Beatrix pottering: Day 31 - 8/3 - Part One

Kevin was thankfully on the mend in the morning, which meant our planned afternoon walking tour in the favelas could go ahead - and more importantly, he’d be able to come to the trip’s big finale that night: the Champion’s Parade at the Sambadrome, the culmination of Carnaval!

We had a quiet morning - Jemima offered me a deal: she wouldn’t complain about the walking tour if I didn’t drag her to the botanical gardens that morning. So I had a little outing on my own in Ipanema instead.

First, I wanted to investigate the metro before our journey that evening - it was all very easy, and, even better (and very Rio!), the ticket machines played a jaunty little bossa nova tune as they printed the tickets.

Then I did a little Carnaval shopping: a sparkly fan for me and feathered hair clip for Jemima, and some long sequinned earrings for us both (blue for me, black for her, to go with our holiday colour schemes).

And I loved my little wander! Ipanema is just lovely: pretty tree-lined streets, great shops, and fabulous little restaurants and cafes. I’d happily spend more time here.

We met the minibus for our favela trip at about 2pm. There were about 15 of us in the end, after a few pick-ups, led by a guide called Carlos. He was quite a character - probably in his 50s, very skinny, and self-taught to speak 5 languages (English, French, German and Spanish, as well as Portuguese). He was also from the favela we were visiting - and very passionate about helping us understand his community. The rest were all youngsters (mid-twenties?) of different nationalities - 3 Israeli men, 4 American men, an English couple, two young women, German and English. Carlos made a special effort to welcome Jemima (although he did forget she was there sometimes, when he started swearing…).

As the van wound up the hills behind Leblon, the posh beach one over from Ipanema, the road got narrower. When the van pulled over, we’d entered a different world, most noticeably from the spaghetti tangle of electricity wires overhead, looking like the worst health and safety risk ever. Carlos led us into what I think was an empty martial arts studio, and while we sat on concrete bleachers, he gave us a history of the favelas.

According to Carlos, during the Paraguayan War (which we heard about in Iguazu, and Buenos Aires), former black slaves had been promised houses if they fought for Brazil. They fought - but at the end of the war, the houses were not forthcoming… So they went into the hills around Rio to sleep under the favela trees for shelter, as they had nowhere to live. Over time they built themselves houses, which had no services at all - and these were repeatedly torn down by the authorities. But then during a visit of Pope John Paul II to Brazil in 1982, he visited one of the favelas, and was petitioned by the people to ask the government on their behalf to stop tearing them down. He did, and government agreed - and they then authorised the existence of the favelas.

There are now 786 of them, most of which are in the north and west of the state of Rio, far from the beaches (and the work); but 3% are in the south, like the one we visited, Rocinha. This houses 160,000 people in 4.5 sq km, and although it now has services like running water, electricity, even banks and a postal service, half of the residents live on less than $1.50 per day (and none pay tax).

He was a very passionate speaker, complaining “they” (non-favela-resident Brazilians) don’t visit, but they do make films about favelas, they write books them, and they study them (there was lots of rhetorical flourishes in his speech, like this Ciceronian three-fold repetition). And his goal was to show us the real favela, which is the community, not something synonymous with crime and danger. And with that, he led us out…

Again, it was the electricity wires that struck me first. Apart from that it looked like a bustling high street in any developing area of the world - with lots of mopeds/ motorbikes roaring down the road. I spotted lots of these had high vis jackets on with numbers on them - it turned out they were motorbike taxis, with the usual range of passengers from old people to mums with kids sandwiched between them and the driver (obviously no helmets), and one women on the back of a bike carefully nursing a birthday cake over the bumps. (We found out it’s 5 reis, ie about 67p, to go anywhere in the favela.)

Then we turned into a little doorway, and walked up 3 or 4 flights of uneven, homemade concrete steps, to a rooftop with a view across the favela. Huddles of houses all piled closely together over the hillside, with no system or design, just finding whatever space they could. And when, later, Carlos led us off the main road into the warren, that’s exactly what it felt like - irregular stairways squirrelling their way between buildings, but nearly always steeply up and down.

Before then, though, we had a welcoming committee on the rooftop: a woman in her fifties, and five young people, ranging from 18-ish to 12-ish. With the help of some translation, we discovered this woman had played for Brazil in the Women’s World Cup, and is the only woman to have scored a goal in the Maracanã stadium from mid-field. She now runs a charity helping young people from the favelas learn capoeira, the Brazilian combo of dance, music, and martial arts - and we were getting a demonstration.

After she tested us on various song refrains until she found one she thought the group could actually perform (it took a few goes…), she played an instrument like a bow with a coconut on the end, sang, and then the kids took it in turn to drum, and perform capoeira - flowing movements like slow motion karate, or breakdancing, with no-handed cartwheels and back springs included. Very impressive! Then there was the usual call for volunteers - a few of the youngsters from our group got involved with a capoeira attempt; I tried (and failed) some samba moves; and then the women specifically asked Jemima to join in. She can do a mean cartwheel, and this went down very well - I think the woman was encouraging Jemima to start capoeira back in the UK…

After that the tour continued, following Carlos some more through the streets, dodging the other obvious tour groups as we went (Rocinha is one of the few favelas with roads, and within easy reach of the tourist hot spots, so it clearly gets quite a few visitors). Rocinha is a busy, lively place, with everything from pet shops and dentists to (many) barbers (I saw a 2 year old boy crying getting his haircut - the same pains the world over…), and brightly-lit grocers with fantastic looking fruit. But we also saw a man up a ladder, entangled with the chaos of electric wires, clearly cutting into the electric cables to get his own power - a weird combination of the very normal, and outside the lines.

We finished with a beer in a bar where I met a man from Florida who likes to come to hang out and watch the world go by - I can see why, the world is very active there - and then it was over - back to the hotel to regroup before our Big Night…

The Carnaval gets its own post!

Ipaneman church:

Electricity cable chaos in the Rocinha favela: