Salvador, Bahia in Brazil was my first main stop of my long journey. I was going there to meet up with friends from London and go to the 2014 World Cup Soccer tournament. A week before my trip, there was a news report about riots in Brazil ahead of the world cup. I was asking myself if it was actually a good idea to go. As it happened, as soon as the world cup started and the Samba rolled, everyone had completely forgotten what the riots were all about. For Brazilians, nothing gets in the way of Football and music, not even politics! 

I had always thought that Brazilians were fun loving, friendly, warm and kind hearted people. What I found interesting was how a lot of their neighbours actually say the same thing about them, like Colombians, Uruguayans, and even their bitter footballing rivals, the Argentinians!

The city was brightly decorated with the Brazilian national colours of green, blue, yellow and red. The world cup was underway and the National Brazilian Festival of Sao Jao was due in a couple of days time.

Salvador lies on the Atlantic coastline. It has beautiful beaches and terrain. It was the original capital of Brazil from 1549 - 1763 before Rio took over. Brazilians consider it to be their cultural heartland, full of old churches, buildings and grand squares.

The city is divided into two parts, the lower part and the upper part, which are separated by an escarpment that drops down a sharp cliff edge. An elevator designed in the 1870's connects the two parts. Most of the interesting historic buildings are located in the upper part of the city. 

The oldest area around the main square in the centre is known as Pelourinho. It is designed in a typical Portuguese colonial style with buildings and cobbled streets, baroque style churches surrounding a grand square. It is a truly magnificent and beautiful part of town, full of character and reminiscent of Brazil's colonial past. Very Iberian in its style, it feels as if you could be anywhere in Portugal, Spain or Latin America, when standing looking at the surrounding architectures.

Pelourinho's cathedrals are all within a few hundred yards from each other. One of the most magnificent in Brazil is the convent of San Francisco which was built in 1708. It has a gracefully ageing exterior, but still full of its former glory. Its interior walls are adorned with elaborately carved artwork and gilded with gold leaf. It is breathtakingly beautiful.

Church of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim is the most revered and the most famous in Salvador located in the lower part of the city, which dates back to 1754. Another strikingly beautiful Cathedral in the lower city is the Basilica Nossa Senhora da Conceicao da Praia, which dates back to 1723, built entirely with stones transported from Portugal.

Like most Brazillians, Salvadorians are mixed ethnically and culturally between Portuguese, African and Indigenous American. And this region is more famous for its people with a darker shade of skin colour, for their hot and spicy cuisine and their colourful dresses, very much influenced by their African heritage. 

Salvador has a wonderful night life located in various parts of the city. Pelourinho is still the best part for the night life. As everywhere else in Brazil, it is packed with outdoor venues and bars that have live bands, with music pulsating out of every window while almost everyone sings along to every song the bands are playing. It is very Brazilian and very heart warming seeing how joyful people are in an otherwise very ordinary evening. And people always readily make strangers feel at home with so much kindness.

The following day we headed to the stadium to see the Bosnia-Herzegovina V Iran game. The roads leading to the stadium were crowded with people of all nationalities from all around the world. Full of samba bands, traders and football supporters, the atmosphere was more like a carnival procession than that of a football game.

There were a lot of empty seats in the stadium as both teams were not highly ranked, and tickets were selling for as low as $50 in town. But to everyone's delight they showed top class football, worthy of their position in a world cup tournament. In the end Bosnia-Herzegovina won 3-1.

Our prime pre-occupation for the next few days became hunting for cheap tickets for the next scheduled games. The atmosphere in the city was electric with nothing but football on people's mind.  Everywhere we went in town, places were packed full of people from all around the world, watching games and looking for tickets. It was a surreal environment with people speaking 100 different languages in every place we stopped at, very reminiscent of the atmosphere we felt in London during the 2012 London Olympics.

Tickets for the qualifying rounds were selling for around $200 and for the last-16 at $500. Once you buy the tickets, you also have to pay for the flights to go to where the game was going to be played, covering great distances in this vast country, almost as big as a continent.

There was very little chance of finding any tickets for the big teams. England was playing in Manaus, deep in the Amazon. There were no tickets available anywhere and the only way to try would have been to go to Manaus and look for tickets, which none of us was contemplating on. Tickets for Brazil, Argentina, Germany and the likes were either unavailable or needed flying to very far places to see the games. As my next stop on my journey was Rio de Janiero, I was just happy enough to go there and try to find a reasonably cheap ticket for one more world cup game experience.

A day after I got to Salvador, I was to have a sudden reminder that there were some parts of town that needed taking some caution. It was about 1pm in the afternoon when I was in my hotel room and started hearing loud popping sounds. After cautiously approaching the windows, I saw some youngsters in the hills on the opposite side ducking between the hills and the bushes. It turned out that they were shooting fireworks at each other which eventually set the entire hill alight. I rushed to report it to the receptionist, who had already called the fire brigade. It took about 1 hour to put the flames out before it turned into a full scale bush fire, threatening the surrounding neighbourhood. It was a bizarre start to what was one of the most amazing 3 weeks of my journey.

How to get there

http://www.fodors.com/world/south-america/brazil/salvador-and-the-bahia-coast/travel-tips/getting-here-and-around-60342590

Accommodation

 - Average daily cost of a hostel bunk bed accomodation, £8

 - Average daily cost of 2 Star hotel, £21.0 pounds

 - Average daily cost of 4 Star hotel, £42 pounds

Food

 - Average Local restaurant, £3.80

 - Mid range restaurant, 3 course meal, £6.20

Google Map Location