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La Paz: Avenida Buenos Aires
It is not uncommon for places to become popularized through song, whether this is a city, a river, or even a street. If you look at the latter in particular, Broadway has taken a bow, as have Main Street and Baker Street. There's a fat to morbidly obese chance that people will ever write about any street in La Paz.
When you ask locals where the most dangerous place in La Paz is, you will always hear Avenida Buenos Aires, the long and winding road leading through the black market quarters of San Pedro. Forget about the black market, locals will say. That is actually supported by the state. Think drugs, think prostitution. Think armed robbery, hombre.
It’s a shame it needs to be like that. A walk down Avenida Buenos Aires during the day is as harmless as riding the century old merry-go-round in San Miguel. There will be as many traffic jams as on any major road, as many pedestrians checking out the stores as at the shopping mall Megacenter in Irpavi, although these customers clearly lack the deeper pockets of their counterparts in Irpavi. Taxis and troufis (shared taxis) try to weasel their way through traffic just the same, whether people are going to banks or bordellos.
Every other little shopette on Avenida Buenos Aires offers food – there will be saltenas, a pizza place, a mom and pop’s store cooking lunch as if you were walking into somebody’s home’s kitchen serving rice and meat of questionable quality.
Finally, there is a break between the old decrepit buildings, as there is a chain link fence protecting the pedestrians from a steep decline in the terrain beyond it. A gorgeous view over downtown La Paz and the looming Illimani mountain in the background offer people to pause and look, as if to make them forget where they are for a while.
When you ask locals where the most dangerous place in La Paz is, you will always hear Avenida Buenos Aires, the long and winding road leading through the black market quarters of San Pedro. Forget about the black market, locals will say. That is actually supported by the state. Think drugs, think prostitution. Think armed robbery, hombre.
It’s a shame it needs to be like that. A walk down Avenida Buenos Aires during the day is as harmless as riding the century old merry-go-round in San Miguel. There will be as many traffic jams as on any major road, as many pedestrians checking out the stores as at the shopping mall Megacenter in Irpavi, although these customers clearly lack the deeper pockets of their counterparts in Irpavi. Taxis and troufis (shared taxis) try to weasel their way through traffic just the same, whether people are going to banks or bordellos.
On a visit to the black market one weekend, I can no longer stand waiting in traffic and ask my buddy to let me out, so I can walk the remaining half mile or so. Again, this is the daytime, where crimes have as little success of being committed as a vampire is of being seen at sunrise.
I pass a store selling cheap cell phones, and yet I remind myself this is no different than Kathmandu or Brooklyn, New York. A lot of stores double with their services. The phone store also sells pirated DVD’s for two dollars each. One store sells gymnastic equipment…and kitchen hardware. A shop, another little hole in the wall, hawks cheap plastic toys and sells bed mattresses. Every other little shopette on Avenida Buenos Aires offers food – there will be saltenas, a pizza place, a mom and pop’s store cooking lunch as if you were walking into somebody’s home’s kitchen serving rice and meat of questionable quality.
Finally, there is a break between the old decrepit buildings, as there is a chain link fence protecting the pedestrians from a steep decline in the terrain beyond it. A gorgeous view over downtown La Paz and the looming Illimani mountain in the background offer people to pause and look, as if to make them forget where they are for a while.
Past the chain link fence is a wall advertising real estate – there is little chance of finding a realtor around here, where the rent is probably less than that of a parking lot in any city of a comparable size. There are pin-up notes, dozens of them, advertising for apartments, lots, and houses – property you can literally have for a song and a dance, and property that would probably crumble to the ground if you tried to perform a song and a dance in them.
A smiling cholita offers fresh juice, which I politely decline. There are homeless people wandering down the street, several of them conceivably ravaged by mental illness. There are beggars, completely sane, camped out under the sun, hats between their legs to accept the pittances this humble neighborhood has to offer. Begging for money on Avenida Buenos Aires is useless really, kind of like selling salchicas, or sausages, to vegetarians.
This doesn’t even tell the whole story, as the misery is only compounded at night. There are almost no policemen during the day, and I think we can reduce that meager number all the way to nada when the night breaks on Avenida Buenos Aires.
Avenida Buenos Aires is the perfect Jekyll and Hyde - the friendly, unassuming host during the day, and the mean spirited, nasty cousin at night. Every city has one.
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