[Canada] Poverty tourism: take a walk on the wild side

from MacLeans

Seeing how the world's downtrodden live is becoming all the rage

ISABEL VINCENT

"Watch out for the dead rat," says Marcelo Armstrong as he leads a group of 10 tourists through the dark, winding alleyways of Vila das Canoas, one of hundreds of shantytowns, or favelas, nestled in the hills surrounding Rio de Janeiro. The tourists, who hail from Israel, Ireland, Switzerland, Australia and Canada, step gingerly over what appears to be a recently crushed rat, swarming with flies. But few seem fazed by the scene, or the stench of rotting garbage that has been strewn on some of the streets in this favela of some 2,500 people. All have paid the equivalent of $35 for what many describe as the chance of a lifetime -- to see poverty up close, and gain a greater understanding of the complexities of Brazilian society.

"I came because I wanted to see the other side of life here," says Zvi Laster, a surgeon from Israel who is in Brazil on business. For his tour of two shantytowns, Laster, neatly dressed in designer shirt and black trousers, has squeezed into a white minivan with several other tourists, many of them backpackers wearing colourful rubber flip-flops. "I really wanted a different perspective," Laster says, "and this tour has been unforgettable."

Tired of the typical tourist fare -- resort stays and visits to architectural monuments -- many foreign tourists around the world are increasingly in search of more adventurous "authentic" experiences, and have embarked on what some in the travel industry have dubbed "poverty tours." In addition to Rio de Janeiro, tour operators are conducting guided trips through shantytowns outside Buenos Aires, immigrant neighbourhoods in Rotterdam and Birmingham, England, and impoverished areas in Houston, Washington and New York City. As well as the tours in Rio, more adventurous travellers can even stay at family-run hostels in some of the estimated 750 shantytowns throughout the city.

"Some tourists want to get an integral view of the country and society they are visiting," says Heike Thelen, who helps run Villa Tour in Buenos Aires. For $70 a person, Thelen and her partner lead tour groups through a slum, known in Argentina as a "villa miseria," on the outskirts of the city. "Because of globalization, it is no longer possible to ignore how the biggest part of mankind lives in the so-called Third World. Tourists are not only interested in landscapes or architecture or shopping. They want to see and understand social and political problems."

Armstrong, who founded his company Favela Tour 14 years ago, agrees. The tall, lanky entrepreneur, who looks like a surfer in long shorts and dark glasses, says he became interested in the concept of poverty tours while working at a Club Med resort in Senegal. "I was always far more interested in what was going on outside the resort, and I always wanted to hang out with the Senegalese," Armstrong says. In the early 1990s, when he returned to Rio de Janeiro, where he grew up, he decided to start up his company.

"Everyone thought I was crazy leading tours of favelas," Armstrong says. But today, the tour is one of the most popular in Latin America, and featured prominently in not only alternative travel guides such as Lonely Planet and Rough Guides, but in the more traditional guides such as Frommer's and Fodor's. The latter highly recommends the experience, calling it "a fascinating half-day tour for anyone with an interest in Brazil beyond the beaches."

The tour works largely because of Armstrong's frank and knowledgeable assessment of how more than 20 per cent of the 11 million people in Rio de Janeiro live. His message is that poverty is extremely complicated in communities that are controlled by notorious drug gangs that often engage in bloody conflicts with police and rival gangs for control of the trade in cocaine and marijuana.

"I want you to see that a favela is not just about poverty," says Armstrong, as he points out half-finished brick houses with satellite dishes and large verandas in Rocinha, Latin America's largest shantytown, where official estimates put the population at 60,000 (Armstrong believes the actual figure is three times more). Despite the poverty here, Rocinha boasts several community daycare centres and a local radio station. In recent years, banks and fast-food franchises have opened up in a community that began some 65 years ago as a squatter settlement. "There is definitely a war going on here between drug traffickers and police," says Armstrong, who doesn't hide anything from the tour groups his company escorts every day through Vila das Canoas and Rocinha. "But if you respect them [the traffickers], they respect you. If you don't, they kill you."

But nobody seems to bother tourists here. Often, tour guides who lead groups through shantytowns negotiate with the drug lords in advance, and even donate part of their earnings to help maintain local schools. "There is a law of the favela, that if you mess with a foreign tourist, you are in big trouble," says Antonio dos Santos, a Rio travel agent. "It's never in the drug traffickers' interest to attract police, so they dispense a harsh justice in the shantytowns, which are strangely very safe places to live for the local community."

Indeed, in the 14 years Armstrong has conducted tours through Rocinha, he has never had a problem, although he admits that he had to suspend his operations for 45 days a few years ago while police and drug traffickers engaged in a particularly brutal war. "We were afraid of stray bullets," he says. While Armstrong's reality tourism and brutally honest comments have not made him a favorite among Rio government tourism authorities, who have removed his tours from their official website, he seems to be in high demand among many foreign travellers. "This has been such an interesting perspective," says Ben, a tourist from Melbourne, Australia. "It was totally cool."