Lake Titicaca and Copacabana

Hey guys!

I'm trying to catch the blog up to real time, so I'm going to attempt to fit my long weekend in one post.

NOTE: This is a very long post so grab a snack and settle in.

To get to Lake Titicaca we first needed to catch a 7 hour bus to La Paz. Claire and I left with the intention of meeting up with a few of our SB friends once we got to either La Paz or the Lake. We took an overnight bus on friday, and we 'splurged' for a bus-cama (literally translates to bed bus). The seats on the bus-cama are super comfy and larger than normal. They recline extremely far back and there is a little thing you fold out for your feet to lay on that extends the seat all the way to the floor so that it feels like you are lying on a bed that is bent in the position of a recliner. A normal bus is 25 Bs and this was 90 Bs. We left at 11:00 am and by 7:15 am we were sitting in Alexander coffee ordering breakfast. This is the same coffee shop I went to in La Paz last time, where the Death Road bike tour meets. They were there again and just like last time the tour guide asked us if we were with the tour group, he wanted to be sure lest we be left behind. Our friend Elizabeth met us at 8:00 am, she had been hiking up an extremely tall mountain (so tall it involved wearing those ice pick things on your shoes). She had been hiking with an Italian couple from SB that we'd planned on meeting, but needed to escape from them after having a rotten time on the mountain (the Italian girl felt sick and went back to base camp with the guide, and soon after she felt ill too. She, however, was staked to the side of the mountain for an hour and a half because the Italian guy was pissed that she wasn't feeling well and he didn't want to go back down). Claire and I were exhausted from our bus ride and were also adjusting to the altitude, so we didn't leave until a little after 10:00 am. To get the bus to Copacabana we needed to make it to the cemetery. If you recall, last time I was in La Paz I climbed up to this cemetery to meet Maren's friends who weren't even there anymore, and I almost died. This time we were even lower and farther away than where I'd started before, so we took a cab.

Oh, also, it was raining when we got to La Paz. It rained the entire afternoon too. This was so weird. It hadn't rained the entire time I've been in Bolivia and for at least a month before that because Claire hadn't seen rain here either and she arrived here a month ahead of me. The rainy season here is between November and February. The rain turned out to determine the rest of our trip, so it was no trivial matter. Anyway, where was I..

We got a cab up to the cemetery and found a bus company that had a bus going to Copacabana in 20 minutes. Almost an hour later we boarded the bus with a new friend. He was 19, named Olivier, and half Brazilian and half French but grew up in Thailand and then Sri Lanka. His parents are now moving to Syria for the next few years. He spoke english extremely well. The afternoon had been somewhat miserable. We had to wait for an hour for a late bus in a cold and wet office and then board a bus that quickly became smelly while we were half hungry and half nauseous. While we were on the bus Claire, Elizabeth, and I talked about how cold we were and how all we really wanted was to curl up in a blanket with a hot drink next to a fireplace and watch a movie. I napped a bit and listened to my iPod, which I had just charged all night but after 7 songs the battery was down to half. A couple of hours later we all had to get off the bus and take a small boat to the other side of the harbor. Our bus would be following us on its own ferry across the water. It was still raining and pretty cold when we got off the bus so we grabbed a boat as soon as we could. We had to wait about half an hour on the other side for our bus to reach the shore, and then we were off for another hour to Copacabana.

We arrived in Copacabana around 4:00 pm.

Geography/History lesson: Copacabana is the town on the Bolivian side of Lake Titicaca. The other side of the Lake is Peru. It is famous for it's trout and for it's really big basilica. It is considered a sacred city and has been since before the Spanish Conquest.

