Our first bus ride out of Rio took us to the town of Ouro Preto, where every single surface on every single building breathes history from Brazil´s colonial past. A beautiful sight indeed, but we soon learned how the breathtaking beauty of every laden brick was tainted with the haunting hand of slavery.
Moving about the state of Minas Gerais, we also got a first hand look at it´s historical gold mines and got a chance to take a cable car right down into the ancient depths of one of them.
And since we love trains, we purposefully went out of our way to hitch a ride on one rickety railway heading east to the Brazilian coast. The 14 hour journey took us by some spectacular scenery including long trestles built over deep ravines and the largest iron-ore mining operation in the world. The world´s largest producer of iron ore is the Brazilian mining corporation, Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (CVRD) which incidentally also owns the railway. What is an Iron Ore Mine?
Now, if only trains outnumbered buses, we would never stop moving about.
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