(This is the second part of a two part post about the favelas of Rio. Click here for the first post.)

The second stop on our favela tour was Vila Canoas, a much smaller favela (pop. 2,500) that has receieved a lot of funding from the World Bank and NGOs. Many favelas are situated close to the city and to wealthy neighborhhoods because they provide the easiest access to jobs for favela residents who work as maids, nannies, waiters. According to Marina, the minimum wage in Brazil is $180 per month. School teachers earn about 500 reais a month (about $250). Policemen earn about 1,200 reais, which goes some way towards explaining why some are corrupt.

Hopefully, this photo gives you some idea of just how narrow favela alleyways can be. In Vila Canoas, we were passed by a number of men hauling a sack of bricks on their shoulders, zig zagging through the maze-like alleyways. How they get furniture down there I have no idea. Many of the favela homes, especially down the alleyways, lack windows so you can literally peer into people’s lives. Although the exteriors were often a hodge podge of materials, the interiors were as clean and well-equipped as any Western home, including widescreen TVs and nice dining tables and chairs. Many of these goods are bought on credit. In Rio, you can even buy shoes in installments.

While we were in Vila Canoas we visited a school called Para Ti run by an Italian NGO. Kids in Rio only go to school for the morning or the afternoon so Para Ti steps in to give them something to do for the second half of the day, keeping them off the streets and away from the influence of drug dealers.

Children under 18 in Brazil do not go to jail, so they make ideal lookouts, runners and couriers for the drugs trade. Something tells me this Para Ti student may be headed for a career with one of the city’s half dozen or so football (soccer) teams.

About 20 percent of Rio’s 5.6 million population live in the city’s 750 favelas. Yesterday, Sofie and I visited Rocinha, Rio’s largest favela, with a group called Favela Tour. According to our guide, Marina Schultze, Rocinha is the largest favela in South America with an official population of 60,000 and unofficial estimates as high as 180,000. The people of Rocinha live packed into a jumble of odd-shaped brick and concrete homes squeezed into about one square kilometer on the side of a mountain next to the city’s exclusive São Conrado neighborhood.

Rocinha has one main road that is often filled with cars, buses, and of course, people. The best way to get around the favela is on a motorcycle and there are plenty of those driving up and down the winding hillside that was once used as part of a Formula One race course. The motorcyclists act as couriers and taxis transporting people and goods around the favela. They also act as couriers, messengers and lookouts for the favela’s drug dealers. The main area where the motorcyclists congregate, on the edge of the favela just at the bottom of this street (pictured above), was off limits to photographers.

Probably the most surprising aspect of our visit to Rocinha was just how many goods were on offer there. It was almost a city within a city, with hairdressers, bars, restaurants and stores as well as plenty of garages for repairing motorcycles. Rocinha even has a private cable television station, a radio station, two community newspapers and two official banks. Apprently there was a McDonalds until two years ago when gang warfare errupted in the favela between the ruling gang, Red Command, and another gang known as the ADA or Amigos dos Amigos (friends of the friends). The ADA has been in power ever since.

(Sorry for this blurry shot of one of the motorcycle couriers, but it was a bumpy road and this was taken from the back of our van. You can tell if a rider works for a drug gang because the license plate is missing from the back of his bike.)

According to our guide the gangs guarantee a semblance of security in the favela. You are much more likely to get robbed in Copacabana or in Ipanema than in Rocinha because the drug gangs don’t want trouble (and the added inconvenience of the police) to interrupt their business. As an example of just how much control the gangs have over Rocinha, our guide told us that a group of corrupt police officers tried to rob one of the banks in Rocinho a few years ago but they were repelled by one of the gangs. Although the gangs do not tolerate petty crime they do turn a blind eye to other problems like the domestic violence that goes hand in hand with the alcoholism among the favela’s residents.

Perhaps surprisingly, rents in Rocinha can be quite high. A house near the main road, and therefore close to transport and amenities, can cost up to 600 reais a month (about $300). Apart from the one road there are only three additional streets in Rocinha. Everyone else must commute to and from the city and the shops via very narrow, winding alleyways. Most people do have access to water and electricity. Those wires you can see even include blue cables for broadband Internet.

This is what chaos looks like. Both in this favela, and in the much smaller Vila Canoas that we visited later in the day, the system for getting electricity and phone lines to people’s homes looked like something out of a city planner’s nightmare. I have to say that during our entire time in both favelas we never felt intimidated and most people were exceedingly friendly, though having a guide along was extremely reassuring. I would not attempt a trip to Rocinha on my own.

(I can’t vouch for other companies but I can say that our visit with Favela Tour was well worth the 65 reais fee. Just for the sake of transparency, Sofie and I paid for our tour.)

Rio might look like a paradise from atop a mountain but on the streets, even in the fanciest neighborhoods, it is impossible to escape the fact that most of its residents are exceedingly poor.

Just about every apartment building in Ipanema is surrounded by tall, thick metal gates with a guard stationed outside. Elderly men and small boys sit forlornly on the sidewalk in front of shops that would not look out of place on Fifth Avenue. Young mothers holding babies beg on the street.

I don’t feel safe here. I always take care to carry only a small amount of cash. And even on the main shopping streets I am retiscent to take out my camera. Yesterday I withdrew a large amount of money for the remainder of our stay and headed straight back to the hotel without stopping.

It’s hard to tell whether the horror stories and continuous warnings in guide books are poisoning my view or whether I just don’t want to be a stupid tourist. As Ermiyas mentioned in the comments section of a previous post, tourists are often an easy source of cash. Our friend Octavio, at Carioca Da Gema, said there are 500 murders in Rio each month.

The other day, as I wandered towards the bank a couple of small boys, dressed in rags, came tearing down the street in the opposite direction, laughing and looking over their shoulders. About 100ft up the road a group of about a half dozen armed policeman, carrying very long truncheons, seemed to be having an equally good laugh. I imagined a neverending light-hearted game of cat and mouse between the children of the favelas and the police. But looking at the melancholy faces of the older men and women sitting on the street it was obvious their future would be a lot bleaker.

While I was at the top of Sugar Loaf mountain, I saw a group of children peering into a tree. When I reached them I saw a troop of monkeys that I think were marmosets.

The kids were trying to feed crackers and potato chips to the monkeys while holding their cameras inches from the monkeys’ faces. Meanwhile, the monkeys were trying to grab the crackers and the kids’ cameras.

Then this girl turned up with a bag of bananas, which the monkeys much preferred to the crunchy dinner the kids were offering.

(Disclaimer: No marmosets were injured in the making of this movie. These monkeys might not even be marmosets. Any similarity to the eating habits of EiNY readers is purely coincidental.)