A Brazilian friend described Curitiba as a rich city, and 'not like the rest of Brazil'. It certainly feels like a city in decent shape. The streets are wide and it boasts about its bus network. They have bendy buses with 2 bends - what would Boris make of them? - and you can interchange between bus lines in the many tube-shaped shelters around the city.
One option here is a tourist bus tour of the city, which comes tantalisingly close to giving you good views of the main sights (and you can jump on and off). Unfortunately there are only about 8 seats downstairs and upstairs has an open top and for us it is, as it has been for the last 4 days, raining pretty much non-stop. Ah well. On a rainy day, sitting on the bus for a 2.5 hour circuit of the city seems as good as any other way to pass the time. The bus passes through some nice parks and suburbs - you can spot the nice houses because they have electric fences and barbed wire.
We jumped off once, at the Museo Oscar Niemeyer, a crazy building that has recently had a new addition, 'the eye', which looks a bit like the Lord's media centre, added by ON, a famous architect. Fun design of the building itself, although the art spaces here are amazingly badly designed. Didn't enjoy all the art here but some bits were interesting, including Marcello Grassmann's crazy engravings and rubbings, and Carlos Alonso's van Goghs; and some models of ON's own most famous buildings.
Curitiba is also the starting point for possibly Brazil's most scenic train journey - not that it has much competition since there are only about 4 trains in the whole country. The train takes 3 hours to wend its way slowly through Atlantic rainforest (with guided commentary in Portuguese unless you splurge for the expensive top class - still, you can tell when to look left or right by watching the locals. Left side of the train is best, by the way), which for a while is pretty, with just enough colourful flowers to suggest that it's even better in summer. And for a while it's spectacular, as the train clings to a hillside, taking bridges over waterfalls. The sun rarely threatens to shine on us, and mist intermittently blocks some views, but either low cloud or localised mist gathering in patches below us makes for some breathtaking views at times.
The problem with train journeys like this is that they have to go somewhere - in this case Morretes, a cobbled-street village that is too run-down to be charming and clearly entirely dependent on selling underwhelming lunches and knick-knacks to tourists. Put it this way: you shouldn't worry that you won't have enough time here (and we came on a Sunday, when the stopover is an hour longer than any other day). Fortunately any disappointment was shaken off by the return journey - oh yeah, we realised, the views really were that good. So not an unmissable trip but a good one.
Next up for us is Sao Paulo, a huge city (biggest in the southern hemisphere) that we don't hear many fond words about, but fingers crossed. If nothing else, our bus ride to this 'concrete jungle' is a pleasant journey past green hills and blue lakes, with - predictably - the first sun we've seen in a week pouring through the window. We last saw it set beautifully over the lagoon on Santa Catarina, and it seemed to have decided to go out on that high note and not reappear for days. It would be nice if it sticks around a bit...
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