La Paz and Death Road
Trip Start
Jun 03, 2008
1
16
27
Trip End
Aug 11, 2008
La Paz,
Bolivia
Thursday, July 10, 2008
La Paz is the unofficial capital of Bolivia and we spent three days there. It is a crazy city, with the traffic as bad as iīve seen anywhere, mainly due to the fact there seemed to be no rules for the roads. Drivers just beeped their horns coming to an intersection and drove through assuming other drivers, pedestrians heard them
Bolivian border
. Walking on the footpath is also nearly impossible due to the fact stalls selling everything and anything just set up wherever was convienent for them!! We managed to get lost in the markets because we simple couldnīt find a way out!!Not much to do or see in La Paz though, the big highlight was getting to cycle down "death road" on the Saturday."Death Road" or "The Worldīs most dangerous road" is the road linking La Paz to Coroico. It is so called because at its peak in the mid 90īs 341 people were killed on it in 1 year. In the last 10 years 14 cyclists have been killed attempting to go down it, with thousands others suffering numerous horrific injuries. It is a gravel road with very loose stones and cliffs to one side dropping 80 metres in places with no barriers along the way. You can still see the wreckage of cars and trucks at the bottom along the way. Sounded like fun to cycle down!!
On Saturday morning 10 of us got our bikes and got kitted out in our gear. Due to the fact there was a big festival on in Coroico we got to do the entire original Death Road because it was too dangerous to go on the main road because of drunken Bolivian drivers!!There is still traffic allowed on Death Road but thankfully we met very little. The entire road was 64km long and descended from 4,760 metres to 1,110 metres
Celebrating finishing Death Road
. It was all downhill and very fast, we reached speeds up to 65km. The whole experience was unbelievable, iīm not a big fan of cycling but going down this road with huge drops on one side and rock faces on the other knowing that one slip or mistake and you were in huge trouble was incredible. I never concentrated so much in my life!!We cycled under waterfalls and through streams and amazingly nobody fell off, although there were a few dodgy moments!!We arrived in the bottom only to discover we had to get the bus back up the road because the main one was blocked due to the festival. This experience was just as scary because the road can only fit one vechicle at a time and at times we got very close to the cliff edge. However we got the opportunity to take good photos and met one of the festivals along the way. Upon our arrival back to La Paz we had to go out and celebrate!!
