RIO DE JANEIRO -- The tour starts where the asphalt stops, at the top of a steep alley that begins just a block from the beach and wends its way up behind the pricey high-rise towers to a starkly segregating boundary. On one side lies the legal part of the city, served by cab drivers and postal carriers and ambulances; on the other side lies the no man's land of irregular slum housing known in Rio de Janeiro as a favela.
Our guide into this particular unknown is 31-year-old Marcelo Quirino, a lifelong resident of this irregular hillside community known as Babilonia, which clings to a hillside just a Frisbee toss from one of Rio's most famous beaches. Smiling, dressed in a clean white shirt and pressed khaki walking shorts, Quirino introduces himself to his small tour group: a pair of American women, lawyers in Rio de Janeiro on business, a Dutch tourist and a Canadian reporter.
Middle-aged, middle-class and not especially trendy, we represent the cutting edge of tourism, at least according to a report on world travel trends unveiled in London recently at World Travel Market, the flagship trade fair of international tourism. According to Euromonitor International, "safe-danger" or "controlled-edge" experiences represent a hot new growth area in travel. The thinking: Tourists jaded with the soft adventure of bungee jumping and whitewater rafting will instead line up to tour violent fringe communities, or traipse through former combat zones and chat with child soldiers.
This expanding niche -- dubbed "poorism" by some media outlets -- sparks questions. Much effort is often made by travellers to experience a country's character (and wine and dine like locals.) Do reality tours provide meaningful experiences and a true window on the world? Or is it simply exploitation of the poor?
This trend of "safe-danger" or "reality tours" first began in South America with tours of marginal shantytown communities, such as the ones in Rio de Janeiro. According to figures from the latest Brazilian census, there are more than 500 favelas large and small in Rio de Janeiro, home to about 1.5 million people, or nearly 25 per cent of the urban population.
Tourism in these shantytowns began in 1992, when a then 24-year-old middle-class Brazilian named Marcelo Armstrong set up Favela Tour, and began taking tourists into Rio's largest shantytown, Rocinha.
Armstrong had worked as a guide at an African Club Med, and thought people were looking for something that brought them a little closer to the reality of the country they were visiting. The business struggled for years, both for respectability and for tourists, but then in 1995 it was listed in a Lonely Planet guidebook, and has never looked back.
From Rio, "reality tourism" spread to other cities in South America, and to the rest of the world. In Argentina, there are tours of the villas miserias or "misery villages" on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, while in India there are visits to the tanneries, pottery sheds and soap factories of Mumbai's massive Dharavi shantytown, and walking tours amid the drug addicts and the homeless of Delhi railway station slums. Africa, according to the Global Trends Report (which reported on a range of travel trends from singles travel to "babymoons") could be the real gold mine for controlled-edge tours, given its abundance of marginally controlled communities and wealth of recent warfare.
Already, South Africa offers sleepovers in bed-and-breakfasts in the Johannesburg township of Soweto, site of some of the most violent repression of the Apartheid era.
In Somalia, an enterprising Mogadishu resident has opened an unofficial Black Hawk Down museum. Sierra Leone, recently emerged from a 10-year civil war, should leave off trying to sell nature tourism and concentrate instead on safe danger, the report suggests.
"Africa has more than a sufficient supply of destinations offering controlled-edge experiences," says Euromonitor's Global Trends Report as reported in British media. "Places such as Freetown in Sierra Leone could offer a package in which tourists are escorted by armed guards around no-go areas in highly volatile cities."
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