I just want to blog briefly about the favelas. These last few blogs have suffered from me not being able to load pictures - I´ll add them asap when I return home.
The favelas are the slums of Rio. The ones I visited today has 200,000 people living in them. They are crumbling old buildings with bare bricks and open windows. Several people live in a single room and they´re pretty unsanitory. However, they are far from depressing places. The people, though poor, appear healthy and happy. They are all controlled by Brazillian drug barons and amazingly this leads to them being crime free.
Walking between the beach, fashion shops and nightclubs of Ipanema, particularly at night, there´s always a risk you will get mugged, and it will probably be by someone from a favela. But in the favelas themselves they will not touch you. This is because the drug barons do not allow crime as they do not want to attract the police. They also refuse to deal crack cocaine in the favelas as it is so addictive it often leads to people committing crimes to fund the habit. However, most of Brazil´s coke and cannabis come out of these neighbourhoods.
We went to a graffiti artists shop and a daycare centre, and listened to children playing samba music on makeshift drums in the street. In a way it is poverty tourism, but the money goes back into the favelas, into the daycare centre, and tourism has been instrumental for some years now in gradually improving quality of life in the neighbourhood.
Today is my final day. Tonight we are going to live it up in Lapa, tomorrow I start a mammoth journey back. It´s been an amazing experience and I will blog some more and try and recap a little, hopefully without boring you all too much more.
Incidentally, before deciding on the title Travel and Travails I had planned to call this blog Around the World in 80 Blogs. Without any pre-planning I have now hit blog number 77, so who knows, maybe we will finish on 80 after all.
The favelas are the slums of Rio. The ones I visited today has 200,000 people living in them. They are crumbling old buildings with bare bricks and open windows. Several people live in a single room and they´re pretty unsanitory. However, they are far from depressing places. The people, though poor, appear healthy and happy. They are all controlled by Brazillian drug barons and amazingly this leads to them being crime free.
Walking between the beach, fashion shops and nightclubs of Ipanema, particularly at night, there´s always a risk you will get mugged, and it will probably be by someone from a favela. But in the favelas themselves they will not touch you. This is because the drug barons do not allow crime as they do not want to attract the police. They also refuse to deal crack cocaine in the favelas as it is so addictive it often leads to people committing crimes to fund the habit. However, most of Brazil´s coke and cannabis come out of these neighbourhoods.
We went to a graffiti artists shop and a daycare centre, and listened to children playing samba music on makeshift drums in the street. In a way it is poverty tourism, but the money goes back into the favelas, into the daycare centre, and tourism has been instrumental for some years now in gradually improving quality of life in the neighbourhood.
Today is my final day. Tonight we are going to live it up in Lapa, tomorrow I start a mammoth journey back. It´s been an amazing experience and I will blog some more and try and recap a little, hopefully without boring you all too much more.
Incidentally, before deciding on the title Travel and Travails I had planned to call this blog Around the World in 80 Blogs. Without any pre-planning I have now hit blog number 77, so who knows, maybe we will finish on 80 after all.
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