Sao Paulo - March 4th

Today we must leave our island paradise and move on.  Rather than take the long ferry back to Paranagua, we opt for the quicker ferry to the nearest point on the mainland, Punta Do Sol.  From here we get a bus back to Curitiba, and from there we will connect to Sao Paulo.


A few things make this a slightly harder journey than it could have been.  First of all the bus station and the ferry dock are not near each other (when all sources of information had seemed to imply they were), resulting in a taxi transfer.  Then our two hour bus journey took almost three hours as our bus had a problem going uphill (and as we were going from sea level to 900m this was an issue).  Still we got lucky when we got to Curitiba at 13:00 and found a 13:15 bus had been added as well as the 13:00 one (although the next one was 14:00).  Still it must be said that it was still a lot quicker getting back from the island this way than by taking the train like we did to get there.

Getting the early bus did prove invaluable though because the traffic on the road from Curitiba to Sao Paulo was pretty bad.  This is mostly because of lorries being slow on the uphill section, or road works.  The road works were mainly to widen the road so we could pass the lorries.  I’m sure it will all be fine in time for the 2014 World Cup, but for us it was frustrating.  We did get a good look at the Atlantic rainforest again, like on the Serra Verde train.  I had read that it is even more threatened than the Amazon rainforest, but there does appear to be a lot of it still hanging around.


The frustration is because with Sao Paulo being a city of 23 million it is a different type of Brazil to what we are used to.  And we are slightly apprehensive about the safety of being in such a city.  So getting there at 20:45 instead of 19:30 makes a difference.  But we didn’t need to worry because although the bus station was in a dodgy part of town the metro was there to take us right to a station two blocks from our hostel.  It is a very efficient, clean and safe looking metro.  We still had one issue though, after checking in it was almost 22:00 and we still hadn’t eaten.  Our hostel is not in one of the main eating areas of town, so instead on their recommendation we phoned for pizza and had it delivered to the hostel.   Actually this was quite a good introduction to the world’s 7^th largest city (depending on whose list you read).