beachy day.....

Spent all afternoon on the beach in Barra today. This time I finally went inside to the little maritime museum inside the fort at the base of the lighthouse. It was marvelous! I learned all kinds of things! I was shocked at the antiquity of Salvador - the Portuguese first claimed Brazil way back in 1501 by placing a rock right on the site where the lighthouse now stands. The fort was built soon after, the first fort the Portuguese built in South America; and the lighthouse itself is the oldest lighthouse in America. I was stunned, really, to realize that a lot of the classic colonial architecture I´ve been admiring, throughout Salvador, dates to the mid-1600s. Salvador´s history is a lot deeper than I´d realized.

Spent a long time at the display of the tragic wreckage of a grand Spanish galleon that was wrecked just off the lighthouse in the mid-1600s. It was loaded with priests and Portuguese officials who´d come all the way across the Atlantic, and they almost made it. Imagine coming all the way across the Atlantic successfully in a tiny little galleon, and then drowning within sight of land. They got almost to Barra - I imagine they must have been trying to reach the Bay of All Saints before a storm hit - but they were caught by the storm at nightfall.

The Portuguese version of this story, on a placard in the museum, read somethign like "After hours of desperate struggle, the poor ship, which had been suffering for hours, finally foundered and sank at 11 at night." The English translation condensed this to a dry "The ship sank at 11pm". I think I prefer the Portuguese version....

Anyway, the ship went down just beyond the lighthouse, in the middle of the night, in a raging Atlantic storm. 400 people died. Including the new governor-general of Brazil, who didn´t even get to set foot on his new territory.

For centuries afterward, fishermen retained an oral history of a sunken ship that they swore lay just off the Barra beaches. In the 1970s the Brazilian Navy decided to try to find it, and find it they did. What was left was several dozen cannons and anchors that still preserved the original outline of the ship, and little clumps of crockery, and pots, and forks, and even the simple wedding rings that the priests had brought with them (so that they could perform wedding ceremonies). They even found dishes with the family crest of the governor-general.

That was pretty fascinating stuff. But I think my very favorite part of the museum was its astonishing collection of miniature-ships-in-bottles. Including a miniature Brazilian-Navy-and-helicopter-rescuing-a-sinknig-ship-in-a-bottle. Don´t think I´ve seen a helicopter in a bottle before.

I finally pulled free of the museum and walked on, and reached the tiny Barra beach. What a perfect, perfect beach. The water on this side of the lighthouse is calm as can be - a few hundred meters away, on the other side, there were terrifying breakers rolling in off the Atlantic. But here on the Bay side, it was as calm as glass. You can even swim laps. Which I did. And everybody was having so much fun - men playing handball and kicking soccer balls around, children building beach castles, skinny boys horsing around diving off the pier. Vendors walking by and calling out: water, nice and cold! Baked cheese! Cooked shrimp on skewers! Sandwiches for sale! Beach wraps! Jewelry! Soda pop!

I swam back and forth along the entire beach, and I got a squeaky baked-cheese with sprinkles of oregano, and a little sandwich. I dozed in the sun until the tide came up and started to lap at my toes; and watched the sun set over the Bay. I thought: Oregon has a lot of great things, but Oregon does not have this beach.

I´m told Salvador is the only place in all of Brazil where you can watch the sun set over the sea. (well, over the Bay, anyway.) And it was a beautiful, beautiful sunset.