What exactly crosses your mind when you hear the expression ‘ghost town’?
If you’re like me, you probably hold the image of some abandoned little village in the middle of the desert out west: the wind turning the wheels of some junky old automobile propped up on cinderblocks or pushing tumbleweeds across dirt roads, while the lizards and snakes crawl along, as even they find the place too creepy to hang around.
Naturally, most ghost towns are the result of economic hardships and changes. The depression certainly created its fair share of ghost towns, as did the most recent recession and the urban migration long before that. The math is simple and holds true everywhere in the world: the less opportunity there is in a town, the less the population.
I have seen my share of ghost towns throughout the world, though these were mostly temporary only – sometimes for a day, often only for an evening. Recently, Hurricane Sandy was living proof that you might want to seek entertainment, or even mere survival, at your boarded up home rather than risk driving a car or surfing on thirty foot waves with 70 mph winds. So the weather is a natural ghost town creator.
But certainly not the only one.
Nothing quite compares to the emptiness of an Arabic town when people break the fast during Ramadan. Once the call to prayer and/or the cannon shot sounds, people will be leaving the streets as if they’d been told the plague just broke out. It’s no secret that this is when most accidents occur involving motor vehicles – I am well aware of it, having been a passenger in way too many of these death races to beat the clock.
In Nepal, for instance, I reported regularly about bhands, strikes that would regularly shut down the entire city. The city was not empty per se – only the noise pollution would be reduced to the equivalent of the Sea of Tranquility, since not one motor vehicle was using the Ring Road in Kathmandu. Thousands of people walking down the main streets reminded you of National Geographic articles depicting mass migration.
Bolivia has a unique way of its own to create a ghost town for a day.
It’s called the census.
So if government officials are to count you, you are to stay at home, not wander about freely, let alone use motor vehicles for any personal business, or any business at all, come to think of it. In other words, there’s a 24 hour curfew, with no exceptions. This just happened Wednesday, November 21 – the first census conducted in Bolivia in eleven years.
So who is in the streets of Bolivian cities and villages? About 150,000 canvassers collecting all sorts of data and 30,000 policemen enforcing the curfew.
The government later announced how pleased it was with the population adhering to any restrictions, calling it ‘a positive sign of maturity’.
Kudos to the government of Bolivia for creating the perfect ghost town for a day, something no strike or natural disaster could ever achieve.
