The World's Most Dangerous Road WILL kill you (and then eat your soul)

After a few days hanging out in La Paz, which while no one would ever say is the coolest city in the world (except perhaps someone who has only been to La Paz and Pocatello, Idaho) is a pleasant place to spend a couple of days, we decided to actually do something. We'd grown tired of watching the giant protests, getting tear-gassed in passing, and ducking and crapping ourselves every time the protesters let off another stick of dynamite (not to blow anything up, but rather to simply make a loud noise to announce their presence to everyone whose head wasn't lodged firmly up their own ass.) So, seeing as Tyler hates bikes and I hate Tyler, I convinced him to go on one of the most popular excursions from La Paz: mountain biking down The World's Most Dangerous Road.

Now, the title The World's Most Dangerous Road might put off the average tourist with a vague interest in riding a bike down something without asphalt, but not Tyler nor I. One would guess that by advertising in every travel agency and hostel in town a trip down The World's Most Dangerous Road that they are making sure to point out the road's standing as the Most Dangerous in an attempt to warn people away from trying to ride a bike down it. Not to be deterred by this obvious attempt to dissuade us from attempting such a foolhardy stunt, we signed up with one of the dozens of tour companies who risk life and limb of the hundreds of tourists who refuse to heed the road's ultimate dangerosity and park their often ample behinds squarely on a bike seat, risking death and "saddle-ass" just to get the T-Shirt that lets everyone they meet know that they, at least, have no fear of that most Peligroso of roads.

So, rising early, we were picked up in our hostel by a van already packed full of another tour group of Israelis doing the same thing as us that day. The ride to the start of The World's Most Dangerous Road takes an hour or so, and passes out of La Paz and up to the top of a giant pass in the Andes dividing the Altiplano (high plains) of the west and the Yungas (or jungly-type area) of the east. 2/3 of our group consisted of the coolest people of all time, as somehow we'd lucked out and were going with only Tyler, myself, and our guide. (The Israelis were with another company, and as such we didn't have to go in a group with them). The first part of The World's Most Dangerous Road (or TWMDR as I shall refer to it from here on out) consists of about 20k of asphalt road, descending from freezing cold Altiplano pass regions down to where the road becomes dirt, and the climate much warmer and humid, and the land becomes green with vegetation. At this point, we stopped at a small roadside stand to fuel our bodies for the coming descent of TWMDR.



After stocking up on fried-egg sandwiches, we continued on for another hour or so before we came to where TWMDR actually starts, announcing its awesome presence by turning off from the main road and going in a completely different direction. The road gets its name not just as a cheap advertising gimmick, but from the fact that it is indeed a dangerous road. The road itself is dangerous because the Bolivian engineers who created it made it very narrow, and foolishly carved it into the side of a mountain with a sheer cliff on one side! Anyone who wishes to make a road not the Most Dangerous in the World should place "avoid giant cliff proximity" high in their list of tasks when building said road. The road gains a bit on the dangerous meter as well by the fact that it is used mostly by tons of giant trucks, peppered about a bit with buses full of potential bus-plunge victims, and of course tourists cruising down on mountain bikes, barely competent enough to work the brakes on the bike. A lot of the drivers chew coca leaves continuously to stay awake, which accounts for the steering-wheel-clenching, green-toothed, and wild-eyed appearance of most of them. Accidents do happen on the road with frequency, as it's the type of road where owing to its inability to allow two cars to use the same stretch of road along 99% of it, when two vehicles encounter one another going opposite directions, assuming they don't actually collide, one of them has to back up for quite some distance to find a suitable passing spot.





So, hopping awesomely onto our bikes, we began to tackle the challenging descent of TWMDR. Unfortunately, our guide didn't really know how to ride a bike all that well, so our group speed wasn't all that high, and even Tyler managed to impress him with his daring speeds. We stopped for a brief lunch at a wide spot in the road, known for the fact that an Israeli girl had used the cliff immediatey to the left as a good place to get herself sadly killed by riding off said cliff a couple of years before. What a great place to stop and enjoy a tasty snack. (In the picture below, you can barely make out Tyler, standing on the road in the bottom part of the picture, which gives some amount of scale. It should be noted that the cliff would still look really big if it were a normal-sized person standing there as well.)



So, after lunch we again set out, Tyler and I again trying to push our speeds up into the realm of at least pulse-beating, if not actually pulse-pounding. Finally, our guide, scared to death of the speeds we wanted to go, bailed out and switched with another guide (the advance scout from the Israeli group who was an avid mountain biker). This new guy, pleased to be freed from his duties with the other group and given free license to go as fast as he wanted with the crazy gringos, promptly took off at high speed, leaving behind a trail of dust with flecks of fire in it. We never saw him again. So now, Tyler and I were free to go as fast as we wanted, and promptly did. The rule with mountain biking is: if you're not at least 10-15% out of control and scared, you could be having a ton more fun. So, we flew down TWMDR as fast as we were able, and then a bit faster, having a great time trying to kill ourselves. The rest of the ride took a few hours, down some really beautiful landscape.





At the end of the ride, we arrived in a small town in the jungle. Our group and the Israeli one as well were taken to a very nice resort, where they served us an all-you-can-eat buffet next to a nice pool that I still wouldn't have swam in had you paid me. Big mistake for them, as Tyler and I ate 4-5 helpings of just about everything, forgoing other activities such as sitting in the sun by the pool to gorge ourselves more. Good food, too. The grounds had, in its repertoire, two ornry parrots who hated your guts whether they knew you or not, and snapped their beaks at anyone who came close. At one point one of the birds cornered me with my back to a fall of a few meters, and I was forced to fight my way out.



I lost, horribly.

So anyway, the day ended, and we road the van back up and over TWMDR to La Paz. It was on this particular ride that I discovered that Israelis love to sing, and as such we spent the entire 4 hour ride belting out such classics as Hotel California, and Hit Me Baby One More Time. Good times.

In closing, I'll leave you with a picture of awesomeness:



(who's that guy?)
- posted by Micah @ 5:40 PM