Welcome
Travelogues
Begin trip
Previous: Paraguay
|
Capital: Brasília
|
Text about the country |
|
| Atlapedia CIA Country Reports Lonely Planet Traveldocs bresil | ||
The Itaipu dam built between Paraguay and Brazil on the Paraná river creates a 1400 square km artificial lake extending north. Being professionally interested by matters of energy, I did not miss visiting the huge hydro-electric plant housing 18 turbines of 700 megawatts each.
With a total capacity of 12 600 megawatts, the Itaipu plant satisfies the needs of Paraguay and of all of southern Brazil replacing two dozen highly polluting coal or oil fired thermal plants.
The borders of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet a few km south of the Itaipu dam where the Iguaçu river flows into the Paraná river. The Iguaçu forms the border between Brazil and Argentina. This photo shows the falls on the Argentina side of the river.
The Brazilian part of the falls is more spectacular as you can see from these pictures.
I stayed only one night in the town of Foz do Iguaçu. After visiting the Iguaçu Falls and the Itaipu plant, I took an overnight "leito" bus to Curitiba. The Brasilian sleeping busses are really quite comfortable. The next morning I took this photo through the window shortly before arriving in Curitiba where I took another bus to São Paulo.
Arriving in the afternoon, I found a cheap hotel in São João street and started to explore the central area around Praça da República, Praça da Sé and the Luz train station. This is the Sé Cathedral on Praça Sé.
And here is the Luz train station next to the Parque da Luz. There's a lot to see in São Paulo, nice parks, good museums and a great art gallery.
This audaciously suspended building is the São Paulo art gallery on Avenida Paulista.. The peaceful Parque Trianon across the street is an oasis of quiet in the noisy city center. São Paulo also has an interesting zoo with a herd of giraffes which were the first that I had seen.
This part of Avenida Paulista is where all the banks are. I found one that gave me an advance on my credit card and took a night bus for Brasilia for I found the big, modern Saõ Paulo with its 15 million people a little intimidating after months of visiting villages, towns and more human sized cities.
Brasilia is not oversized like São Paulo but it is entirely artificial. It is a city without history that was built in three years just in time to become the capital in 1960.
President Kubitscheck got himself a big ego trip and his acomplices (urbanist Lucio Costa, architect Oscar Niemeyer and landscaper Burle Marx), had a wet dream letting their imagination loose aiming to impress but they gave little consideration to the practical aspects of urban life.
The entrance to Brazil's "pentagon" (military center) is a success as far as being impressive goes.
Kubitschek's mausoleum is also impressive.
The Cathedral is impressive and beautiful like a sculpture.
Especially inside when the sun is shining through the stained glass roof.
The clean lines of the dome (the Senate), the saucer (the Congress) and the legislative office buildings behind them are also beautiful in a futuristic way.
Great architecture is a pleasure for the eyes wherever it is and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs certainly is great architecture...
Wide open spaces are always impressive, like Tienanmen Square, or the Red Square. They exalt the power that inhabits them by reducing the individuals who chance to venture there to insignificant proportions.
More vast spaces with a couple of ant-sized humans venturing on foot in the land of giants.
Here are some of the giants in front more great architecture, the Supreme Court building.
Everything is squeaky clean in this new artificial city, even the cheap hotels like this one where I stayed for 16 dollars. I met a young man who brought me to meet his parents in a standard modular apartment some distance from the center. I gathered from our conversations that Brasilia was nicer to look at than to live in for it was difficult for anyone not born here to adapt to the sterile, standardized lifestyle that the city imposes on its captive civil servant population (of which the higher ranking spend every weekend elsewhere).
personally I think that is a serious mistake to isolate civil servants in a capital where the only business is government business because of the inevitable intellectual inbreeding that results. I know for I have experienced it, I was raised in Ottawa and I have worked 10 years in Quebec City. There is very little else than government related activities in those two capitals. Civil servants living in those ivory towers are cut off from the economic reality of industry, agriculture and commerce. As I have seen it, Brasília is only an ivory tower.
