The staff in our hotel were impressed that our next destination was to be Curitiba rather than the standard tour that goes from Rio de Janeiro to Iguaçu and then down to Buenos Aires, with a possible inclusion of São Paulo for transport logistics.

Our first experience of the Brazilian intercity bus service was an 11 hour journey from Foz do Iguaçu  to the booming city of Curitiba. First impressions are that the big intercity buses in Brazil are relatively luxurious affairs and while the journeys are long, we arrived pretty much on time.

The countryside we drove through looked as if anything could grow there. In particular there were fields and fields of soya and maize as well as a number of ranches. Also practically every town we passed through seemed to be full of dealers selling the latest shiny new agricultural equipment; we soon lost count of the number of bright red tractors and harvesters for sale. In contrast to this there were a large number of old motor vehicles on the roadside in what looked like a whole second line of business in recycling.

Many of the the towns we passed through were clearly developing fast, with a massive quantity of building going on, indeed there were clusters of tower blocks on the edge of the towns with a number of pockets of empty land in the town centres.

Date: 30/01/2018