November 12 - 2:00PM - Ipanema Beach Kiosk

Today is our last full day in Rio and Brazil. It all is going by so quickly but then again it seems like ages ago that we were in Salvador sitting listening to music on the coblestone streets and dodging bums. My cold has subsided for the moment and I am in a better mood than yesterday.

Here’s what’s going on. We woke up today in our non-AC sweatbox hostel room and booked a tour to the favelas which are basically the slums of Brazil. It sounds dangerous but I guess it is set up with the drug kingpin/boss of the favela so that it is safe. It may also sound exploitative and gawky but I guess it isn’t because according to our guide sixty percent of the price we paid for the tour goes to a daycare center that the tour has set up so that favela dwellers can go to work and they like the cash flow. We did see the daycare place so it does exist. Maybe it was just a front though, I don’t know, don’t care either.

Want to mention quickly that the cachaca rum and cokes that we drank last night are nowhere close to what a regular rum and coke tastes like. Cachaca is very bitter and I guess that is the reason that they have to hide the flavor with lime juice and tons of sugar in caipirinhas. Did the trick though anyways.

So let me tell you about the favelas. The one we visited is THE largest in Brazil. It‘s called Rocinha and is actually in a little better shape than the average favela in Brazil because the people that live here are situated close to "decent" jobs in the hotels and restaurants of Ipanema and Copacabana.  There are still really poor people here though. The houses are all just built on unoccupied land that the builder claims without paying for. This is how favelas work because people are too poor to buy land, or they pay a small price to someone who has already claimed land in the favela to build a house on top of that persons house.

Some houses are precariously stacked five stories high and they do fall down during landslides in the rainy season. Sewage flows down the street as there is no sewage infrastructure, tour guide recommends building at the top of the hill because of this, and they steal their electricity by patching into the overhead lines. All of the drug trade is controlled from within the favelas and as you hear from the news there are drug wars here, both with police and with other drug dealers. The government does not fully want to shut down the drug trade though because corrupt politicians make money from it. Raids on the favelas have seized military grade assault rifles, some with US military identifying marks. All this said, these are functioning neighborhoods with mostly good people just trying to live and feed themselves and their kids.

Rocinha is about two or three square miles from what we can tell. It has a population estimated to be about 150,000 souls according to our guide. 18 percent of Brazils population lives in a favela. These are normal people, they are just poor. Rent starts at 200 real and goes to 400. All in all it’s a shitty place to live but if you don’t have a choice I guess you just have to deal with it. These favela tours sound scary but if you have a choice I highly recommend it and it will open your eyes to what it is like to have it bad.

Right now Kevin and I are sitting at a beach cabana drinking a Skol. We’re going to walk around and work up an appetite for churrasco, Brazilian BBQ. I guess we live better than they do in the favelas.