Costa do Sauipe

In the summer of 1983, my first wife Bonita, my seven year-old daughter Rachel and I took a two week vacation to Hawaii.  Rachel has referred to this as the family's best vacation.  It was wonderful, especially our time on Maui.

However, my son Bret was not born until two years later.  Ironically, he has travelled to Hawaii for work several times and the rest of us not at all since 1983.

In the winter of 2004-2005, before Bret's trips to Hawaii, I decided to take him to another tropical location, to sort of make up for him not going on our family vacation to Hawaii.  We went to a resort in the Brazilian State of Bahia.

He and I flew from New York to Sao Paulo and then transferred to another flight to Salvador, the capital of Bahia.  From there, we took a special bus to Costa do Sauipe.

This resort is in essence a gated community consisting of five hotels plus restaurants, stores and various activities available to all its guests.  We stayed at the Sofitel Hotel.

Bret and I enjoyed a breakfast and dinner buffet as guests of the hotel.  We lunched at one of the restaurants outside the hotel.

One day, we sat an outdoor restaurant and placed our order with a waiter.  Our food took a very long time to arrive until we realized that our order was delivered to the wrong table.  The two men there ate the food we ordered but refused to pay for it since it wasn't what they ordered.  We eventually got our food.

One night we went to a bar and Bret got his first legal alcoholic beverage, a caipirinha.  The legal age in Brazil is eighteen, while in the US it is twenty-one.  Bret was nineteen.

Between meals, we spent time at the hotel's pool.  Early in the morning Bret liked to drink agua de coco right from the freshly cut coconuts available free to the hotel's guests.  I remember strolling on the beautiful sandy beach on Costa do Sauipe.  One day, Bret and I went horseback riding.

I didn't want Bret to think that this resort was typical of Brazil.  So, I hired a taxi driver to take us to Salvador, the capital of Bahia.  Our first stop was at the Basilica do Senhor do Bonfim, the most famous church in Bahia.  As we got out of our taxi, we were mobbed by parishioners who put religious bands on our wrists.

We then went to the Mercado Modelo where I bought Bret a jersey of the Brazilian national football team.  In the old part of Salvador, we visited a museum dedicated to the Brazilian author Jorge Amado, a couple of whose books I had read in English.  We had hot dogs from a street vendor for lunch.

On our return to the airport in Sao Paulo, we discovered that a snow storm in New York caused our flight there to be cancelled.  Luckily, we were able to get on a flight to Miami.

Once in Miami, Bret and I put our names on a waiting list for the one flight that was able to leave for New York.  We were lucky to get a couple of the last seats available.  

I remember arriving in New York while a storm was still hitting the area and we were not appropriately dressed.  But we survived.