The Street

The El Dorado hotel is situated on the central thoroughfare in La Paz, Avenida del Ejercito. The hotel costs 300 Boliviana a night which is £30 sterling. My friend chose it because it has three things to commend it. It is in a safe area. It has a heater which is turned on at night and it has free wi-fi. My own efforts to locate a hotel with similar characteristics were a resounding failure. The hotels I chose from internet booking sites, Gracie condemned as unsafe, saying to me, ' You stay in these places in these areas and I will not visit you'. So I am in my cheap safe hotel and it is absolutely brilliant. I am working on the staff to let me post their photos;they know about the blog and they are slowly warming to the idea and becoming less shy.
The gift of El Dorado is the proximity of the persons on the street.
Walk past the young charming security man on the El Dorado hotel door, dressed in the outfit of a New York bell boy from the 1950's and you meet the whole of Bolivia. Shoe shine street boys in Balaclavas. Indigenous women in satin skirts and choleras. The middle class queuing to perform transactions at the bank forming a queue no impatient European would ever think of joining. The female traffic police striding along the central reservation with raven hair and red lipstick. The peasant vendors selling sweets and newspapers at make shift booths covered with sheets of blue plastic. Entire families engaged in the act of selling chocolate bars water and sugary drinks.
If I was a professional documenter of life I would have pointed my camera in to their faces and snapped them up close. I could not do that. I could not steal their dignity. My photographs are taken from a distance but they provide something of the atmosphere of the place in which I have arrived.

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