The Ice Flow

By Red Sox Steve

During my recent trip to Brazil and Argentina, my friend (I'll call her Travel Woman - TW - here because I don't have permission to use her name) and I journeyed from Buenos Aires all the way to Rio de Janeiro, hitting a number of towns in between. Travel Woman and I are adventurers - we enjoyed seeing the sites in different cities, relying on our trusty Lonely Planet to guide us on our journey. We stopped in Posadas, St. Ignacio and Puerto Iguazu during the Argentinean portion of our journey; we then crossed into Brazil (make sure you get that visa in advance, Americans!) going from Foz do Iguazu to Paraty via the Sao Paolo bus station. From Paraty, we went to Rio de Janeiro, the final destination on my journey - with a pseudonym like "Travel Woman", I'm guessing you won't be surprised to hear that she spent TWICE AS LONG in South America on this trip as I did - I was there for 3 weeks, she for 6!

That's a general overview of the trip - a journey which I hope will provide me with a number of columns in the future, but that's not what we're going to talk about today. Today, I want to discuss one experience on one tour that I had in Rio. No doubt, when I got to Rio, I was in awe at the beaches, the "beautiful people" enjoying the sand and surf blocks away from an urban environment. The way the mountains sprout up throughout the entire city, literally defining and delineating sections of Rio in a way that only nature can (entire rivers separate the Bronx from Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn from Manhattan, and Staten Island is, well, an island...!). Rio, when seen from one of the New Seven Wonders of the World, the Cristo Redentor ("Christ the Redeemer"), is a picturesque landscape combining a densely packed urban location and an unforgiving mountainous terrain - a beautiful city.

So, after getting a feel for Rio by taking public buses to and from the Cristo, and seeing the sandy beaches and muted airplane traffic from so high up, TW and I decided to go on a tour of one of the most intense urban settings in Latin America, a place that in my view is a step up from a shanty town, certainly NOT a squatter's village, has been depicted in numerous movies and, when taken together, a place where 1.4 million of Rio's 7 million residents reside - a favela.

We were given the opportunity, through the Be A Local Tour Group, to take a tour of what some say is the largest favela in all of Latin America, Rocinha (pronounced ho-SEEN-yuh). TW and I looked at each other and first gave it some thought. What are the implications of a tour through a neighborhood, especially an impoverished one? Is there something morally void about wanting to photograph the disadvantaged way of life that exists in the favela, treating it as some sort of zoo where we are so curious about the "wildlife" there that we feel the need to objectify it through touring? On the other hand, we are, after all, explorers of the globe humanity occupies. We had both seen films centered around life in the favelas, such as City of God, City of Men (sequel to City of God) and Favela Rising, and we want to build our awareness about life in Rio - not just a sun-kissed, samba dancing Rio, but the more earthy, gritty, urban experience which is replicated in large cities throughout Latin America in some form or another. This article would end right here if we chose the former - the bus picked us up at our hostel in Copacabana and we were on our way.

Rocinha is in the southern part of Rio, just west of a section of the city called Gavea. It is nestled between two small mountains and faces Praia Barra ("Barra beach"). We started our tour at the base of the favela, and no, we weren't in Kansas anymore... just before the tour bus reached the dropoff point, Daniel, who did an excellent job throughout the tour, gave us the skinny:

1) No pictures without permission - the favela is run by drug gangs and we are just tourists. The gangs certainly don't want any attention and they don't want to be photographed.

2) Stay together and pay attention - we are going to do a lot of walking and don't want anyone to stray from the group.

3) Jump on a mototaxi which will take you to the top of the favela.

I get 1 and 2, but was he kidding about us having to ride motorcycles to get where we were going? This mototaxi trip was no joke. We started at the bottom of the hill, and the mototaxis were there, seemingly waiting for the tour bus to arrive. It was an "eeney-meeney-miney-mo" moment. Was I choosing my preferred vehicle of death, playing the Brazilian version of Russian roulette, or would we actually make it, knowing there is no way for me to communicate with the driver seeing as how I speak zero Portuguese and he speaks zero english? I'm here, so you know the answer, but the ride up to the top was pretty scary.

How do you say, "the best defense is a good offense" in Portuguese? My driver was aggressively dodging and weaving through vehicles and pedestrians during our trip up the single, windy road. I made sure to hold on tight enough to stay alive, but not so tight that I didn't strangle the guy... I don't want the American consulate to have to call my parents telling them my brains were splattered all over the road, and there were many other reasons to make sure I safely got where I was going.

On the way up, it was hard to pay attention to anything besides my personal safety, but once we were all off the motorcycles, our surroundings were immediately noticeable. Daniel pointed out a few things - first, the population of Rocinha was 200,000 people (approximately the size of Providence, RI). More importantly, there was only a small post office and a small health center which served the entire population - if you wanted mail, it wasn't delivered to you, you had to go to the post office to pick it up yourself. In addition, the water ran every 3 hours for 30 minutes, which means that people had to make sure to collect some water and do their best to be hooked up to the piping system in the favela. Furthermore, electricity usage was unregulated - in other words, people plugged directly into the current coming off a utility pole, producing the very dangerous web of interconnected and unmonitored wires that you see in the picture below.

So, after a brief introduction and being given permission to take pictures, we were on foot, meandering through the labrynthine alleys of the favela. Daniel took our group to a rooftop so we could see the entire favela, as well as Barra beach just beyond its borders. The views were amazing, as you can see from the photos below:

At this point, we learned some interesting information about the history of the favela. This type of living situation started to emerge in Rio in the 1920s. At that time, more and more people started to migrate into the cities in order to secure employment and income. Jobs in rural areas were scarce and Rio had already been an economic center and the capital of Brazil for over 150 years. Rocinha sprouted up because wealthy people lived around it - Ipanema, Gavea and Copacabana have been wealthy neighborhoods for at least the entire 20th century. In order to secure service-type jobs in those communities, it became economical for people to live close to them, causing the formation of Rocinha. Although there isn't very much that is safe about life in the favela, the people who live there do so very cheaply - they can rent rooms or apartments for anywhere from US$100 to US$200 a month, giving themselves access to Brazil's wealthiest city in the process.

One of the problems in Rocinha today is that the population is quickly expanding. Because there is little vertical construction taking place, residents are continuing to spread the favela farther and farther into the forest areas located at the base of the surrounding mountains. Because this becomes an issue of convenient settlement for new residents at the cost of environmental destruction, the government is taking measures to prevent the continued cutting down of trees. As I understood Daniel, he mentioned that residents found a way to circumvent this, enabling new construction and pushing the perimeter of the favela even further.

(to be continued...)