Nighttime in La Paz

I´m sitting in an internet café of questionable repute, where web surfing patrons enjoy the complete privacy of walled-in blackout booths that conceal completely any curious activities going on within them. This internet café stays open at all hours of the day, which is convenient both for the night-owl porn surfers and also for me, since I am waiting on the hour to strike one thirty in the morning (ten thirty at night on the west coast of the States) so I can make a phone call.

Outside, the city half-slumbers, half-shivers in the cold winter night. Street vendors have ceased hawking their wares, and many of them sit bundled in piles of brightly colored blankets, with their necks cocked at uncomfortable looking angles and their mouths wide open, snoring lightly. Women stoop over large steaming woks within which sizzle mysterious meat products and potatoes that they stir lazily and occassionally ladle into disposible cardboard snack trays for passers-by. Loosely affiliated packs of dogs rifle through piles of garbage in the shadows. Taxi drivers careen through the empty streets, obeying even fewer laws than usual, and once in a while a harmless drunk man or two or three stumbles down the sidewalk on a mission to find either something else to drink, or somewhere relatively warm to sleep.

The vast majority of shops in the city close down around ten or eleven pm, shuttering up their entry ways and windows with roll-away ceiling-mounted steel doors and sometimes also with wrought-iron cages that extend from one wall of the doorframe to the other. With all the doors closed, the city takes on the appearance of a prison town, where access both into and out of every building is quite effectively denied. Our hotel is no different. At ten pm, the man behind the front desk extends a metal grate across the entrance, closes the sliding steel doors, and attaches no less than two padlocks for posterity's sake. Watching this happen from inside the hotel definitely reinforces my feeling of safety, but exiting the hotel through the layers of metal and hearing the locks click back into place behind me leaves me feeling a bit exposed.

That feeling vanishes quickly though, once I hit the street outside our hotel-prison. I get relatively little attention for a six foot tall gringo wandering the streets in the middle of the night. Few people even seem to notice as I pass by. And as yet, crime seems to be virtually nonexistent here. Except for the few scammers which we watched attempting to relieve unwary tourists of their money in the traveler's ghetto a few blocks from our hotel, we have seen no actual criminal events take place. We haven't even heard about any, in fact. Even at night, the Bolivians are friendly and cheerful, yelling jovially at each other and flamboyantly flagging taxis and minibuses for the ride home. The gates, bars, sliding steel doors, and padlocks seem to be a just-in-case measure--par for the course in an otherwise relaxed and comfortable nighttime city.

It's time for me to make that phone call. Good night.