Advertisement
Published: October 30th 2007
Although it seems ridiculous now with hindsight, we were really quite nervous about going to South America at all. Practically the whole continent gets a really bad press, and not just from outsiders either - our landlady in Malargue, for example, was really concerned when we told her we'd be going to Buenos Aires and warned us to be very careful that we didn't get shot! But even when we realised we wouldn't be taking our lives into our hands every time we went out the door, I was still pretty nervous about Rio - it's the place we'd heard the most horror stories about, and even our travel agent, who books trips to far flung destinations for people every day, and had travelled a lot herself, told us that "ït's not the type of place you want to hang about in" when she saw that we'd included it on our itinerary. So, our original plan was to give Rio just one night, enough to see the sights before catching our flight to New Zealand. Once we'd seen a bit more of Brazil and liked it, we thought we could risk 3 nights, and well, 3 became 9 once we actually
got there and couldn't tear ourselves away! We had an amazing time here - as I've said previously, before we developed our new found love of the beach, we'd always been city people at heart, so Rio was perfect for us, and we quickly settled into a fab routine of spending the mornings on the beach (we stayed in 3 different places, but were never more than 2 mins from a beach), seeing some of the city's sights in the afternoon, before returning to the beach in time to watch the sunset with a couple of beers or caipirinhas.
One of the most interesting things we did here, and in fact on our whole trip so far, was take a tour of a favela (slum). We probably wouldn't have known anything about Rio's favelas if we hadn't seen the film City of God (about drug gangs in one of the 700 odd favelas) a few years ago, and I still remember how shocked I was when I realised that the film isn't, as I was expecting, a kind of Brazilian "Goodfellas" with middle-aged gangsters, but instead is a true story with little children running around with machine guns in
areas controlled by drug lords who are barely out of their teens. Although that particular story takes place in the 60s, our guide Andres confirmed that unfortunately this is still the case today. It was the most fascinating afternoon, and I could go on about it for ages, although I promise I won't! We visited Rio's largest favela, Rocinha, with an estimated 200,000 residents, and Andres explained the background to how the favelas sprung up, the politics of the situation, and told us some unbelievable stories of police corruption, drug running and gang warfare. We got a few pictures, but they don't show the full scale of the conditions these people are living in as Rocinha is one of the drug controlled favelas, and although the drug lords although the tours (the tour company put a large percentage of the proceeds back into the community), there are many areas where photographs are strictly forbidden.
And that was South America!! Unable to believe that our 3 months here were up, it was off to the airport with a wee tear in my eye, both agreed that we'd definitely make it back again some day.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.086s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 7; qc: 45; dbt: 0.0496s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
