Favela Chic

There is a pair of uber-trendy bar-restaurants in Paris and London called Favela Chic. Do not go to either of these spots thinking there is anything favela-like about them. Do you see open water running across the floor, do you see pre-adolescent boys with guns under their shorts ... do you see people cutting up cocaine on the sidewalk ... okay, then, you should probably just buck up and order the ten euro caipirinha and enjoy the music, because a favela is a totally different thing. Jonas and I rocked up one night after a Marcelo D2 concert on the top of Sugarloaf Mountain. Appropriately, the rapper-cum-singer is from the baile funk school, the name of which is shared with one of Rios most famous favelas. This supposedly ghetto sound screams with all the aggravation and agitation that coming from a place where many children do not reach adulthood incites. There are three ways to get up to the hotel where we were staying, by a motorcycle, which means separating and sticking my then-mini-skirted-self onto some teenage boys bike ... um, no thank you ... or taking a taxi to a certain point and then walking, let the buyer seriously beware ... or walking, in which case, do not say you werent warned.

Not because this is a dangerous favela, in fact Tavarez is the only in Rio with its own police station. And it houses perhaps the only B&B where Snoop Dogg chose to shoot a favela video, further romanticizing the hip hop, violence and poverty connection. It is just that two seriously white kids on Saturday past midnight do not really have a place wandering around a hood uninvited. Thank God for Bob and The Maze. This hotel is an incredible example of someone who thought what every favela tour participant has thought, these are the poorest people in Rio and they have the best views. He has created a space with rooms, a small bar, breakfast room with breathtaking ocean vistas and every other week live jazz performances on Friday nights.

Bob is the owner, a salt of the earth British hippie-intellectual-activist who surely abhors any sort of labeling, but hey reader, until you go there, I can give you my supremely biased view ... He worked for the BBC World Service for years, and told us stories about saving the venerable John Simpson, or something to that effect (do not quote me on any of this as the morning coffee had not been fully integrated ...), the war in Lebanon, and training a Brazilian footballer from a favela who is now on a major European club team. To find an eclectic, boheme spot with personal-expressionist paintings on the walls and a concrete sculpture of a face in profile looking down over an empty, mosaic-tiled pool, leading up to a small cabin of a bedroom that views a fat chunk of Rios best beaches is just unreal, for lack of a better expression! Do not believe me, go there and see for yourself. If Bob does not charm you, his beautiful wife and children certainly will, and lets face it, not many people come back from Brazil with a story of sleeping in a favela.