Well, you've basically got three ways to go: by taxi, by bus, or by rented car. Taxis are cheap enough by U.S. and European standards (if you don't get taken to where you're going via the long route) and buses, at two reais and thirty centavos, are a bit more than half the cost of a subway ride in New York City. I'll fill you in some more and I'll start with the buses --

First, you don't enter via the front door. You get on through the back door. (The executivos, the more expensive and easily distinguishable alternatives to city buses, are entered at the front. They don't have rear doors.)

In order to get from the airport into town you can go by any of the three means above: taxi, executivo, or city bus. Taxi, of course, is the most expensive. The fare is around seventy-five reais. The executivo is R$4.00, and the city bus (ônibus coletivo) is R$2.30. The advantage to the executivo is that it will accommodate as much luggage as you have.

The end-of-the-line for the executivo is Praça da Sé, at the entrance to Pelourinho, the old colonial city center. To be more exact, the bus stops a couple of blocks before reaching Praça da Sé (the end-of-the-line used to be Praça da Sé itself, but a public plaza was built there a couple of years ago). A lot of the route encompasses a beautiful ride along the orla, or seafront. Oh, and by the way, you don't pay the fare for the executivo when you board the bus. It will either be collected along the way by a fare-collector, or collected by the bus-driver when you get off.

And, Salvador also has a Mêtro! With shiny "new" cars! The shine though, unfortunately, is fading and rusting away as the cars languish in a warehouse for which the city pays 80,000 reais a month, having been purchased in 2008, while the rest of the Mêtro's infrastructure was far from complete (in spite of construction having been started eight years earlier, in 2000). The corruption in this city, state, and country is colossal and appalling! It doesn't matter who you vote for, the system is rigged! Of course it's almost more sickening that in the United States (I'm an American) corruption is completely institutionalized in the obscene form of campaign contributions (and I don't doubt that in terms of the amount of money buying influence, the U.S. is the most corrupt country on the planet; amazing blindness on the part of a lot of people!). It's a good thing that there's more to a country than its politicians and businessmen, or places like Brazil and the United States would be deserts, rather than the intricately fascinating places they are. I suppose that goes for the entire world.

* I'm going to add a list of honest taxi drivers here, with phone numbers...

Cana Brava Records in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil

Brazilian music is deep, there's no question about that! And while musical depth is not unique to Brazil, Brazil's harnessing of depth and warmth to complex and sophisticated rhythms makes it a source of enormous richness to a people -- including many musicians -- who don't have such richness in a more material sense.

Pixinguinha

Cana Brava Records was founded as an outlet for the music of Bahia and Brazil's Nordeste (Northeast, an ethnographic entity unto its own, defined by hardship and spirited resilience), and as an outlet for hard-to-find music in Salvador (while making room for Brazil's consecrated artists, Cartola, Jobim, et al, and styles ranging from the sambas of Rio's morros - hills - to choro - "cry", a style which gave birth some of Brazil's most beautiful compositions and most extraordinary instrumentalists, per which, below, is the trailer to Finnish-born Salvador resident Mika Kaurismäki's 2005 choro documentary, Brasileirinho).

Hamlet said: "I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." The dreams of the composers, singers, and instrumentalists beneath our arches pulse and soar through space and time, extending our shop beyond its walls to the plantations beyond the bay, to the backlands, to the terreiros de candomblé, to the hills ringing Guanabara, to the gafieiras (dancehalls) of 1930s Lapa, the Ipanema of the 1950s and 60s...

Our shop is small, but it encompasses a universe!

Where we're located in Pelourinho...

Our Own Short History of Brazilian Music

Notes on current Bahian music and how it got to be this way...

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