It's really hard to go a small distance

11.03.2016

I headed out this morning on the 7am bus to ponta grossa, thinking this should be early enough to make it to Vila velha. Not exactly. I had a little card that the woman at the bus station gave to me with bus directions and I found out it was wrong. There were no times on it, and when I took the buses they told me to take, I ended up at a random place on the side of the highway, 3 km away from where I wanted to go. I was forced to walk all the way there. It was pretty dangerous with giant trucks lumbering by constantly. After an hour singing random songs from my iPod and sauntering down the freeway like a hobo, I found myself at the gate of the park. A man stopped me and after taking what seemed like an excessive amount of time typing on his phone, he couldn't tell me what he had originally wanted to, he just pointed down the street. I kept walking, and the military police stopped me...AGAIN. For some reason he had to bring me to the front ticket office himself, I was about 20 metres away at that point. Where were you 5 kms ago? Whatevz. I was getting really tired of this attitude of having massive security for something as simple as a state park or art gallery. At the reception area, they brought the one guy that spoke English out and he told me how to buy a ticket and take the bus to the attractions. He was nice enough, but oh great a bus tour...for maximum security purposes we were all shuttled around between the craters and rock formations. They would let us off at various places and then we went around in a little clump, easily observed and controlled. People must really be jerks in Brazil if you have to keep such close watch on tourists at a nature park. People with very young children and retirees who can barely make it up the stairs. Other than the transportation and security annoyances, this park was worth the visit, the crater is pretty amazing and the rocks are awesome. You can look straight down into the earth and look up at towering monstrosities made from glaciers. Admission was really really cheap, so that was great, and my lunch wasn't much of a ripoff either. It was just the sheer amount of people watching you making sure you didn't go off the path or start turning the rocks into your own art canvas that was disconcerting. After I walked around, I tried to take the bus back. My guidebook said it would be easy to flag one down but it was not. None of the buses would stop no matter how hard I waved. A poor family said the next bus came in three hours and they were waiting for it. That was insane, so I just went back to the info guy and asked him what he knew about the bus, he said the same thing, the bus comes at 6 p.m., sorry.

I turned right around and started walking back down the highway. He ran after me with a walkie talkie and the English speaking guy on the other end. He told me not to walk and that he would bring me to the bus because it was too dangerous. Why don't the city planners make the bus go all the way to the park then, if it's so dangerous. It's the main tourist attraction in town! What are people supposed to do? Ugh. So it was super nice of him to bring me back the 3 km I had walked in the morning. Then, there was about an hour until my bus to Ponta Grossa came, so I tried the beer with the sexy lady on it that I'd been seeing around town. It's delicious btw. I made it back just in time for the 5:10 bus back home, a successful though frustrating and tiring day trip.

There was a major traffic jam on the way home, so I got home pretty late.

The wrong bus to the park