Forget Carnival and the girl from Ipanema. The hot new attractions for visitors to Rio de Janeiro are the favelas–those infamous, scruffy, often felonious shantytowns that cling to Rio’s sheer peaks. More than 1 million people make their homes in 500 or so shantytowns like Rocinha, a jumble of cinder-block, tin-roofed homes threaded by a web of cramped alleyways. Now they’re a curiosity for better-heeled foreigners.
Every week, and some weeks every day, the visitors come in their cargo pants and Reeboks. Usually they arrive by Jeep convoy; the cacophony of English, Japanese, German, French, Italian and even Flemish may be heard echoing in the favela’s twisted streets. Some of the visitors are a little jumpy at first: “I can’t believe we’re doing this!” gasps Mary Gorski, who moved from Texas to Rio seven months ago. “Hi, gringos!” the children sing out, hoping for a smile and maybe a coin or two in return.
Shantytowns are nearly as old as Rio, but the favela excursion is a new business. It was born on a whim in 1992, when a delegate to the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Sustainable Development asked his tour guide to take a detour to the “other side” of Rio. “So we took him through Rocinha,” says tour operator Bela Pinto. The idea became an instant success. Today Pinto and her husband, Andre Monnerat, command a fleet of 22 Jeeps and a full-time staff of eight.
For $30 a head, Pinto’s Jeep Tours agency offers a two-hour outing in a roofless vehicle, and guides who are fluent in several languages. Some slum tourists become disappointed. “This looks like luxury to me,” says Merete Angelica Baird, a Danish freelance journalist, waving her hand at a tidy row of one-room houses appointed with flower pots. “Take us to see the real thing!” But Pinto is unfazed. “Maybe the tourists will take back a better image of Rio,” she says. Then again, if they wanted that, they could have just hung out with the girls from Ipanema.
