Day 3

The next morning we woke up, ate breakfast at the hotel and left to drive south in a very nice coach bus. After a 3 hour bus ride we ate at an all you can eat buffet, which is very common, for R$20. We then traveled to Tractebel Energia, the largest private energy company in Brazil which supplies 7% of energy to Brazil. The facility we visited was a thermometric (coal) power plant. We learned some interesting things about Brazil's energy industry, such that 83% is hydro electric and they want to move towards more thermal (coal, natural gas, etc) in order to have more energy security. We got a tour of the power plant including the control room. Is was nice to see schematics of the thermal process, exactly as I leaned in some courses at my university! There is an environmental park in the power plant "village" which we also explored. After our tour we drove 4 hours to a small town called Tramandaí. We had another "livre" dinner with a lot of fish and meat and rice then walked to  our hotel. Although pretty decent, it was freezing in the room and I had to put 2 additional large blankets on.