	Home
	Newsletter
	RSS Map
	Privacy Policy
	Contact Us
Search



Newsletter
Your name
Your E-mail
We will never expose your E-Mail address or offer it to any third party

Slummy Tourism Spins Up

comments (0)	article print view publisher send to friends add to favorites post comments
Travel Articles >> City Travel Travel Articles >> Economics

The slummy tourism, or, how it is also called “poorism”, gains more and more popularity among the tourists from all over the world. The foreign guests zestfully change clean beaches and museums to favelas in Rio de Janeiro, the quarters of Johannesburg and Mexican dumps.

According to experts, such tours first started in Brazil 16 years ago, when an enterprising young man named Marcelo Armstrong have taken few tourist to the biggest favela in Rio de Janeiro. Since that time his company ‘Favela Tour’ has grown in size and gave rise to lots of followers. One of such companies, ‘Reality Tours and Travel’ operates in Mumbai. Its founder Chris Way claims, that only two years ago he could hardly find volunteers to hold at least one tour a day. However, now he shows the local “sights” two or even three times a day and even started to take tourists to the countryside.

The cost of one tour is 300 rupees ($7.50).

The critics of such trend in tourism think that this is a pure voyeurism. “Would you like some strange people to take photos of you and to comment your life style few times a day?” asks the professor of tourism and environment David Fenell from the Brock University of Canada.

The tours’ organizers themselves deny these charges, pointing at the fact, that with their help tourists are able to find out what is poverty at first hand. Besides that, in several places (in Mexico, for example) the foreign guests are asked to actively participate in the occupations of the local inhabitants, to help them with potable water and sandwiches, and Mr. Way has opened in the Indian ghettos a community center, where the poor people can learn English and chess.

[Get This Article]

Most Viewed Articles in City Travel, Economics categories:

This article has been viewed 45 time(s).
Article Submitted On: March 13, 2008