Rich v Poor in Rio

Yesterday I met a man called Rambo who lives in a cave. Well, I said I met him, I really just said hello and shook his hand.

The Major and I were on a tour of a favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. These unplanned sprawls of habitation are greatly feared in big Brazilian cities, because they are controlled by drug lords, they are where the poor people live, and they have bad and scary reputations - go into a favela and you won't come out alive, etc.

Except it turns out they're not all like that. Certainly the one we were in wasn't. It is called Rochinha, and is home to the largest number of favela dwellers in Rio - 300,000 people packed into 54,000 houses, some little more than shacks, perched on a hillside overlooking (of course) one of the most expensive pieces of Rio real estate. We spent about three hours walking around it with our guide, a half Brazilian, half American man who was born and raised in the favela and loves it with all his heart, so much so that he has tattoos of it all over his body.

It was most enlightening. Like any good tourist, we had bought the Lonely Planet guide to South America before embarking on our month-long trip around Argentina and Brazil, and had been warned to keep our valuables closely about us while in Rio and to never ever venture unaccompanied into a favela. But actually, all the people we met were lovely - friendly individuals, all of whom loved living in this close-knit community where people look out for one another and know each other by name. To be sure, we spotted occasional shadowy figures patrolling balconies - the drug boys who were keeping lookout from their patch, but according to our guide, the live and let live mentality of Rochinha means that, as long as people don't steal, kill or abuse, everyone will be fine. And it seemed that this was the case. We met one man, a German, who has lived there for 12 years, and never locks his house or his car. And of course we met Rambo, a rugged hairy type who lives on the edge of the favela in his cave on the hillside, and prefers to keep it simple.

It's not all idyllic of course. By and large, people live in favelas because they can't afford to live anywhere else - they are the maids, the housekeepers, the cleaners for the rich, earning R700-ish a month - a fairly pitiful sum and certainly not enough to rent a house in a proper planned area of the city. As our guide pointed out, if you tore down the favelas, Rio would grind to a halt, because the people who live here are the ones who keep everything ticking. The educational prospects are poor there, the majority of children don't end up at university and sadly, many of them turn to the drugs trade because they can earn more that way - although, thanks to an informal agreement with the police, it means they can never then leave the favela, because once they do they will be arrested.

It made us both think. Of how lucky we are to have enough money to go on adventurous holidays, to live in a nice house, to drive a nice car, to be able to educate our children well. But also of, how in many ways, we are spiritually the poorer for it - we don't have the same relationship with our neighbours, we get hung up on our possessions and whether we have the latest clothes and whether our thighs are too fat. For a brief moment, the Major and I contemplated coming there to live for a while, to engage with the people around us, to learn the language, to see if we could get by. But then we returned to our cosy little guesthouse perched in pretty Santa Teresa with lovely houses all around and weakly, foolishly agreed that we might not be able to manage it after all. A shaming thought, especially after meeting Rambo.