Surviving "Death Road"

---

Am a little behind in blog entries at the moment cos we have been on the go and seeing and doing so much and staying in some places where there is no electricty let alone internet!

I have to go back a little to our La Paz experiences last week. Of course we signed up for the mountain bike ride down "The World´s Most Dangerous Road" whichis couple of hours out of La Paz. This is a road that is 3.2m wide and has 600m drop offs and huge, soaring cliffs. Up until 3 years ago it was the only road into La Paz from the northern areas so the 3.2m wide "road" was shared between trucks, buses, cars and crazy tourists on mountain bike trips! Needless to say many people came a cropper and have contributed to the road´s other name "Death Road".

They have since built a new road which most of the traffic uses. Even so our precarious bike trek down the original "Death Road" was pretty bloody scary and that was with only a handful of cars passing us. I felt a little ripped off though that it wasn´t technically "The World´s Most Dangerous Road"anymore but I still managed to almost shit my pants.

It was super misty and raining (of course!) when we were on the most dangerous (and spectacular) parts and it took all my strength to keep the bike in control (not very successfully at times) as we bumped over the wet and slippery rocks. My hands were absolutely aching and giving me heaps of grief from the vibrations (and cos my arms are too short to reach the handle bars comfortably). We rode for about 5.5 hours the scenery was gorgeous (especially once the sun came out) and we had a crazy funny Swiss guy in our group who hung at the back with Stace & I (as we entertained him with our best impressions of Nicole Kidman in BMX Bandits with our cool motor bike helmets).

---