We arrived at the airport in Salvador, expecting an uneventful day of travel. We would go smoothly through security, make our first flight without any issues, and have a few hours to burn in Vitoria before our connecting flight to Belo Horizonte.
If it were that plain, I would not be writing a blog post about it.
The sign on the monitor said "last call for the flight to Vitoria."
I was a little concerned because Avery was still in the bathroom, and I didn't know how much longer he would be. Once he finished his business, we handed our tickets to the gate agent and proceeded onto the bus that would take us onto the plane.
We were standing on the bus for a few minutes when the gate agent walked out to the bus and pulled us aside. He told us that we weren't supposed to go to Vitoria. We were booked on a flight to go to the city of Vitoria da Conquista. We went back into the terminal to await our actual flight.
No worries, we thought. We'll just look into our guidebook and find a way to fill the four-hour layover. We opened our Lonely Planet Brazil to find our destination, figuring that any city large enough to have an airport with flights to two major cities would be in the book. We couldn't find it.
We looked in the index. Nothing.
We looked in the section about the state of Bahia. Nothing.
We looked in the section about the state of Minas Gerais. Nothing
With no clue where we were headed, we got on our rear-loading prop-plane. We figured that wherever this plane was going to take us, we would be able to make our connection flight - as long as it left from the same airport.
No worries. Airline magazines always have those nice maps of their routes...but this airline didn't have any magazines.
It wasn't until we were 20,000 feet off the ground that I asked the woman sitting next to me where we were going. She said we were going to the city of Vitoria da Conquista, which is hundreds of kilometers away from the city we thought we were going to.
She said Vitoria da Conquista was located in the state of Bahia, right on the border with Minas Gerais. She pointed it out to me on the map in the guidebook. Apparently, it is the third largest city in the state, but there is absolutely no reason for tourists to go there. So there is no reason to include anything about it in a guidebook.
Our experience at the airport gave me the inkling that we were headed somewhere different than we had expected, but I pinned that up to not understanding Portuguese.
For example, every time I told the ticketing agent that we were going to Vitoria to get a connecting flight to Belo Horizonte, she would say Vitoria da Conquista. I thought this was formal name of Vitoria, and they were really up tight about the name of their city being pronounced correctly.
The time on the gate monitor for the first flight was a half hour earlier than our scheduled take-off time, but it was our scheduled boarding time. I thought that, because we had to taxi out to the plane on bus, that they moved the time up on the monitor.
Now that we knew the name of the place we were headed, I had to find out a bit more about the area.
The woman next to me told me that it was a big coffee-growing region. The view from the plane looked like the area was really dry and barren. She told that it's not normally this dry. The city was in the middle of a big drought, and the local water company was rationing water (Unlike the water company in Ecuador that cuts the water without warning, the water company in Vitoria da Conquista tells customers when the water will be out).
Apparently the downtown area was a big commerce hub and a very bustling place during the day. My new friend was kind enough to drop us off in the central plaza. We walked around the town for a few minutes in the direction of the central bus stop to head back to the airport.
After reading about the Bahian cuisine and visiting a museum dedicated to it in Salvador, we wanted to have the experience of eating some good Bahian street food. What we had read said that almost all traditional foods were not vegetarian-friendly. In talking to the woman next to me on the plane, she explained that acaraje, a typical food that is normally made with shrimp, can be ordered without shrimp.
We came across a delicious-looking acaraje stand on the corner and sat down for a bite. Acaraje is a black-eyed bean patty about the size of a baseball. The patty is cut in half and then filled with a chopped salad, spicy pepper puree, and some sort of grain spread. It was delicious. The patty reminded Avery of the spiced breading on good shnitzel patties.
On a side note: Don't you feel a great sense of relief when your plane ticket says that you are seated in the first handful of rows? That means you aren't going to have to wait to get on or off the plane. When we got our seats in row 3, we felt that sensation - only to be disappointed when we learned it was a rear-loading aircraft.
How they could have two similarly sounding cities take off from the same gate within twenty minutes of each other was a question for another day.
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