Today we started off with a Favela Experience. Favela is another word for slum and over 6 million people in Rio are living in a Favela!
There are some really dangerous ones that not even the police interfere with, but some like the one we went to are going through Pacification. This is when the government gives money, water, and resources to improve the Favela. Clearly, there are pros and cons to this as it changes the way they used to work, but it has been a success for this one. Over 42,000 people live in the one we visited. Newbury is about 44k, so it seemed a bit mental to me.
G-Adventures supports different projects around the world, and we visited a drum school and beer start-ups (Vidigal), which were part of the Favela Inc projects in this Favela. We also visited their orchard, which was part of the clean-up project. I took photos of the view from there.
With the kids from the drum school, I was one of the ones to play! Not well mind!
After the Favela we started our city tour with Vlad, we hired a van to drive us to the 3 main sites we wanted to see!
Christ the Redeemer
We started off with the iconic Christ the Redeemer statue, which is a lot smaller than I thought. As with the whole trip, we were really lucky on the weather and the number of people here. I’m told in high season you can not move at this spot!
We stopped to take a photo of another Favela, I mentioned 6m people living in them. There are about 450 in Rio! Vlad has recommended we watch the film City of God to understand them better. The biggest one in Rio has about 200k people. A symbol of a Favela is Kites, those are the ones you avoid. There was a police presence on the entry to the one we visited.
Escadaria Selarón Staircase
A chilean-born artist, Jorge Selarón decided to cover the steps next to his house with colourful mosaics. He asked people to bring them from all around the world. There was a big problem with drug users in this area, and he tried to help them. however, the people he tired to help were then the ones who killed him in the end!
In the photo below you can see the strange Cathedral of St. Sebastian of Rio de Janeiro, its the pyramid one, which was created but the designer of the city Brasília, which is the capital of Brazil, I had never even heard of it before this trip, I’d always assumed it was Rio!
Sugarloaf Mountain
This is two mountains connected by cable cars. We went up here for sunset, views again were amazing.
We then ended the day by going to see Barbie at the cinema!! Really enjoyed it!!
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