"Ladies, wrap your arms around your motorcycle driver and hold on tight, he loves it. Gentlemen, don't even think about it. Use the security bars behind the passenger saddle." After telling us how not to burn our legs on the exhaust, our local guide then gets on the back of a bike herself, and takes off, ripping through traffic to reach the peak of Favela Rocinha.
Rocinha is roughly a 15 minute drive from Ipanema or Leblon, two of Rio's upscale neighbourhoods. Capitilizing on the pervasive negative press about Brazilian favelas in Western media, our local guides decided to create a favela tour. The result? A successful business that demistifies much of the hype and gives a portion of its profits to a local school and orphanage.
The charity component serves various purposes. Indeed, it aims in part to appease the conscience of Western clients - but more importantly, the gesture operates as public relations for the criminal faction, ADA (Amigos dos Amigos), who play the role of government in Rocinha. Our guides are granted access to the favela with tour groups, and in return, the ADA ensures safety (peace), on condition that some tour profits are handed over to the school and a local NGO . As such, the ADA appears benevolent, the school makes coin, the guides run their business, and we get to ride motorbikes through a favela.
The tour slows down when we get off the bikes, just enough to better
absorb sights and smells. Our guides lead us back to the bottom by
foot. We weave through small brick buildings on makeshift concrete
paths that appear to have a mind of their own, like a path in the
woods.
Although residents of Rocinha still do not pay property taxes,
electricity, phone or internet bills, the community features a
relatively superior infrastructure to other favelas in Rio, due to a
combination of government initiatives and work done by the ADA. In
spite of this, massive entanglements of bootleg electrical and phone
wire connections adorn the walkways.
"Not bad, right?" says our guide, after emphasizing favela dwellers'
free services, lodging and proximity to work - in many cases, work is
in the neighbouring upscale communities. I immediately consider how
that's relative to other conditions that must be dealt with. Then
again, I suppose that's her point as well.
-Ravi Handa, Beach Travellers Brazil Guide
