The Cactus Trip Diaries

After a good night’s sleep, Marlon took us to a Nissan garage to get the car serviced after Brian’s 5 day long trip from Sucre in Bolivia. While the car is being worked on, Marlon takes us shopping at Shopping Iguatemi, a large modern city centre shopping mall, the one with the 2 McDonald restaurants, one inside the mall, the other a drive through in the car park – impressive!

The centre of Salvador has many sky scrapers and modern architecture office blocks; just like any large modern European city centre.  Later, when we drove out of the city we saw many large crowded favelas build against the hills.  There are the usual crowds around at traffic lights, people who clean car windows and demand money, just as in most large cities anywhere in the world.

Brian bought a second spare tyre and we enjoy lunch at McDonalds and tea at Pizza Hut.

Given the summer like weather, it was strange to find that by 18:00 it was pitch dark.  Sun rise is around 6:00, so in the weeks to come, we would get up at 6:00 and would usually be in bed by 20:00, dog tired.

Late in the afternoon, Marlon took us to the Lagoa do Abaete (the Abaete Lake Park) in Itapoa, north of Salvador, near the airport, along the Atlantic Coast in sand dunes.

Unfortunately the light is too poor for photography, but we plan to return at the end of the trip for pictures.  Unfortunately the weather on our return had turned, so no photos other than the ones taken today, of Melocactus azureus. Other plants seen, but not photographed, are Cereus fernambucensis and Pilosocereus salvadoriensis.

[PS: writing these notes up today, in 2013, and after years of taking digital cameras on our plant trips, I need to explain that on this trip, we had each budgeted for one roll of 36 exposures per day and then would often queue up to take the same picture of the same plant!]