Brazil — São Paulo, Trancoso and Salvador

Brazil had been on our list for a while, and this year we finally made it there. We started in São Paulo, spent some time on the coast, and ended in Salvador. Three very different places, which turned out to be a good way to get at least a small sense of the country.

São Paulo

We landed in São Paulo and settled into Jardins, a neighborhood that made a pretty good home base for the ten days we spent there. São Paulo is big. Really big. With a population of more than 12 million people in the city proper, it is one of those places where you can spend a day walking around and still feel like you have barely scratched the surface.

One of the things we did was a free walking tour, which took us through some of the city’s neighborhoods and, importantly, introduced us to São Paulo’s graffiti scene. There is graffiti everywhere, from huge, elaborate murals to smaller pieces tucked into walls and alleyways. It is clearly part of the visual identity of the city rather than simply something that happens to be on the walls.

And then we got lucky.

Carnival was still a week or so away, but one of the neighborhood groups was practicing for the big event. We happened upon them while they were rehearsing, and were able to stand around and watch for a while. There was a lot of music, dancing and energy, even though this was just practice. We have never been big party people, so getting a preview of Carnival without having to actually participate in the madness seemed like a pretty good deal.

We also got our first taste of some Brazilian food, including feijoada, a hearty stew of beans and meat. And, of course, there was the obligatory caipirinha. Yum. We quickly decided that Brazil was going to be a good place to eat.

São Paulo was interesting and certainly had plenty to keep us occupied, but after ten days we were ready for something smaller and slower. Fortunately, that was next on the agenda.

Trancoso

From São Paulo we flew to Trancoso, where we stayed for the next three weeks. This was much more our speed.

Trancoso is a small coastal town, with beautiful beaches and a much more relaxed pace than São Paulo. We had deliberately chosen it as our Carnival destination because we are, as previously noted, not big party people. The timing worked out beautifully. While other parts of Brazil were gearing up for Carnival, Trancoso gave us plenty of opportunities to enjoy the beach and mostly stay out of the way of the festivities.

Getting around was another matter.

The roads could be rough, and drives that looked relatively short on a map could turn into long, hot, bumpy adventures. But eventually we started to understand the Brazilian relationship with the beach. People really do seem to organize their lives around it. And after a few weeks of heat, we understood the attraction ourselves.

Denise also had some better luck with wildlife than she usually gets just walking around town. On a couple of her early morning walks she came across groups of the local monkeys. They were usually gone before I could get there, which seems to be a recurring theme with Denise’s wildlife sightings.

Our evenings were pretty quiet. We generally cooked dinner at our place and tried to avoid becoming the evening’s main course for the mosquitoes. Not exactly an exciting nightlife, but it suited us just fine.

Three weeks in Trancoso gave us plenty of time to slow down, get into a routine, and appreciate the beach. Eventually, though, it was time to move on.

Salvador

Our final stop was Salvador, where we stayed in the Santo Antônio neighborhood. Salvador felt completely different again. It is colorful, lively and full of history, and much of that history is not particularly pleasant.

We took another walking tour, this time learning about Salvador’s role in the Portuguese slave trade and the enormous number of Africans who were brought to Brazil through the city. It was brutal history, and seeing the places where it happened made it considerably more real than reading about it in a book.

Salvador’s history is also very much reflected in its food and culture. The city’s cuisine has strong African influences, along with elements from Brazil’s indigenous and Portuguese traditions and the wider Caribbean world. After mostly cooking for ourselves in Trancoso, we were happy to turn ourselves over to the local restaurants and start working our way through some of it. There was a lot to like.

And then there were the marmosets.

We had seen plenty of monkeys by this point, but the tiny marmosets in Salvador were something else. They are ridiculously cute, and small enough that “monkey” almost seems like an overly grand description. They also make a surprisingly bird-like call when they are communicating with each other, so sometimes we’d hear them before we could find them.

That ended up being a fitting way to finish our time in Brazil: good food, colorful streets, complicated history, and small unexpected encounters with wildlife.

Brazil was a good reminder that three places in one country can feel like three different countries. São Paulo was enormous, busy and urban. Trancoso was slow, hot and beach-focused. Salvador was colorful, historic and full of its own distinct culture. We liked all three for different reasons, although Trancoso probably wins if the goal is simply to slow down for a while.

And, yes, we are still thinking about the caipirinhas.

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