| May 1, 2006 - The Death Road, Bolivia
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 | | show all 104 | | Dan and I, starting the day at 4700m (15,500ft) | | Geared up, bikes tested, ready to roll. That's Dan. | | The first part of our ride, still paved | | |
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 | The cute monkey at dinner, and listen to the parrots
| | The start of the ride, still on cement
| | Onto the gravel now
| | A bus passes during our snack break
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 | | | A bus drives away, as we leave the snack stop
| | A quiet scene, as we wait for the group to catch up
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| This exciting, wild, and irresponsibly stupid ride, also dubbed "The World's Most Dangerous Road", is a huge tourist attraction for young and carefree backpackers seeking memorable experiences, take-home stories, and intimidating risks along the Gringo Trail. A large majority of the people I met who had passed through Bolivia had done this ride, and they all recommended it.
The day begins with an early wakeup, and then a breakfast at the tour company's office as they prepare, and the different riders all meet each other. You then pile into a van and drive for a while until you reach La Cumbre (the peak), the highest point at 4700m on a paved road leading from the Andes mountains near La Paz down to the Bolivian piece of the Amazon Basin. You arrive at the starting point, layered with warm clothes, helmet, and gloves, test out your bike and more importantly the brakes, and then begin your journey on a still-paved downhill section of the road.
The ride itself plunges 3600m to arrive at an altitude of 1100m in a town called Coroico in only four hours. While you begin in the bitter high altitude cold of the Altiplano, by
the end of your intense downhill ride you are stripped down and sweating in the humid tropics on the outskirts of the jungle. The sinister nickname comes from the fact that the majority of this ride takes place on 9ft-wide dirt and gravel roads with 1000ft+ cliffs at times on either side. And no guard rails. That and the fact that 30 vehicles a year make the plunge resulting in about 200 yearly deaths. But only one of which is a bicycle rider, which actually makes biking the safest way down the road!
Dan and I booked the trip together with Barro Biking, and a bunch of other international backpackers made up our team. We were weakened from the night before, but as soon as you mount that bike in the piercing early morning cold its amazing how alive you feel. The first section is actually all on paved road, you get an immediate downhill rush, but then there is some climbing you have to do as well. That part was not so fun. You go through some dips and climbs, a checkpoint of some sort, and soon enough arrive at the start of the actualy Death Road section. And then the fun begins.
Its right around this point too that you typically hit the cloud line, so in addition to the road narrowing and turning to gravel you can no longer see anything but misty white in all directions and a look over the very near edge reveals a milky nothingness. It can be 5 feet, or it can bee 1000 feet, but you certainly don't want to find out. So our group moved on, at times crawling around curves with sweaty temples and white knuckles and at other times bulding up the courage to let yourself fly bouncing and bumping to exhiliration. It was a great time, and adding to the adrenaline, as always, was the fantastic scenery all around. Once you get below the clouds you are in an environment that seems reserved solely for cliff-clinging and canyon-dwelling wildlife and the brids that soar overhead, yet there you are cruising along with your bike on a road that has less of an excuse to be there than anything else. It was stunning and inspiring, and we stopped frequently for photo ops. In these moments we were free to truly appreciate the beauty surrounding us, which crept up in a quiet stillness available only during these breaks, with no cars or trucks around, and the wind ceasedtaking a break from rushing passed your ears. It would take a moment to catch your breath, to let your heart rest for a second and for your insides to stop vibrating and your hands throbbing, but then you feel it. And with this power you are ready to start up once again, using gravity as your copilot.
Towards the end of the ride the road flattens out for a bit and some peddling is required, a welcome relief at this point, to get you into the town of Coroico. Here we loaded the bikes back onto the van that had been following us the whole time and went to the little resort oasis for showers and a large buffet lunch/dinner, the reward included in all tours as the final piece of a long day. We stuffed our faces, had a drink, toasted our success and our health, traded stories and perspectives from the day, and then loaded back into the van for the 3-hour ride home.
That's right, did I forget to mention this? The scariest and most dangerous part of the day is actually the return ride since the only way back to La Paz is to climb back up the same road, only this time in a van and in the dark. For this reason many people choose to take all their belongings on the ride, and stay the night in Coroico to continue on to a jungle tour from there the following day. After all, as I said before, the bike is the safest way to make this trip, which is the only way to the Bolivian jungle from La Paz other than flying. Although I too was moving on to Rurrenabaque and the jungle the next day, I declined this option as I had plans for one final night and one last goodbye for the final breakup of our longstanding travel group, since Dan was also moving on but in a different direction to catch his return flight from Lima in just a few days. The return ride was uneventful and passed quickly though, as Dan, Igor, and I were able to stretch out in a van to ourselves. It was actually one of those spontaneous magical travel moments as I engaged in a lengthy profound conversation with Igor, a philosophy professor from Colorado who has done a lot of social service work similar to my own. We shared, debated, and analyzed away the entire three hours, and it was the perfect ending to a great day. It would be the only time I ever spent with Igor, and really only a few hours at that, yet he is definitely one of the characters from this whole experience that I will never forget and who truly made a lasting impression on me. As I've said a million times before, along with the scenery and the cultures, the language and the food, the experiences and the struggles, the people you meet along the way are really one of the main parts of what this trip is all about.
