Coroico, Mountains and Fear

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Well we left La Paz yesterday, we took a quick bus out of town to the place where we can get microbuses (basically a van) to the town of Coroico. Coroico is not has high elevation wise as La Paz, which was nice, but to get there one heads north east through the mountains. The trip started off pleasant enough, we climbed upward, I had a bit of a buggered stomache so I took a gravol. We saw llama´s and farms and even some snow! After awhile we started back down, into the jungle, clouds and rain and slippery mountain roads.

Now, I saw pictures of this "highway" before leaving, it´s actually a popular mountain biking excursion, and judging from the shots I saw in La Paz, it looked like a narrow, wet, deadly road through a mountain valley, pretty cool. Then I drove it. I don´t honestly think words can express just how incredibly scared I was being a passenger, in this van, on this road. Quite easily my worst fears were realized when turn after turn, slipping and sliding down this road with no shoulder, no barriers, parts with no road (it had just caved away) under waterfalls, over rivers, around corners, around trucks this road continued. Looking out my window all I saw was jungle hundreds of metres below, straight down. I suppose I was cursed with an outside seat, and for some reason cars going down pass on the outside lane (left) which we´re not too sure why, but figure it has something to do with them being partially out of control. There are turns so deadly and blind that they post men, with garbage bag flags to signal whether to go or stop, because otherwise head on collisions would occur around every three or four turns. Anyways, yes I´m afraid of heights, it´s rather hard to deal with when you don´t trust the vehicle you´re in, you don´t trust your driver, and you certainly do not trust the engineers who designed this trip to hell and back along a mountain side. All I can really say to describe this road would be if you could picture the road to Canim lake from where it turns off the main logging road (6000?) and somehow glued it to the side of the Squamish Chief, covered it with wet rocks and then drove down it as fast as you could, that would be the trip I had yesterday. All I could do was close my eyes, put my head in my arms and try to tell myself it would be O.K. Needless to say I´m looking into a helicopter to take me back.

Well, I can´t really say it was worth the trip up here on that road, but when we got to Coroico it turned out to be a rather pleasant place. We think we might have altitude sickness, Jord has had a headache for days, Ryan fell down yesterday for seemingly no reason, and last night I started vomitting all over the place for basically no reason (Randy would have loved it). So we´re going to stay here until next Monday, try to find some horses to ride and some 4X4´s and have some fun up in the mountains. We found a great little pad with a kitchen we can hang out at for awhile and I´ve got some pictures of it.

Jord has all the pictures of the drive in, I was so scared I couldn´t even pry my hands off the seat in front of me to pull out my camera, his shots are from the inside window so he doesn´t really have any cliff ones (not that photo´s could do it justice) but check his blog for the best ones.

***EDIT: The internet here is way too slow to update pictures, I´ll get all of them up once I return to Lapaz after the weekend, sorry to dissapoint!

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Photos

Fear the Road
So tense you could hardly breath, the excursion down down death road reaches the climax of fear!

Death Road
An awful shot because I was shaking in fear and trying to photograph through the window on our trip down death road, maybe you can make out part of the cliffs.

Comments

[Michael]

So much fun!
Jason, that sounds like an awesome trip, you guys are having way too much fun!

[Barry Lang]

Did Ryan have a blanket over his head for this trip (it's a family joke.. you'll have to ask him about it