Precerpt from In with the East Wind: A Mary Poppins Kind of Life - Brazil: Bahia

 

 

Salvador (Bahia)

There is something special about Bahia. Everyone says so, and everyone means something slightly different when they do. For some, it’s the way the air itself seems to hum—warm, salted, and touched by music even when no instrument is playing. For others, it’s the way the streets open into sudden bursts of color: sun‑washed facades, ribbons tied to church gates, markets overflowing with fruit that tastes like it was grown in sunlight. Bahia carries an ease that isn’t laziness but confidence, a rhythm that invites you to walk slower, listen longer, and let the day unfold without forcing it. It’s a place where history breathes through drumbeats, where the ocean feels like a companion, and where joy is treated not as an indulgence but as a birthright.

Bahia sits on Brazil’s northeastern shoulder, where the land curves toward the Atlantic and the ocean feels less like a boundary and more like a pulse. The state is huge—larger than France—and its coastline stretches for hundreds of miles, shifting from calm turquoise bays to wild, wind‑cut surf. Salvador, the capital, rises on a bluff above the Baía de Todos os Santos, a city split between upper and lower levels like a living diorama of history, music, and movement.

The elevator in Salvador is one of those details that makes Bahia feel almost mythical. The Elevador Lacerda, a tall, Art Deco sentinel of concrete and glass, links the Upper City—where government buildings, churches, and lookout points perch on the cliffs—to the Lower City, where the port, markets, and old commercial district spread out along the water. It rises more than 70 meters, and when you step inside, the ride is brief but cinematic: the doors close, the machinery hums, and suddenly the whole Baía de Todos os Santos unfurls in front of you. From the top platform, the ocean looks like a sheet of hammered blue metal, and from below, the elevator towers overhead like a lighthouse turned vertical.

The catacombs, by contrast, feel like the city’s whisper rather than its proclamation. Beneath Salvador’s oldest churches—especially places like the Basilica Cathedral and São Francisco—lie chambers carved into stone, dim and cool even in the Bahian heat. They hold centuries of history: ossuaries stacked with carefully arranged bones, narrow corridors where the air smells faintly of lime and old incense, and alcoves where early clergy were laid to rest. The walls are thick, mottled, and uneven, as if the city grew around them rather than the other way around. Walking through them feels like stepping into the undercurrent of Bahia’s story—quiet, reverent, and impossibly old, a counterpoint to the bright music and sunlit streets above.

The landscape itself seems to invite rhythm: coconut palms leaning toward the water, long beaches that glow gold at sunset, inland hills that roll into cacao country. Bahia feels like a place shaped by tides and time, where geography doesn’t just describe the land but explains the mood.

In the 1990s and 2000s, Olodum became one of the most recognizable cultural forces in Brazil, a percussion group rooted in Salvador’s Pelourinho neighborhood. Their sound—samba‑reggae, built on deep, layered drumlines—felt like the heartbeat of Bahia itself. You could hear it echoing through the cobblestone streets: surdo drums thundering like surf, repique patterns snapping with bright precision, and dozens of musicians moving as one organism.

Olodum wasn’t just a band; they were a social movement. They used music to affirm Afro‑Brazilian identity, to teach local kids, and to reclaim Pelourinho as a place of pride rather than poverty. Their fame exploded internationally when they collaborated with artists like Michael Jackson and Paul Simon, but in Bahia, their presence was always more intimate—street rehearsals that drew whole neighborhoods, parades that felt like rolling celebrations of ancestry, rhythm, and resistance.

My gratitude to McGraw-Hill lasts to this day because McGraw-Hill representatives, having attended one of my workshops in Sao Paolo, contracted with me to present the same set of workshops in Bahia. Yes! A visit to the fabled land!

They assigned a driver named Fabio, whom they said spoke English. Nope. He did not—delightfully. I received a lot of incidental language instruction on the drive to Bahia and back. In between my seminars, which, as always, I enjoyed, given the wonderfully talented teachers in Brazil, Fabio, originally from Bahia, took me just about everywhere. We rode the elevator, picked our way through the catacombs, and listened to the Olodum. He also took me to the post office—another cultural experience—to mail books back home and a Level 2 language experience (task with a complication).

We celebrated two weeks of successful seminars with dinner at a churrascaria, my first experience of that uniquely Brazilian temple of abundance. The place felt less like a restaurant and more like a performance: gaucho‑style servers in crisp trousers and boots circulating through the room with long skewers of grilled meats—picanha glistening with sea salt, linguica snapping with spice, tender cuts carved directly onto your plate in thin, perfect slices. The salad bar was its own spectacle, a sprawling display of farofa, hearts of palm, roasted vegetables, cheeses, and bright, tangy vinaigrettes. Everything smelled of charcoal and citrus. The rhythm of the meal was almost ceremonial: a small wooden token flipped green for “yes, keep the parade coming,” and red for “pause, I need to breathe.” By the end, I understood why Brazilians treat churrascarias as celebrations in themselves—equal parts hospitality, craftsmanship, and joy.

And then came the drive back to São Paulo—hours of highway that turned into an unexpected classroom, good for language practice and for watching Brazil unfold in long, shifting panoramas. The road carried us out of Bahia’s coastal humidity and into the drier, rolling interior, where red earth and wide‑open ranchland stretched toward the horizon. Small towns appeared like punctuation marks, each with its own rhythm: roadside cafés serving strong coffee, clusters of pastel houses, and plazas where children played under the shade of mango trees. As we moved south, the landscape changed again—more eucalyptus, more farmland, more signs of São Paulo’s gravitational pull. It was a reminder of how vast Brazil truly is, how each region feels like its own country with its own food, music, and temperament. The miles didn’t feel repetitive; they felt like chapters, each one adding another layer to the story of the place.

From the forthcoming book:

In with the East Wind...A Mary Poppins Kind of Life

Volume 1: ABC Lands

by Dr. Betty Lou Leaver

For more posts about and from this book, click HERE.

For more posts by and about Betty Lou Leaver, click HERE.

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