When we got off the bus we found a woman who explained that if we wanted to go to Isla del Sol that day, it was going cost a lot of money because that late in the day you have to take a private bus to a private boat and then a private car. Or something like that. Isla del Sol is where everyone had told us we had to spend the night at Lake Titicaca. Apparently it's beautiful during sunrise and sunset. We weren't willing to spend 300 Bs per person to reach the island, especially since there were no ATMs anywhere around and we could only use the cash we had on us for the next few days. Instead we, with Brazilian/French guy in tow, made our way to a hotel that the lady recommended. (Olivier was more than harmless and planned to stay just the one night and was going to leave extremely early the next day for Tarija, on the opposite side of Bolivia- don't worry I follow my instincts and this guy was like a puppy just glad to be with 3 pretty and talkative girls). We asked to see what a room looked like, and sat down in a room with 4 beds to pull out our Lonely Planet and see what our other options were. According to Lonely Planet there was a hotel named Hotel Cúpula nearby with a view of the lake that had heat, hot water, a common room, and a communal kitchen. We set out to check out that place and apologized to the man for sitting in his hotel room for 15 minutes. The altitude was almost 4,000 meters and it brought me back to my days at the Salar de Uyuni. We were out of breath once we walked the 15 minutes to the hotel, but we knew as soon as we saw it that we wanted to stay there. It was $10.00 (70 Bs) a night. We got a room of 4 and sat down to put on more layers before going off to walk around the town and catch dinner.

This is the gate to our hotel and the view in front of it:

The yellow boats on the lake are reed boats.

This is the basilica from the street:

This is it from inside the front walls:

We ate dinner at this place called La Orilla, it was wonderful. I had stuffed trout, Olivier had pizza that I tasted and it was delicious, and Claire and Elizabeth split stuffed trout and coconut curry trout. All the menus in Copacabana are in english and spanish. Some of them aren't even in spanish. It is very obviously a tourist town. Oh, and the person who brought out our food was 12- maybe.

When it came time to order dessert the waiter said "no hay" (there is none) as if I was bothering him. About 80% of the time I've eaten in Bolivia, the place is out of dessert. And they always act as if you should've known that they were out of every dessert item on their menu. I think thats why I seem to have gained a few pounds. When you eat a delicious dessert, you feel satisfied. All I have to work with however are candy bars and Chips Ahoy cookies. So I eat a ton of cookies and junk to try to satisfy my sweet tooth but it never works. A lot of the time they are also out of whatever it is you want to order for your meal. I've heard from other volunteers who travel to poor countries a lot that it's normal for a place to only have half of the stuff on their menu. After we ate we bought a bottle of wine and some cookies/chocolates from a street vendor and a tiny store. In the tiny store we met another American who was from somewhere in Wisconsin. Claire is from just outside of Milwaukee, so they bonded over that for a few minutes before Olivier got impatient and we walked back to the hotel.

Back at La Cúpula we stripped down to comfy clothes, grabbed the extra blankets the hotel had put in our room, and headed to the common room where there was a TV. The common room was already occupied by a Danish family playing cards, but they told us to please watch a movie if that's what we wanted, it wouldn't bother them. (I told them Oprah told everyone Denmark was the happiest country on Earth, and they seemed unimpressed, but they were very nice). The room had a big space heater so in no time we all had a glass of wine and were eating our sweets and watching Slumdog Millionaire under our blankets. It was wonderful, and it was almost exactly what we'd been dreaming of on the bus. We couldn't believe our luck. I got up and took a hot shower halfway through the movie because I knew my hair would dry fast in that room with the heater and I know better than to go to sleep with a wet head, especially since I already had a lingering cold.

