Day 3: Monday, April 7th, 2008 (Copacabana – Barry Manilow)

8:03am – I’ve just awoken from a pretty good sleep. The bed is nice and comfy.

After the internet café yesterday, we laid down in/on our beds for a little siesta. We ended up talking a bit, but eventually fell asleep. We got up after 8pm and grabbed a taxi to a place called Mongo’s. It was a cool restaurant with wood floors, tables, and chairs, a fireplace, and candles on the tables.* The ambiance was very cool and they played American music (such as Tom Jones’s Sex Bomb). “And they’ve got a pool table, too.”

We ordered what Ranz claims to be the best cheeseburgers in Bolivia. They were tasty.

His friend Mike met us there and we drank Bolivian beer before heading back to the hostel and crashing.

*One good thing about Bolivia is that they are very conscious of energy usage and power consumption. I don’t know if this is by choice so much as necessity, but I like it. There were no outlets in our rooms in some of the places we stayed, so we had to be aware of when our electronic devices were running low on power. On the island and on the Salar, a lot of places ran on generator power (and the generators didn’t start until the sun went down and they were needed to produce light). It was an adjustment to not always be able to plug into the “grid” and have electricity.

One contrasting bad thing is that they seem to not care about garbage. People just throw their trash in the street. This contributes to the presence of the stray dogs, who basically scrounge through the discarded waste for food. There are piles of trash in the middle of the street in places. It’s kind of sad that they just don’t care.

Monday we got up pretty early and packed our bags up. We checked out of our room and left our bags at the “reception” desk while we headed out. The first stop was some breakfast, Bolivian style.

9:23am – We are sitting in a corner café on Monday. I just had a Bolivian salteña, a breakfast item kind of like a hot pocket. There is a precise technique to eating these without slopping juices all over, which I totally botched.

The city is bustling with people. It doesn’t look much different from any city I’ve ever seen.

I forgot to write yesterday that Bolivians love ice cream. We saw so many people eating it, and every ice cream shop we passed had long lines out the door. We are planning to leave to go to Copacabana later this afternoon. More then…

10:07am – One more thing: because of the altitude in La Paz, there are not many bugs, which is nice. Also, I feel a little sun burnt on my face and neck from yesterday. We are going to buy some sunscreen.

After breakfast we walked around some of the artisan shops that lined the streets. I scoped out some souvenirs to buy on my last day before heading home. One thing they sell that I found interesting was dead baby llamas. They had baskets full of these baby llama bones, most of them between a foot and a foot and a half tall. Ranz explained to me that they somewhat revere the llama since it is a very useful animal for them (it is one of the few that lives and thrives at high altitudes). They put the dead baby llama remains in their houses for good luck, kind of like to ward off bad spirits. I felt safe enough without one, so I saved my money for other mementos.

There was a big church of San Francisco that we went in and looked at. The architecture and woodwork were so old and ancient looking. It was pretty cool. There were lots of people praying and looking at the paintings and sculptures, yet it was almost completely silent.

We walked back to our hostel, grabbed our bags, and got a taxi to go and meet Ranz’s friend Armando.

I believe Armando is originally from Chile, but he does a lot of volunteer work in Bolivia. His natural language is Spanish, but he speaks pretty good English. As him and Ranz talk, they speak mostly English for my benefit, but revert to Spanish when they are misunderstanding each other in English (or when they can’t think of the English word).

We drop our bags off at Armando’s apartment and head to a restaurant called Paladar. It is Armando’s birthday, so he got to pick the restaurant. Unfortunately, when we get there, they are closed on Mondays, so we head back to the square we started from and find a different place that he likes.

2:27pm – We walked around and did some window shopping this morning. We went and saw the Church of St. Francis. Then we caught a taxi to go back to where we were last night near Mongo’s. Armando, a friend of Ben’s, met us and took us to a restaurant for lunch (Quontero?). We had steaks, rice with cheese, salads, soup, and dessert. The steak was delicious. We got to see a park where some riots went down a couple weeks ago.

A few more things I’ve learned: the street lights are sideways (green, yellow, red are horizontal instead of vertical). The women in La Paz all wear funny derby hats.

We are now on a bus on our way to Copacabana for this evening.

After eating our nice lunch with Armando, we went back to his apartment, grabbed our bags, and caught a cab to where the busses leave for Copacabana. I say “to where the busses leave,” because it was not a station. It was just a place near a cemetery that apparently seemed like a good spot to leave from. These busses are actually more like glorified vans. The one we find holds maybe 10-15 people. There are “buses” loading people up, and we get 2 of the few remaining seats on a “bus.” They grab our bags and put them on top of the “bus,” and we inch our way to the back seat.

The first leg of the ride takes about an hour and a half. At that point we reach a river town where we have to take a ferry across the river to the other side. We have to get out of the van and meet it on the other side. It takes one ferry for vehicles, while we take a boat for people. We get to the other side at a different spot from our van. While walking to try and find our van, we also have to pee. We can’t find a bathroom anywhere and finally just go down a dirt “ally” in some bushes. Meanwhile, we hear honking and assume it must be our driver giving us our last warning. I get to the street and see the van and wave to it. The driver pulls up to where we are and we hop in. Ranz makes a joke in Spanish to the driver (something about us not being fast) and everyone laughs.

The second leg of the trip from the ferry town to Copacabana only takes about an hour. The funniest part of this trip to me is when someone yells for the driver to stop, and then they get out where there is no civilization in sight. I don’t understand where they can possibly be going.

When we arrive in town, we had plans to stay in this higher-end place. We check at one hotel, but they only have 1 room left with a single bed. We checked at the higher-end place, but they are out of rooms, so we go back to the first place. The lady looked at Ranz kind of funny when he said we would take the room with one bed, especially since it was called a “matrimonial” room.

6:06pm – We are in Copacabana in a “matrimony” room at the Hotel Utuma. The ride here we took a “bus” and ferry and people got dropped off in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. We almost got left after the ferry because we had to pee. The driver was very speedy and tried to drive us off the edge of the road a few times. On the way here we drove through a lot of pretty barren wastelands. It reminded me of the movie Babel and the road the bus was on when the woman got shot.

The shower in our room has an electric current running to it that heats the water as it comes out of the shower head.

The shower was new to me. Ranz explained that you have to choose your water temperature on the heater before turning on the water because if you reach up to do it while the water is running, you are liable to get shocked.

Not having showered since Saturday before I left the US (and it now being Monday evening), I was anxious to try out the shower. It worked pretty well, and I survived without getting a shock.

The room also had outlets, so we charged a bunch of our stuff (cell phones, batteries, computer, etc.). I realized I must have left my headphones for the iPod in our hostel in La Paz.

9:42pm – We went to dinner at a place with fish on the menu and a fireplace. The fish was okay. It was a garlic trout. I have found a hair in pretty much every meal I’ve eaton here, which is kind of gross, but a man’s gotta eat.*

There was a soccer game tonight, so a lot of people were watching it and they kept setting off fireworks. Some guys also set up some huge speakers in the street and were blasting music and trying to get a street party going.

We’re back in our room now, reading, blogging, and organizing photos.

* This trend pretty much continued throughout the whole trip. There were very few meals where I didn’t find a hair or a fly in my food.