This weekend, Tom and I drove to Paranapiacaba, a town founded in the 1800s by the British-owned Sao Paulo Railway Company. It sits in the Atlantic rainforest of the Serra do Mar, about 40km (26 mi) from Sao Paulo.

Even on a Sunday, getting there took 1.5 hours, as we first went west, then south, then east, then west, then north…in a mind-boggling frenzy of twists and turns trying to get out of town. Yes, we were even using the GPS!

But once we’d gone through the ABC cities (named after the three smaller cities of Santo Andre, Sao Bernardo do Campo, and Sao Caetano do Sul) on the outskirts of greater Sao Paulo, we hit the countryside, blessedly green, moist, and reinvigorating.

Half an hour later, we approached Paranapiacaba, which was the headquarters for the Brits as they laid the train tracks that by 1867 would carry Sao Paulo’s…