After the movie Olivier got right into bed because he was going to leave at 6:30 am the next morning to catch a bus back to La Paz and then on to Tarija. Our room had a small heater and we had extremely comfortable beds. We all fell asleep as soon as we put our heads on our pillows. The next morning Olivier left right when he said he would, and he paid his share of the room on his way out. We'd planned to leave by 8:00 am and eat before finding a boat then bus to Isla del Sol for our last night before returning to La Paz. We ate breakfast at our hotel and left around 9:30 am. We walked into the tourism office to ask when the boats left for Isla del Sol. We were informed that because of the rain the previous day and the high winds, no boats had left for a day and a half. We sat down to figure out our next move, and realized that even if we did catch the next and last boat to Isla del Sol, and even if it did leave, we have no way of insuring that we'd return when we wanted to and wouldn't get stranded on Isla del Sol. We couldn't risk that because Claire had to be back in La Paz by Monday night for her flight early Tuesday morning to Ecuador. We decided to stay in Copacabana another night since we'd been enjoying our time there so far. Around 11:00 am we returned to our hotel and booked a room for 3. Our new room had a fireplace! Now ALL of our dreams had come true! After dropping off our things, we left to explore the town and grab some food before hiking a mountain/cliff/large hill thing. We sat down at a table in the sun around noon and ordered the lunch special which included Quinoa soup, trout with veggies and potatoes, and either a crepe with marmalade or bananas and chocolate for dessert ($16 Bs or ~$2.3 Dollars). The courtyard was filled with Gringos and there were several hammocks hung from trees. I spent 10 minutes before we got our food sitting in one of the multi-colored fabric hammocks and decided I needed to get one as soon as I could. While we ate lunch and chatted Claire excitedly burst out that she swore she just saw hipster walk past our restaurant. Remember hipster and wannabe hipster from our Salar trip? They're british and had brought a lot of booze with them and very little warm layers. Elizabeth hadn't been there but Claire and I sat there staring at each other with our eyes bugged out until Elizabeth suggested that someone run and see if it was them for sure. After a dramatic pause I leapt up and ran out of the restaurant to verify our sighting.

It was them! It was hipster, this time with pants on instead of leggings, and wannabe older hipster walking down the street! I ran back to declare the good news. It is such a small world.

We didn't leave our lunch spot until after 3:00 pm. I left hoping my sunscreen had lasted that long. We spent an hour or so shopping amongst the many stores that lined the street. When we were done we all had new sweaters. We got back to our hotel to put on more layers before climbing the steep cliff up to some Incan ruins near our hotel. Both Claire and I saw that our noses were definitely red. My constant blowing my nose only made it worse, but I was having such a nice time I didn't mind at all. My asthma had been acting up all day, and when we got back to the hotel I borrowed a puff of Claire's inhaler. We laid down on our beds to take a breather from climbing the short distance to our hotel from lunch. I knew that if I felt that out of breath from getting to my hotel, climbing the cliff was not going to be fun. I really didn't want to do it but was mentally preparing myself. Elizabeth and I were sharing a "cama matrimonial" (matrimony bed= queen bed), and Claire laid down on her twin bed. Elizabeth and I laid down perpendicular to sleeping direction, with our legs hanging off touching the floor. We all fell asleep within seconds. Halfway through our impromptu nap, Claire woke me up because she was seeing this out of our window:

I took pictures and laid right back down and fell right back asleep. Around 5:30 pm we all got up groggily and we all realized we were starving. "Well, I guess the hike isn't happening," said Claire and Elizabeth with not even a hint of remorse. I was ecstatic. We walked back with all intention of going to La Orilla again, I wanted Olivier's pizza from last night. When we got there around 6:15 pm it was closed! We went instead to a place across the street. I knew it wasn't going to be good when the man outside the store said "¡Chicas bonitas! Van a entrar?" (Beautiful girls! Are you going to come in?) I was right. Everything was overpriced. Bottled water is usually 4 or 5 Bs, but here it was 10! Cheese pizza was 45 Bs! That's almost $7.00. Claire's food came out first. She'd ordered pesto pasta. This is what she got:

Oh, and this was a sign in the restaurant. It says "Hi? No smoking please":

