

Barnaboo

Current state of beard: Patchy - perhaps this was a bad idea...
Mental jukebox: 'Samba Magic' by Basement Jaxx
To see all my photos so far: http://www.flickr.com/photos/barnabyaldrick