Most incredible bike ride of my life

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So the title pretty much says it all. Not sure if you´ve heard of death road before but it is, literally, death road. We got up fairly early in the am and took the bus for about an hour into the hills, and we were greated with a spectacular day. The tour set me back $40u.s. but was well worth it. The company supplied bikes, helmats, pants, coat, lunch, transportation and first-aid. The beginning was a little chilly but I adjusted quickly and it wasn´t long before I was sweating up the hills.
We started at La Cumbre and the first 10kms was on pavement and mostly down hill it took us just about an hour to get to the start of the trail. Trail isn´t really the right word for it. It used to be a road but has been closed to traffic for about two months now. I could see why. It was all down hill on gravel and rocks and was only a single lane. There was a steep cliff almost straight up on my right and about 10 meters over (or less at times) on my left was a drop-off. At one point, the longest way down was over a kilometre! Believe you me it´s a long way down. The road was full of twists and turns and scary corners, not to mention loose rocks and mud because it was pouring rain at one point.
Accordingly, crosses and memorial monuments lined the way down where other people had fallen over the edge to their deaths. I had only one particular moment where I almost flew over the edge but was lucky and stayed on my bike. Luke (an australian that happend to be behind me) said his heart was pounding when he watched my bike wobble and sway when I hit some loose rock and was kinda sandwiched between another rider and the cliff on my left. I shot my feet out to the side and bounced them off some boulders to keep from falling over. Shortly after that my front brake busted so I had to stop and get one of the guides to repair it. Besides two more flat tires tires througout the day, I had no further incidents (thank the good lord!). Besides being incredibly dangerous it was awesom!
After awhile I got used to the steep downhill and you kinda let yourself go. The scenery was spectacular! We rode under waterfalls and through the thick jungle on the side of a mountain. In total it was 10km on the pavement, about 50km on death road another 10km to the village that we finished at. When the ride was over we had an amazing buffet lunch and hopped in the pool and went over the day. There was only one crash and the guy suffered a little bit of road rash and nothing broken. I´d do the ride over again in a heartbeat, it was spectacular but definitly not for the faint of heart. Surprisingly only one girl chickend out and rode in the van...we were a group of about twenty and five guides. Such a good time.

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