I am typing this in the middle of a lake. The lake isn’t very deep—about an inch—but it forms over the kitchen floor of my son Jeremy’s apartment whenever it rains in Salvador. It has been raining in Salvador solidly for a month, according to the taxi driver who brought me here from the bus station. Seven people have died and several houses have been washed away.

I have been amazed by my good luck with the weather so far. In two weeks of travelling through Brazil and Ecuador I have not had a day of rain. I arrived in Parnaiba the day after the torrential rains stopped, on May 6, and left Caravelas yesterday under blue skies. During the 10-hour bus ride north, I moved from one climate zone to another, and now it’s emphatically umbrella time. The cloud is so low the tops of the church steeples are disappearing into grey.

Salvador’s colonial architecture is stunning. The twin bell towers of the Convent of Carmo, 50 metres from the kitchen window, are crusted with lichen and wear the black patina of age and decay. The hands on the tower’s two clocks look as if they haven’t moved in a hundred years. I lean out the window to watch people hurrying down the cobbled streets, holding newspapers or jackets over their heads in the rain.

The whole purpose of coming to Salvador is to prove to those who think otherwise (are you there, Heather?) that I can take a day off. In this case, two. I fly to the Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge in Florida on Sunday, but I’ve diverted to Salvador to see Jeremy’s last day of capoeira training before he returns to New Zealand.

Salvador is Mecca for anyone who is serious about capoeira Angola, the more traditional of the two forms of the game. Capoeira is crudely described as “ritualised mock combat,” a label that gives no hint of the subtlety and complexity of the game. Encounters are backed by singing, the twanging of berambaus—single-stringed instruments made of a gourd, a stick, and a piece of wire excavated from the rim of a truck tyre—and the beating of drums and tambourines. It is an intense, vibrant experience. Jeremy has been training here for three months. Last year he was here for six. I watch him play with a parent’s pride and an outsider’s bafflement. After a game he will explain some nuance to me—a particular gambit that paid off, a stylish move his opponent made—but I’m in smile and nod territory. I find the moves as difficult to fathom as the jumps my figure-skating daughter used to perform. Was that a single Axel or a double Lutz?

There’s something about the switching of roles between parent and child that I find deeply satisfying. For 20-odd years you play, however erratically, the part of the sage, the teacher, the Decider, and then you’re the one who’s being taught, who’s being taken in hand, being guided through an exotic city, with its exotic tastes.

Acarajé was number one on the must-eat list of street foods. Mashed black-eyed peas formed into a ball and fried in palm oil, then filled with shrimp paste, these little flavour bombshells are a Salvador speciality. So, too, açai, the pulped crimson berries of the açai palm, sweetened and served ice-cold mixed with granola. Unbelievably good. One night we ate the classic Brazilian fish stew called moqueca, brought to the table bubbling in a clay dish that has been blackened through soaking in a decoction of the bark of the red mangrove. (See, even on my days off, mangroves find me!)

It was my great good fortune to catch an exhibition of the work of Carybé, an artist I had never heard of, but will now never forget. This astonishing genius could work equally powerfully in paint, sculpture, mural and stage design. His sketches of capoeira capture the elegance of the game far better than a camera can.

At the end of the roda I attended—the three-hour capoeira session—the mestre (literally master, the leader of the capoeira school) made some comments which resulted in everyone looking amusedly in my direction. Jeremy explained that he had joked that since I was clearly the oldest person in the room I should have the last word. “Say something in Portuguese,” Jeremy said. Reaching into my paltry stock of one-liners, I came out with “Beleza!” (Beautiful!) Everyone clapped. Which goes to show the truth of a sign I saw in a Salvador junk shop: The old burro can still eat.

PS The fact that I’m posting this on the 22nd and it is now the 29th is probably as confusing to readers as it is becoming to me. Lately I have been putting in long hot days in the field and have lacked brain space to write, and internet access to post. I hope that the posting date and the actual date will start to be more congruent soon.

Below: a striking sculpture outside Salvador’s museum of modern art, which was hosting the Carybé exhibition, and one of Carybé’s capoeira paintings.