That evening I headed high up into a steep hillside slum where rival gangs still shoot unsuspecting trespassers who cross invisible borders.
Al Nakasah is a densely populated Burmese slum built on steep, unpaved mountainsides.
Officials said it was a freak of nature that had sent a wall of water barrelling down the steep, narrow streets of the slum district of Bab al-Oued.
Unlikely though it is in this setting, the cable car has become a trope in South American cities, since slums often cling to steep hills where it is difficult to build roads.
Caraballo, who is 32, lives in the El Encanto section of La Vega, a slum on the side of one of the steep mountains around Caracas.
(The city is spectacularly situated against a chain of steep green mountains, with a brick-centric architectural style, massive slums to the south, and a lingering air of nighttime menace that keeps festival visitors close to their escorts).
On the steep Andean slopes of the valley that cradles the city, vast slums, virtually abandoned by the government, provided a ready supply of recruits for the cartels.
The nation is grossly overpopulated and in environmental chaos, with agriculture driven to deforested slopes too steep to hold soil, rivers that run in new channels daily, slums covering agricultural land, no forests, no fisheries, a shortage of potable water and a dependence on international aid for food.
This is Kibera, a slum on the outskirts Nairobi made up of a spider's web of steep inclines littered by foul-smelling rubbish and open sewers.
In Magazine Wharf, one of Freetown's largest slums, rivers of stinking mud and debris tumble from the central market, down a steep hill crammed with precarious wood- and tin-built dwellings.
