Day 4: Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 (Island in the Sun - Weezer)

7:52am – We are sitting in our room listening to music. I brought Ranz a cd with some mp3s on it. My head hurts a little bit.

Another observation: A lot of houses are “open air” in the center, so people put shattered glass and broken bottles on the top of their outer walls to keep people from climbing over them.

8:54am – The hotel had an excellent full spread complimentary breakfast, including a pancake, a cup of cereal, yogurt, a peach, eggs to order, bread, OJ, and the blackest coffee I’ve ever seen (“Blacker than a moonless midnight,” I told Ranz). The milk was served warm in a kettle. It was all very tasty.

After breakfast we walked around the town down by the harbor and up into the main square of town. Because Copacabana draws a lot of tourists, there are restaurants that cater to them, such as pizzerias. Another thing that was true of Copacabana and La Paz: there were little vendor stands that sold all kinds of candy and snacks, such as Pringles, Snickers, M&Ms, Skittles, and Twix, to name a few.

We hiked up this mountain that was used for religious ceremonies. The stations of the cross were represented as you got higher and higher up the mountain, and then at the top were a bunch of pits for lighting fires and candles. From the top, the view of the harbor and Lake Titicaca was spectacular.

After hiking, we grabbed our bags and barely caught a boat to the Isla del Sol.

3:38pm – We are on the Isla del Sol. This morning we walked around Copacabana. We sat on a plaza in front of their main church and discussed my new house. I drew a diagram for Ranz and we talked shop for a while.

We again left our bags at the hotel and hiked up a religious mountain to a height of over 4000 meters (13,000 ft). On the way down I stood next to a sheep.

We then ate some fantastic Hawaiian pizza. Ranz almost freaked when he thought I was going to drink an already-opened bottle of water. It was awesome. I was impressed he even noticed that the cap didn’t crack when I opened it. I had opened it previously when he was in the bathroom, so everything was okay.

When we got back to our hotel around 1:10pm, we found we missed the bus to the harbor, so we high-tailed it to the boat. We took a 2 hour boat ride that smelled like gas fumes and are now on the Isla del Sol. We had to hike up a good bit, but are now situated in our hotel.

On the boat ride to the Isla del Sol, this crazy American girl from Arkansas started asking us about the Bolivian visa and what stamps she needed in her passport to get home. She had apparently “snuck” into Bolivian with her Chilean friend. The girl used southern phrases that reminded me of my days in Memphis (she was “fixing to” do something, and “ya’ll”). She name-dropped like crazy (supposed celebrities she had met) and was pretty full of herself.

The boat captain/ticket-collector told Ranz he had a nice hostel we could stay at for twenty Bolivianos a night where we could see both the sunrise and sunset. He told Ranz his daughter would take us up to it when we arrived on the island.

When we got to the island, we were mobbed with locals trying to sell us stuff or get us to stay at their hostel. The captain took us off the dock and said his daughter wasn’t there but these two boys would take us up. We followed these two boys up this trail (we learned they were both five years old) which was exhausting but a beautiful trail.

The locals didn’t speak true Spanish completely fluently, so they seemed to misunderstand Ranz. For instance, he asked the boys how many times a day they went up and down the trail, and they replied that it would take us 20 more minutes. When we were about halfway up we reached the first hostel, and the lady told Ranz it was the place we were looking for, but it clearly wasn’t, so we kept going.

We finally found the place and got a room (two beds) and settled in. The bathroom was a little gross. The bathroom was like a basement closet and the toilet didn’t flush on its own. You had to dump a bucket of rainwater into it.

The set up of the hotel was cool because it was built into the hillside and had a couple different levels.

A girl from France also stayed at the same hotel and she decided to explore town with us. We walked up the road a little bit and found an internet café / restaurant where we got a beer. It was essentially an open roof patio where the guy set up four stools, one for each of us and one to use as the table for our beer.

It was pretty cool sitting on the rooftop talking in three different languages about life, basking in the sun with the sounds of laughing children and braying donkeys in the background. It was a moment I can honestly say will never be recreated in my life.

This girl had worked for two years in France, saved up money, and had now quit her job and was taking a three-month tour of South America. This was a somewhat common theme among the tourist travelers we met, most of them European. It is a completely different mindset from in America. I can’t think of any Americans I know who would quit work and take their life savings and go tour the world for three or four months. I totally respected and envied this girl that she could do that.

After our beer we decided to go get some dinner. The French girl went off her own way and Ranz and I put some warmer clothes on and went and found a place where we could watch the sunset and eat our dinner. The French girl ended up joining us shortly into our meal. We also ran into two friends of Ben’s (Phil and Vicki), who we joined for some drinks after finishing our dinner.

We went to this cottage in the woods that had candles and no electricity but made delicious food. We then had to walk back to our hostel in the dark, though Ranz had a tiny flashlight to guide us. We agreed to meet Phil and Vicki in the morning to hike the length of the island with them.

9:20pm – We met a French girl named Bertilla, but Ranz called her Elena. We sat on the roof of a house in a “restaurant” and had a cervaza and talked in English/French/Spanish. It was cold in the shade but okay in the sun.

We went to dinner and I had spaghetti. We ran into Phil and Vicki, two Peace Corps volunteers in the same class as Ranz. Elena joined us for dinner. Afterwards, we went and joined Phil and Vicki at a little cottage that had no electricity and drank some cervezas. We could see Peru across Lake Titicaca and lots of stars were visible in the sky. We're now back in the room ready to hit it.