24/02/2020 – Carnival, Salvador, Brasil

We had a nice big lie in today, a much needed sleep! We made coffee, and had some leftover pizza as well as some cereal, and tried to gather our strength for our final blocco today. Joe and Henna came round and we had a pasta lunch alongside a glass of dioralyte and some paracetamol all round. I deroofed a blister on my toe, we are walking over 20km a day during carnival, it’s a lot of movement considering we never get to eat any dinner and have a liquid meal of vodka and lemonade generally! We showered, glittered up and put our final outfit of a green and pink ‘crocodilio’ vest on. We got an Uber half way across the city where we then met up with Rohit and his friends and the big group of us walked the same route as we had on Saturday, through the underpass and through some of the worst poverty I have witnessed so up close. I think because we were a group of about 12 of us by now, we were a bit safer, but had it just been the four of us I am not sure if we could have walked that way. We had a good few drinks from the street vendors to keep us going along the hot and sweaty walk. We were so early to our blocco, we enjoyed watching the sunset across the beach. Josh bought about 4 hot dogs from the street vendors, I think a few days of not eating much has caught up with him! When our blocco started we could see the performer, a Brasilian singer called Daniela Mercury, on the top of the bus with some dancers in red costumes, on the top of the leading lorry. We did the parade but were all running low on energy, so we ducked out early and got a taxi back. Josh and I were pooped, so showered and watched some Netflix. There was a bit of a commotion outside our house and I peered out the window to watch a a brawl and some bottling by the locals, there was some blood on the cars and on the walls of the houses all the way down the street. We watched as the locals came slowly out of their houses afterwards, resuming whatever they had been up to before the incident, as if it was a normal occurance. We heard later that there had been a knifepoint mugging just further up the road during the evening, so there was clearly a bit of ensuing trouble.