When the waiter brought it out I couldn't help it, I started to giggle but quickly suppressed it and tried to cover it up by saying "sorry.. I don't know why I'm laughing.." Halfway through eating her pasta, Claire said "I kind of want to go up to them and say; 'you know this isn't pesto right?'" We decided that what she was probably eating was pasta with creamed spinach or creamed broccoli. Our pizzas were no better. They were soft and the sauce tasted like pure tomato paste. A cute European couple sat down next to us and began discussing getting pizza (they weren't speaking spanish or english, but we clearly heard the word pizza, and the guy picked up the pizza menu). We decided to save them and quickly asked if they spoke english. They did, and we told them not to order anything to eat, least of all pasta or pizza. They looked alarmed and told the waiter they would just have tea. It was hilarious, they were so adorable. They told us they'd just been to Isla del Sol and it was amazing and beautiful but freezing, it even snowed there overnight. On their boat ride back they said there were 30 people on a boat meant for 15. It was so choppy that several people threw up but they were crammed inside and there was no way someone could escape to throw up over the side of the boat. It sounded awful. We felt lucky to have skipped that boat ride. They asked if we had any other suggestions and we mentioned La Orilla but apologized that they were closed. They said no worries, they were going to go anywhere but here to eat. After we ate we all felt unsatisfied and went back to our hotel. There we commandeered the common room and watched Ámelie. Claire and Elizabeth shared a bottle of wine and I had a couple cups of warm tea and lots of Chips Ahoy cookies. (P.S. Chips Ahoy cookies are easy to find here, but they are all in individual packs of 4 or packs of 6 individual packs, and they are all a tad too well done. All of them. I'm starting to think that the factory workers send all the ones that are a bit too well done to South America). The kids in the Danish family watched most of Ámelie with us. After that we watched Up. Claire and Elizabeth fell asleep towards the end, but me and this random girl who came in when we started the movie watched the whole thing. This girl was around our age but didn't say a single word the whole time. We did catch each other's eyes when I'd look over to find Elizabeth and Claire asleep, and we'd smile to each other. I don't know if she didn't speak english, but I would've assumed she'd say a greeting in spanish if she knew that being that we're in Bolivia. She also had to have understood english because she watched all of Up with us in english without subtitles. It's a mystery. We cleaned up and returned to our rooms where Elizabeth lit our fire place.

We also had the heater going. It was so warm in there it was lovely. I was way too excited at the fact that all I slept in was a tank top, leggings, and not even socks! I fell asleep listening to Elizabeth and Claire talking, which never happens. I must've been really tired and really comfortable.

The next morning we got breakfast at a Columbian style restaurant, which ended up being a bad move. For more money than we'd paid the previous morning, we got way less food. We left there and went to a bus company to buy tickets for an 11:30 bus back to La Paz. There we ran into to Danish guys in their mid 20's who asked for suggestions about where to stay. We ended up giving them advice about a lot of places in Bolivia. One of the guys will be in Chicago in a couple of weekends, so I told him to go to Millennium Park for a free concert or something, and Claire suggested Second City, which I quickly agreed would also be worth doing. When we left the office to wait outside for our bus, Claire and Elizabeth started gushing over how hot the two guys were. They were commenting on their great eye contact and their extreme interest in everything we were saying. Usually I pick up on that stuff quickly, but I had been completely not aware that that's why we were talking to these guys for so long. Somehow their attractiveness did not even register on my radar. I must've been so excited to give suggestions about Chicago that I didn't even think about it.

Our bus ride back went the same as before except that it was much less cold, not wet, and it wasn't cloudy so we could see how huge and beautiful the lake is. The view of the lake included the Andes.

