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Published: August 31st 2006
David and Ian
And the worlds most dangerous roadAgainst my initial better judgement Ian persuaded me the best way to get to Rurrenabaque, the town through which Bolivia accesses the Amazon, was by cycling the first stretch down officially the worlds most dangerous road - a road which had in the last two weeks alone claimed over 40 lives with two busses going over the edge. We booked with the agency based out of previous hotel we´d stayed in and once more were presented with forms essentially saying that if we died as a result of negligence of the guides it would be our fault, we recognised we were forfeiting considerable rights, etc etc. We signed.
We were told to be back a seven the next morning,
¨Don´t be late¨
I gave the chap a condescending glance,
¨We´re British, we´re never late¨
Arriving at 10 past 7 the next morning we wolfed down a fat man breakfast and began to meet the other tourists we´d be cycling with. With the exception of a French Canadian and Japanese hippy all were British, two girls coming from a village just outside Exeter and along the bus journey we began a nostalgia trip as we compared notes on the nightspots in
Exeter and its happening Devon surroundings.
Looking around the bus and wondering about the sanity of the other people who had volunteered for this, some Bryan Adams came on, which it does with a frightening frequency on Bolivian radio. One of the other passengers began to complain bitterly about this phenomenon, to which someone gingerly ventured the opinion that actually they quite liked Bryan Adams. My fears regarding sanity had been confirmed.
At our stop before the road began to descend we were reissued a few statistics, the road dropped 3500m from 4600m to 1100m over 67km. The number of annual deaths were omitted.
The first stretch was fairly rough as the intense competition between firms to take tours down the road had led ours to look for something a little different, meaning to begin with we took the "old road", at least where the old road existed, it occasionally disappeared leaving rudimentary tracks, formed by animals and for the last six months or so, this company. At one steep downhill stage everyone was made to get off and walk, with the exception of Ian, I and another fellow who decided to brave it and ended being
Getting through the clouds
The road winding through below. half forced to walk anyway. Eventually the old road became impassable and we rejoined the last tarmac bit before the truly sketchy stretch began. Here we were able simply to stop peddling and let the world slip past at an ever increasing rate. We rounded a corner and the whole valley opened before us. Behind us at the head of the epic re-entrant at 6088m stood Huyana Potosi, the mountain we´d climbed about two weeks previously, while below us, (Though at this point obscured by the clouds) was the Amazon basin, at barely 100m above sea level.
We finally pierced the cloud level and almost at once the landscape changed from barren rocky scrubland to lush cloud forest, with a correspondingly higher temperature - which would have been a welcome change if we hadn´t been cycling for about an hour and a half. Steadily the road became thinner, the drop offs became larger and our gratitude that we were on bikes and not a bus became considerable. At the sharper corners Bolivians with flags stand to let vehicles know if anything is coming the other way. (They do this by way of Red and Green flags , or in
one slightly confusing case, an orange flag which seemed to signal either ignorance or indifference) Most of these are paid government employees, but some are relatives of people who have died on the road (In the most famous case a father who lost his wife and three children), and have dedicated the remainder of their lives to making the road safer. With this in mind I regularly felt a bit of a prat as I shot past these people, probably making the road more dangerous, for thrills.
This said the views continued get more and more spectacular and the people sat at every particularly wide bit trying to sell us things didn´t seem to resent our presence. Toward the bottom of the cycling stretch the road became no less rough but slightly wider with a shorter drop off, and the more adventurous began to race which was excellent fun, right up to the point I went over my handle bars and did a bouncing bomb impression along the road. Fortunately I´d barely scratched myself and was soon racing again.
Along the road we´d passed numerous vehicles which had had to be abandoned and about two thirds of the
way down we passed the salvage operation concerned with picking up what remained of a the most recent bus to go over. We decided it was rather tasteless to take a photo of the carnage below, but were even happier to be on bikes and at least nominally in control of ourselves.
At the bottom of our cycling stretch we were left waiting for our bus for about two hours as the salvage operation had blocked the road so we sat around the sleepy village which had received us sipping beer in the shade. With still no sign of the bus we negotiated passage on the back of a truck up to Corico where our lunch was waiting. Following this and a quick shower we finally parted with the element of our group going back up the road to La Paz, who were forced to wait until the driver emerged from the bar before setting off.
The five of us left, Ian, myself, a French Canadian girl called Sarah and an Anglo-German couple, Andrew and Susana. We checked into what was by far the our nicest hotel yet (The Lonely Planet classes it as "Mid Range") and I
The group
Under what was, though you can´t tell, a waterfall. immediately retired to the sauna, before a quick swim, while Ian relaxed in a hammock and read his book. The five of us headed out to dinner which became very jovial over a couple of bottles of wine, and still more friendly over a few beers back on the terrace at the hotel, before we all went on our way to bed.
The next morning after breakfast and a bit more relaxing by the pool Ian and I said farewell and caught a mini bus down to the village where we had finished our cycle. After a few more pleasant hours sipping beer and reading, as well as meeting our guides bringing the days cycling group down, the bus to Rurrenabaque arrived and we jumped on for the 17 hour and supremely uncomfortable journey.
There was "no room" for our luggage in the hold so we loaded it into the aisle, where it was soon joined by more passengers, and in the crush Ian and I set ourselves up to play chess by head torch, receiving quite a bit of interest from the locals. We arrived about 7 the next morning and immediately set off for someone who
The salvage operation
They had been at it for about a week. would be prepared to take us out and into the jungle. - David
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David Mayhew
non-member comment
Hostages
Were all those women willingly accompanying you in back of the truck or did you take hostages?! That's quite a spectucular pool.