The Iguassu Falls Area Guru

Photo from the Serra Verde Express, the Train Passenger Concession Holder. This is the railway I will be talking about in this posting. Am I exagerating? I literally walked to the Roça Nova area of Piraquara. I took the very local integrated bus to Roseira and got off about five kilometers from the Piraquara Bus Terminal on the intersection of the very long Nova Tirol Rural Route (RR – or Estrada or still Rua do Nova Tirol) with the RR Antônio Brudeck. From there I was safely taken to Roça Nova by my map and my feet using my pair of worn Kildare shoes – not walking shoes. Roça Nova – that means New Clearing – is on the border of Piraquara’s nowhere with the where-in-the-heck-am-I area of the Curitiba Metropolitan Area – CMA or AMC. I have been tempting to think that Roça Nova has about 10 houses on the left side of the tracks and about four or five on the right side of the Paranaguá – Curitiba railroad track. There is also a Pousada nearby but apparently I missed its entrance gate....

Photo of abandoned Tube Station in the TTU of Foz do Iguaçu Would this work somewhere else? What I mean here is would the Curitiba Public Bus Transportation System work everywhere. I don’t know. Probably not. I have heard though I can not say what results were that cities like New York and Los Angeles have tested or thouhgt of testing the Curitiba Futuristic Bus Tube Rapid Transit / Transport system or part of the system. Has it worked out there? I think that part of the problem is that is that cities throughout Brazil or even the world adopt part of the system. One example that I can offer you about a place where the Curitiba Solution was tested twice and did not work is that of Foz do Iguaçu – the city that accidentally came to be a neighbor of the Iguassu Falls – which I have declared as a World Peace and Power Place thus making the city a kind of Guardian of the Falls. In 1997 the Government of Paraná then under the administration of Architect Jaime Lerner, one of the fathers of t...

Bus Terminal in Curitiba Where? In Curitiba. Brazil has 27 states – so we have 27 state capitals. Curitiba is the capital of the Southern state of Paraná – where I live. There are three Southern states: Paraná, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul. Beyond RGS is Uruguayland. Curitiba has had all the reason in the world to have remained quiet and unknown. And it was. Until the mid 70s Curitiba was just a city, cold, normal, boring and growing to be chaotic. It was only in 1974 that the city was kicked out of its sleep and into the world arena to the point of having made the front pages of Magazines worldwide like TIME and Newsweek (I think). You do not have to know this in order to safely take a bus in the city and go anywhere. But it will help to know that every bus moving around in the city has been the result of yers of sticking to intelligent planning – something not so normal in most Brazilian cities. The first thing I would say is, hum, there is a holy trinity to be identified ...

Photos courtesy of the Piraquara City Government, Secretary of the Environment and Tourism. 1. Avenida Getulio Vargas (Avenue) between the Mountain Range and Curitiba. 2) One of the 1.000 plus wellsprings of the Iguaçu River There were three questions that I hated the most when I worked as a guide in the Iguassu Falls area back in the late 70s when I was younger and foolish. The first had to do with the geological formation of the Falls. We then learned, as we learn today, that the Falls orginated from a volcano. Which volcano? Where? The second was which side is more beautiful the Brazilian or the Argentine? Depending on who asked you might be in big trouble. The third was: where does the Iguassu River come from? The answer then was normally what it still is today: the Iguaçu River comes from Curitiba – like the Government. Curitiba is the seat of the Paraná State Government – a Government headquartered at the Palacio Iguaçu in the Curitiba’s Civic Center. I am writing this tod...