Back in La Paz we headed to our hostel for the night: Adventure Brew. It is a micro brew and gives every guest one free beer a day. We shopped around La Paz, I bought a really cool hammock, and we headed over to Elizabeth's hostel where she'd kept one of her bags before we left La Paz on Saturday. We needed to carry all of her stuff and a very heavy bag from the Italian couple that they wanted her to bring back to Cochabamba (she was heading back via bus that night and not staying at Adventure Brew). We hauled all of this stuff through the streets of La Paz until we reached our dinner destination; the Star of India. Indian food! I was sooo excited. It is owned by British people so we knew it'd be more than decent. Once we sat down two American guys were getting up to pay and leave. One of them complained about the smell of Indian food; "F*ing Curry smell is filling up my nostrils!!" he said. I wanted to reply, "and when you got to Bolivia, were you upset that everyone spoke spanish?" The food was great and by the time we left the place was full of Gringos. I don't think many Bolivians eat Indian food.

After dinner we hiked back to our hostel to get our free beer and relax before an early bedtime. Claire and I would be going to the airport at 6:00 the following morning. She was leaving for 2 weeks in Ecuador and 2 weeks in Nicaragua, and I was just sick of buses and decided to catch a 30 min plane back to Cochabamba.

I want to explain something about La Paz. It is an extremely hilly city. You can't really walk anywhere without going downhill or uphill. Even if you try to trick it by walking left or right, it doesn't work because literally every street, whether north and south or east and west, is on a steep incline. The city is also extremely polluted. All we could smell while walking along the streets was gasoline, and I felt like I could feel it entering my nostrils and then my lungs. There are tons of people in La Paz, and all the traffic is trapped in the bowl that is the city. La Paz is surrounded on all four sides by mountains. All of these things combined to really start to bother my asthma. Claire was constantly using her inhaler, and I desperately needed one. Once we got back to the hotel I could breathe and we went upstairs to grab a beer and use the free wi-fi at the bar. The guy next to me was smoking, and after a few minutes I disintegrated into my asthmatic cough. After coughing on and off for the next half an hour, I escaped downstairs to get a towel from the front desk. First the guy told me that there weren't any and that I'd have to wait til 8:30 the next morning. Then, when I said we were leaving at 6 the next day, he magically found a bag full of clean towels up in the courtyard on the second floor.

After saying goodbye to Elizabeth, Claire and I took turns taking showers and went to bed around 11:00 pm. We got up at 5:20 am and packed up for the airport. I had considered buying a flight ahead of time, but someone had told me that I should wait until I get to the airport because the fares will be cheaper then. I got to the airport and ate breakfast with Claire after being put on a wait list for an 8:10 am flight. I didn't get on the flight and ended up buying tickets for a 2:30 pm flight. There was a man and his son doing the same thing I was, and they struck up a conversation, it turns out that the man is Bolivian but he lives in Evanston! He gave me his card which has a Dempster address. They left to go back into the city, a half hour cab ride, but I stayed and read my book and ate at a cafe all afternoon. I decided I'd rather be at the airport for 7 hours than on a bus for 7 hours. I also hate the bus terminals here. Imagine a big airplane hanger that smells like garbage and inside are 20 different bus companies, one filthy bathroom, several vendors selling snacks and crappy sandwiches, and 200 people yelling "A LA PAZ A LA PAZ A LA PAZ?!?!" in your left ear, and "A SANTA CRUZ A SANTA CRUZ A SANTA CRUZ?!?!?!?" in your right ear. There are also countless Bolivians just standing in the middle of where you're trying to go, and they make no effort to give you any room as you squeeze by them carrying a ton of stuff and hit them accidently with something you're carrying, and they yell something back at you. I hate the bus terminals.

On the plane I sat right across from that Evanston man and his son. The son leaned across and asked what I was reading and I showed him the cover. He smiled and told me he doesn't like to read. I didn't know what to say to that so I just went back to my book. (He goes to high school in Maryland and has a pretty thick accent which I assume is Bolivian).

I got back to my house at 3:30 pm and talked to Tom on gchat for awhile before going to the pharmacy to buy an inhaler, which cost me just over $4.00 and I didn't need a prescription.

That's it folks! I'll update again soon- if you're bored you should watch the Drunk History video I posted yesterday, it is definitely worth it and you are guaranteed to laugh.

Con amor,

Hillary