That night, to nobody's surprise, Dan and I were too beat to do anything and instead just had a quiet night, got ourselves ready for the next leg of our journies, and went to bed early.
Some notes:
The first photos are the ones I took with my own camera, the rest of them are the ones Barro Biking took during the ride and gave to us. The videos come from Barro Biking as well.
Here is a link to one company's site about the ride:
http://www.thedeathroad.com/
Here is a link to a BBC article about The Death Road, but the full text is pasted below
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/6136268.stm
"The World's Most Dangerous Road"
By Mark Whittaker
Nov 11, 2006
It seems perverse that one of the main roads out of one of the highest cities on Earth should actually climb as it leaves town.
"Every year it is estimated 200 to 300 people die on a stretch of road less than 50 miles long."
But climb it does - just short of a lung-sapping five kilometres (three miles) above sea level, where even the internal combustion engine is forced to toil and splutter.
Then it pauses for a while on the snow-flecked crest of the Andes before pitching - like a giant white knuckle ride - into the abyss.
The road from Bolivia's main city, La Paz, to a region known as the Yungas was built by Paraguayan prisoners of war back in the 1930s.
Many of them perished in the effort. Now it is mainly Bolivians who die on the road - in their thousands.
In 1995, the Inter American Development Bank christened it the most dangerous road in the world. And, as you start your descent, and your driver whispers a prayer, you begin to see why.
The bird's eye view is on the left, on the front seat passenger's side, where the Earth itself seems to open up.
Crosses at the roadside mark the locations of fatal accidents.
A gigantic vertical crack appears. Way below, more than half a mile beneath your passenger window, you can see - cradled between canyon walls - a thin silver thread: the Coroico River rushing to join the Amazon.
On the driver's side there is a sheer rock wall rising to the heavens. There is no margin of error. The road itself is barely three metres wide. That is if you can call it a road.
After the initial stretch to the top of the mountain it is just dirt track. And yet - incredibly - it is a major route for trucks and buses.
HAIRPIN BENDS
Drivers stop to pour libations of beer into the earth - to beseech the goddess Pachamama for safe passage.
Then, chewing coca leaves to keep themselves awake, they are off at break-neck speeds in vehicles which should not be on any road, let alone this one.
Perched on hairpin bends over dizzying precipices, crosses and stone cairns mark the places where travellers' prayers went unheeded. Where, for someone - the road ended.
But even these stark warnings are all too often ignored. As first one - and then a second impatient motorist - overtook our car on the ravine side of the road, my own driver - who hardly ever spoke a word and only then in his native Aymara - intoned loudly, eerily and in perfect English..."You will die."
It is not a rash prediction to make.
Extreme weather conditions make driving more hazardous.
Every year it is estimated 200 to 300 people die on a stretch of road less than 50 miles long. In one year alone, 25 vehicles plunged off the road and into the ravine. That is one every two weeks.
It is the end of the dry season in Bolivia. Soon the rains will come - cascading down the walls of the chasm. Huge waterfalls will drench the road - turning its surface to slime.
Then will come those heart-stopping moments when wheels skid and brakes fail to grip. There are stories told of truckers too tired - or too afraid - to continue, who pull over for the night, hoping to see out an Andean storm. But they have parked too close to the edge. And as they sleep in their cabs, the road is washed away around them.
This is not the place to drop off.
CLIFF EDGE
But for now the road is a ribbon of dust. Every vehicle passing along it churns up a sandstorm in its wake.
Choking, blinding clouds obscure the way ahead. Around one hairpin, a cloud of debris was beginning to clear.
Further down the road we passed a spot where a set of fresh tyre tracks headed out into the void
As it did, I could see people milling around in the road. Passengers from one of the overloaded and decrepit buses which run the gauntlet of this road.
It seemed at first that they had got off to stretch their legs, while their driver argued with another vehicle coming in the other direction about who should give way. (Reversing is not something you undertake lightly on a cliff edge.)
It transpired instead though, that the bus driver was dying. Blinded by the dust, he had run into the back of a truck. The bus's steering column had gone through him - severing his legs.
There was nothing anyone could do. Mobile phones do not work here. In any case, who would you call? There are no emergency services.
And no way of getting help through, even if any were to be found. The bus driver bled to death.
We edged past the crumpled bus, and headed on.
Further down the road we passed a spot where a set of fresh tyre tracks headed out into the void. They told their own story.
High in the Andes, they are building a new road. A by-pass, to replace the old one. But this is Bolivia, and already it has been 20 years in the making.
Who knows when it will be complete? Until it is, people will have to continue offering up their prayers, and taking their lives in their hands on the most dangerous road in the world. |
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