Monthly Archive: August 2014

Quick aside for a status update: We are currently staying in Cochabamba, Bolivia for the month (already 2 weeks in) where we are volunteering with a couple of local NGO’s. We’ll write more about it soon.

A couple weeks ago, while in La Paz, we took on the task of biking down the “World’s Most Dangerous Road” or “Death Road” as it is also commonly known. This road, with the official name being “North Yungas Road”, is one of the main attractions in the La Paz area. The road is made of mainly dirt/gravel and is approximately 65km long. It connects La Paz with the jungle community of Coroico. What makes the road so dangerous is that its width is essentially one car lane and that it lacks sufficient guard rails. Did I mention that right next to the road are cliffs that feature drops as much as 2000 feet?

In its heyday, there were many accidents where cars would fall off the side of the road. It is estimated that 200 to 300 people died in accidents every year on the road.

Thankfully, they ended up building a better paved road that connects La Paz to the jungle community in 2006, so cars don’t frequent the road as much anymore. Pretty much the only cars you will see are the support vans from the various bike companies that are leading tours down the road.

For our ride, we ended up going with Vertigo Biking Tours, who were quite excellent. They equipped us with helments, elbow pads, knee pads, gloves, heavy duty pants, and a jacket. The bikes had pretty good shocks, which was a godsend going down the dirt road. With all the equipment, it definitely eased any worries we may have had. The guide also brought along a camera so that we wouldn’t have to worry about taking photos while we were riding, which was a huge plus.

While I spent the beginning of this post talking up how dangerous the road was, it wasn’t actually that scary. Granted, there still is some danger involved (particularly with falling off the bike), and you do hear the occasional horror stories of tourists falling off the cliff, but from what we could tell, as long as you are not an idiot (aka taking selfies while you are riding close to the edge) and focus on the road, you were fine.

All in all, the ride was awesome. It was the most fun I’ve had on a bike ride that I can remember. While we were mainly focused on keeping our bike on the road during the ride, it was hard not to marvel at the expansive views of lush mountains/cliffs out of the corner of our eyes. It started at 4650 meters above sea level where it was snowing. And it ended at 1200 meters above sea level in the rainforest. Most of the ride was downhill, so it wasn’t too intense physically. In total, we were probably riding for 3-4 hours, which included a 20km “warmup” on a paved highway before we started on the “World’s Most Dangerous Road”.

We ended up spending 5 days in La Paz, which is 5 more than we originally planned when we first started dreaming up this trip.  The city looks really interesting – almost a bowl nestled among mountains.  The altitude really varies – if you are in the bottom, it’s around 10,500 feet but the houses climbing up the sides could be almost 3,000 feet higher.

We spent a lot of time just wandering around La Paz. The city was a lot more densely populated with buildings and people than I had imagined it would be.

We took the teleferico up to El Alto (the city that is on the top of the bowl) to check out a huge flea market. The market is supposedly one of the largest in South America – we wandered around it for an hour and a half and never saw an end. It had a very random mix of items from tires to computers to clothing. The view of La Paz from El Alto was pretty cool.

There was another market right by our hostel that we ate at several times. It was a huge concrete building filled with tiny stalls with vendors selling food, flowers, groceries, etc. The little restaurants were so small that you were a foot away from the cook/owner. The food was really cheap – almuerzos (soup + main course) for $1.30 and giant fruit salads for $1.15!

We did a city tour one day that started outside San Pedro Prison. Apparently there is going to be a big Hollywood movie based on a book about the prison called Marching Powder starting to film soon. We also went to another outdoor market (so many markets in La Paz!) and a “witches market” where you could buy llama fetuses.

La Paz is the highest capital in the world so we saw some government buildings (with backwards clocks) and I can now recognize the president of Bolivia – his face is everywhere!

The last day we were there, we saw what looked like a huge park on the map in the middle of the city. So we walked over only to find a huge park – but it was mostly cement!