In a Rio shanty town, Andrew Downie experiences spectacular sights and sounds.

By Telegraph.co.uk

I am standing with a few others under a blue tarpaulin in one of those torrential Latin American downpours a few hundred yards from Bob Nadkarni's house and I fear the worst for his monthly jam session.

Cariocas, as residents of Rio are known, are like cats: they hate to go out in the rain. Nadkarni is about to stage Rio's most unusual jazz night, but it looks as though no one will be there to hear it.

Then a taxi emerges from the gloom and four Germans get out carrying guitar cases and saxophones. They join us under the dripping tarpaulin and we throw back beers and wait for the rain to ease. When it does, we dash through the puddles towards the entrance of the Tavares Bastos favela and head up a narrow staircase to the Maze.

The Maze is Nadkarni's sprawling, unfinished labyrinth of a home set on top of a favela, one of the 600-odd slums that dot the self-proclaimed Marvellous City. Nadkarni, 63, a former BBC cameraman and professional sculptor, started building it 26 years ago when most of the dwellings here were made from wood and tin. Now it is one of the largest buildings in the area.

"There is something about a favela that is so different from the controlled way we live in the West," he says.

"I can build here in the afternoon what I dream up in the morning. I have more freedom here than I could ever have in the First World."

That freedom has been central to Nadkarni's life in Brazil. He arrived in Bahia, in the north-east of the country, in 1972 when the merchant ship he was travelling on broke down. He stayed there for a few weeks but soon moved to Rio, where he spent a hedonistic year before being deported.

He managed to wangle a return as a foreign correspondent seven years later and moved to Tavares Bastos in 1981 after running his maid home one day and glimpsing the spectacular view over the Guanabara Bay towards Sugarloaf Mountain.

The house is now much more than a home for Nadkarni, his wife and their four children. Today, the multi-layered mixture of favela chaos, Gaud� grandeur and Niemeyer concrete and curves encloses an art gallery, a concert space and an eight-room bed-and-breakfast establishment.

Several companies offer tours to see favelas but only Bob's house - as all the locals know it - gives visitors the chance to see the reality of life there up close.

"I wake up every morning to an exotic dawn chorus from the forest behind, the sun rising over Sugarloaf Mountain and a glittering Atlantic," says Abigail Harding, a 26-year-old from Penzance who is living here while looking for a flat.

"Then the baile funk kicks in and the nearby SWAT team starts its daily target practice and I know I'm in the favela." She chose to stay there because it is authentic and cheap.

One of Nadkarni's b&b apartments costs about �12 (single) a night, compared to at least six times that for a nondescript hotel room in frequently dodgy Copacabana.

The rooms are tiny and drab but they all have private bathrooms - and anyway, they are really just for sleeping in.

The wide terrace is where most guests spend their time, especially at night and in the mornings when a communal breakfast is served.

There is a studenty feel to the shared areas and a true favela aesthetic throughout. The soundtrack is that of a cockerel crowing, colour comes from the stalls laden with tropical fruit near the entrance and even the smell is totally Rio: Harding says there is sometimes a faint stench of raw sewage (such inconveniences are not unknown in the favelas, where running water is not standard, or even in middle-class areas, where locals routinely use trees as urinals).

And yet for every person put off by such realities, there is someone attracted by them. George Martin, the Beatles' producer, recorded the samba chapter of a BBC documentary on rhythm here. The rapper Snoop Dogg spent two days filming a video clip surrounded by gorgeous Brazilian girls. And the film director Alan Parker was so impressed that after a few caipirinhas he offered his Hollywood pad in a house swap.

Those who have braved the rain tonight are less stellar and my fears over numbers are half right. A few people are hanging out at the bar listening to an organ and sax duo while others are on the balcony drinking cocktails and chewing on the barbecue meats being tossed from a grill.

But the Cariocas have been scared away by the showers and the visitors are mostly foreigners - tourists and long-time residents such as Philip Coate, a lawyer who arrived here from Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, 36 years ago.

Coate enjoyed the jazz a few months earlier and has returned, this time without his wife who - like most middle-class Cariocas - not only avoids the rain but also the favelas.

"She came here the last time and hated it," he says with a shrug. "Just the usual bourgeoise Brazilian."

Coate points out that most Cariocas are not adventurous. Although one in five of the city's residents lives in a favela, the middle class sees them as filthy, violent and threatening.

Tavares Bastos, because it is close to the tourist neighbourhoods such as Copacabana and the local police station, is however, relatively safe. Both Coate and Harding say they don't feel threatened, and have no problems getting in.

Getting out is more difficult. An ageing Swiss has overdosed on caipirinhas and we have to help her down the narrow, unlit alleyway. The locals are standing around drinking beer and listening to Carioca funk music but not even the sight of two gringos guiding a portly pensioner to a waiting cab fazes them.

Nothing comes as a surprise at Bob's house.

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