The smell makes me sick … and if YOU’re here, you’d probably puke.
This aroma isn’t just that sweet, sickly street stench of rubbish and car exhaust left festering under a day of Rio’s baking sun and constant humidity but something still alive, well, sort of … it comes from the broken-line of street sleepers crashed on the pavement a few feet from my hotel entrance.
In particular there’s an old white guy, gray-haired, skinny-sick, with a black-blood-bandaged-leg of rotten pus stench – WATCH OUT – pull ya throat in fast.
I passed him some money; and when I passed him a day later someone had bought him a thin mattress on which to cushion himself against the harsh streets.
Like so many societies gripped by severe contrasts, Rio’s beauty is often thwarted by its share of the planet’s serious social issues …
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