A Long Bus Ride

From Sao Luis, we decided to take our first really long bus-ride to get to Salvador. It was going to be more than 24 hours. We even tried to plan breaking our trip by first going east to Recife and then continuing down south to Salvador, but on further inquiry, we found out that it wouldn't make a difference. Both towns - Recife and Salvador - were about the same distance from Sao Luis so we would in fact be lengthening the journey.

We made inquiries at the bus station and our so-far favourite bus-station attendant (in the Itapemerim booth in Sao Luis) informed us with a finger-wagging, head-nodding sing-song that there was a bus to Feira-de-Santana, which was about an hour from Salvador but not to all the way to Salvador. That bus actually continued a further day, going all the way to Rio. We decided to take the plunge and go 27 hours to Salvador, there didn't seem to be much that was attractive along the way. In the usual course of things it wouldn't really be much of an issue - we have both been on plenty of long train journeys, say, in India - but for the fact that we were not sure we would have an vegetarian food available at the stops the bus stopped at.

After much fretting we decided to carry all our food with us. We made a whole bunch of jam sandwiches, bought a load of snacks and fruit and were on our way. Finally rid of the decidedly un-lordly Lord Hotel. The landscape was beautiful and the trip mainly uneventful and we even found some food along the way - rice and beans at a per-kilo, self-serve place and some really bad pao de queijo. We made our way first through verdant coastal vegetation of palms and looked like sugarcane country and then wound through the dry interior - the parched and harsh sertao, full of scrub and a few cacti - to finally reach Feira de Santana. Here we hurriedly scrambled into a second bus to Salvador and we were there! We survived!