The Death Road

Came to La Paz and have been mainly bumming around with the Germans and Dessie, a friend we met in Oruro. It's pretty nice here, although so cold that I have to wear gloves at night. The elevation is about 3640 m (11942 ft) and so it gets pretty dicey sometimes.

I'll be honest and say that most of my time spent here hasn't been very..er..culturally centered. We've been mainly in the hostel bar known as Wild Rover which is owned and operated by a bunch of crazy irish people and then going to the after hours club known as "Ruta 36." It's a secret club that changes locations every two weeks. For fear of the differing types of people in my life who are reading this and may judge me, I won't go into details about what goes on there, but it's pretty nuts. Ask me later.

Realizing we needed to do something productive, we decided to shift gears. There's a road known as El Camino de la Muerte (The Death Road) which used to be used by passenger buses to go between La Paz and Coroico. Once the estimate came thru that about 300 people died each year because of buses just careening over the edge in a fiery wreckage, the Bolivian government finally got the message and built another road that I've heard is much better. The road still exists and is sometimes still used by cars and small trucks but is mainly now a tourist attraction done with mountain bikes, which is what we did.

You basically start at an elevation of 4000 meters on the new road, which was freezing cold with hail, and quickly bike your way down to the Death Road itself which is lower, warmer and quite beautiful actually. That's when you realize why they call it the death road; because the "road" is gravel, about 12 feet across at its greatest width and has basically no guard rails with some plunges of about 200 feet. There are crosses everywhere placed at locations where people fell and died and sometimes even the wreckage of a crashed van at the bottom. Oh yeah, and the the bikes you have contain only two working gears and crap brakes. I realized this after I was already traveling at about 35-40 on the bike (it's a steep decline the whole way) After taking a tight turn too fast, I flipped completely over my bike, hit the ground, opened my eyes and was looking over the edge of a cliff that dropped about 75 feet. It might not have killed me...but it definitely would have crippled me for life.  I'm pretty sure that I cracked a rib because it hurts when I breathe. Que Triste. Anyway, me, dessy, nico, gregor and rafael leave for Lake Titicaca soon. It's hard to breathe even here, lake titicaca is at 3800 meters, I wonder what will happen....