http://tags.library.upenn.edu/tag/nytimes+tourism PennTags Feed http://tags.library.upenn.edu/makerecord/url/25514 http://tags.library.upenn.edu/makerecord/url/25514 Heads Up | Poverty Tours<br />Slum Visits: Tourism or Voyeurism? <p>MICHAEL CRONIN's job as a college admissions officer took him to India two or three times a year, so he had already seen the usual sites - temples, monuments, markets - when one day he happened across a flier advertising &quot;slum tours.&quot;</p><p> &quot;It just resonated with me immediately,&quot; said Mr. Cronin, who was staying at a posh Taj Hotel in Mumbai where, he noted, a bottle of Champagne cost the equivalent of two years' salary for many Indians. &quot;But I didn't know what to expect.&quot;</p><p>Soon, Mr. Cronin, 41, found himself skirting open sewers and ducking to avoid exposed electrical wires as he toured the sprawling Dharavi slum, home to more than a million. He joined a cricket game and saw the small-scale industry, from embroidery to tannery, that quietly thrives in the slum. &quot;Nothing is considered garbage there,&quot; he said. &quot;Everything is used again.&quot;</p><p>Mr. Cronin was briefly shaken when a man, &quot;obviously drunk,&quot; rifled through his pockets, but the two-and-a-half-hour tour changed his image of India. &quot;Everybody in the slum wants to work, and everybody wants to make themselves better,&quot; he said.</p><p>Slum tourism, or &quot;poorism,&quot; as some call it, is catching on. From the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the townships of Johannesburg to the garbage dumps of Mexico, tourists are forsaking, at least for a while, beaches and museums for crowded, dirty - and in many ways surprising - slums. When a British man named Chris Way founded Reality Tours and Travel in Mumbai two years ago, he could barely muster enough customers for one tour a day. Now, he's running two or three a day and recently expanded to rural areas.</p>