Paranagua

From the station, we soon arrived at our hostel, which happily was somewhat nicer than we had anticipated it might be.  It was also about the only place that we saw that was open for lunch, so we availed ourselves of that too before setting off to look around.

Paranagua is only small, so there wasn't a great deal to look around, but we checked out a few churches, the old market building and the square with an old animal drinking fountain.

Walking along the beachfront we saw lots of people flying kites, and we came across the rather impressive aquarium building.  Unfortunately the aquarium itself was closed.

A lot of the buildings here are quite tatty, with a number that are verging on decrepid, often with plants - sometimes whole trees - growing out of them, despite still being fully in use.

One was particularly bad, and looked as if the top of the facade might at any point fall off onto anyone below; it was a church building, so we figured they were trusting to God to keep them safe.

Underneath the tattiness though, many of the buildings were actually quite attractive, so those few that had been properly restored looked very good.

We considered getting one of the boats around the shore and nearby islands, but as it was by now pretty hot, and the smaller boats had no shade on them at all, we contented ourselves with staying on dry land.

One thing that I have found strange in a number of places in South America, but noticed a lot here, is that while they may be helpful in putting up some information about a place, they often put that information on a huge great sign which they position directly in the way of getting a good view of whatever it is you are looking at.  Between these signs and all of the messy tangles of electric and phone cables, getting an unobstructed picture can be something of a challenge at times.

In the evening we discovered that being a Sunday, all of the local young people gather along the beachfront and listen to the music blaring out of a number of cars kitted out with huge great speakers.  Some were enthusiastically dancing in the back of a pickup, and I don't hold out much hope for the future state of its suspension as a result.

As well as the gathering along the front, a number of people were driving around with their huge speaker systems too.  We were more amused though to see those who had not yet progressed to cars cycling around instead, some of them with trikes kitted out with the big speakers.

Of course this was all fine while we were up ourselves, and we're not early to bed people, but eventually we did turn in and we found that the party went on for a while and the music as some of the cars went past was so loud that the windows vibrated massively.  Nic donned his earplugs and we both did our best to sleep through it.

Having pretty much 'done' Parangaua the afternoon before, we wandered around some more and then just relaxed in the sun for the rest of the day before starting our long journey to Paraty.

As it turned out it was just as well that we had some time to spare and were sat somewhere with wifi, because in the afternoon we got an email from the hostel that we were due to stay at in Paraty saying that the reduced rate that we had booked with them over a month ago was in fact an error and we would have to pay considerably more. This was doubtless some kind of ploy as they had realised they could sell our room for more as there was an event in town, but there wasn't a lot we could do about it from Paranagua.

So we cancelled our booking there and booked somewhere else that in fact turned out to be in a better location. Happily we have still had the review form for the Che Lagarto hostel, so we will be slating it accordingly!

The Serra Verde train

The point of coming to Curitiba was to take the Serra Verde train to Paranagua, which is billed as one of the most beautiful train journeys, through one of the remaining southerly sections of rainforest.

It was an early start, so I was only just about awake enough to take note of the big train set in the vestibule and the fact that it appears to be someone's actual job to play with the train set and talk to people about it.

On the platform, they had a number of huge bronze tablets with images relating to the train and its journey.  They looked pretty impressive.  I particularly liked the one with the trees and wildlife on it.

The train itself is nothing special, or at least our standard 'litorino' coach wasn't.  The information referred to a bilingual tour guide, which we had reasonably, but as it turned out foolishly, assumed would mean that we would get the tour in English as well as Portuguese.

In fact although she spoke enough English to welcome us, give us a few small facts, tell us that while the first drink was free we would have to buy others, and to try to sell us a DVD (that was in Portuguese), she could not do any of the tour itself in English, so we sat in blissful ignorance of any interesting details.
For those of you who like a few facts though, I do know that the railway line was built between 1880 and 1885, is around 110km, has 13 tunnels and thirty bridges.
The largest is the Sao Joao Bridge which is 55 metres high, and two of the bridges are linked by the Carvalho Viaduct which spans the gap between.
In the main, the journey is spent passing through the forests, and so really all that you are seeing are a lot of trees, banana plants and so forth.  It does look nice, but is pretty much all the same.  The area where is gets most interesting is where you pass along the very edge of a valley and can see across the valley to the steep rock faces above and forest below.

Most of the time there was only the one track, so we had to make stops every so often at a section where there were two, to enable an oncoming train to pass us.  These other trains are the real life of the track as they are goods trains, with huge carriages full of goodness knows what passing back and forth from the port of Paranagua.
At one point we passed a derailed train on its side next to the track.  While this would obviously have been a very unfortunate incident, I guess the train crew, and the owner of any cargo that was on it, would have been fairly relieved that it happened here, rather than in a section where there was nothing at the side of the track for the train to fall onto.  I wouldn't rate the chances of anything or anyone plunging over those rock faces.

Overall, the train journey isn't spectacular.  Most of it is nothing special, but the key section through the forest and around the cliffs is good to see if you are around the area.  Honestly though, we weren't really convinced that it was worth the detour that we made.

There was a short stop at a little chapel.  Again, we didn't get any translated explanation, but we gather this is a little Jesuit chapel built so that they could stop to pray before beginning their walk.  It was interesting as it was decorated with keys and keyholes.  Don't know why though.

What did add to the interest in the journey though was something that happened as a result of the broken air conditioning in our carriage.  As the day got hotter, the temperature in the carriage became uncomfortable and a number of our fellow travellers started complaining about it.  A little later, the guide told us that as the luxury carriages were now empty, we could all move into those instead.

These carriages were designed by Paulo Peruzzo to represent the colonial days when train travel was very popular, and they are impressively decorated and fitted out.  So we went from a basic carriage to the luxury one with proper leather armchairs.  I even decided to try out the toilet and it was all fancy too, with a lamp and everything.
On arriving into Paranagua the town's history as a shipping port was immediately evident as we passed huge areas of shipping containers.  We did wonder why we got a police motorcycle escort as we arrived, but we worked out that this was just how they controlled the road crossings.