Candomblé

Vestments of Obaluaé

Acessórios de candomblé are easy to find in Salvador.  There are two shops (each with an annex) dealing in such located on the ground floor of Edifício Themis (the Themis Building), on the southern side of Praça da Sé in Salvador's Centro Histórico.  These shops are an interesting walk-through even if you're not planning to buy, something in the vein of mercantile museums.

Colares in A Conta

When the season rolls around, you can get your Carnival colares (necklaces) there too, at good prices.

Hair

Negra Jhô

Negra Jhô's African hair salon is located in Pelourinho, at Rua Frei Vicente (Ladeira de São Miguel), 4 (a couple of doors down from Nego Fua's Bar Galícia). Jhô was the first in the area with a salon devoted to African styles and is resolved to stay in spite of competition from later-comers who work in the street and don't have to pay rent. Leave even more beautiful than when you entered!

Tels: +55 (71) 3321-6867 / 3321-8332 / 9162-7239, kimundo@bol.com.br

Hand-Made Clothing & Batiks

Vânia strikes a pose.

Vânia Nazaré works out of her atelier in the neighborhood of Mouraria, making dresses (including the one she's wearing above), shirts, and batik wall hangings (per above).

Rua do Bângala, 160, (71) 3321-6318, 9609-1932, 8817-4361, vanianazare@gmail.com.

Fiction

The interior of Bahia is home to the great sertão, a dry, hard-scrabble area where people work laboriously to eke out a living from an uncompromising and unyielding land.  But as hard-scrabble as the sertão is, and as far away as it may seem, it isn't nearly so far away as the real-estate pictured in the photograph above (Mars).

Author, Scientist

What does Mars have to do with Bahia?  Thomas E. Thorpe is what.  Mr. Thorpe, in addition to being an astronomer, is the Project Manager for the Mars Surveyor Project at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (and is therefore responsible for flight operations for the Mars Surveyor series of missions).  And as it this weren't enough, Tom Thorpe is also a writer of fiction.  The latest addition to his work is a tautly plotted and well-researched historical mystery entitled Night Wind to Bahia, set around the time of the Malê Revolt of 1835.

Mr. Thorpe has a website where this book and others in his Darmon series may be purchased.