Yungas Road

There’s a famous road that, if you google “most dangerous road in Bolivia,” will put the rest of my blog into context.

So far this year alone, 35 trucks have gone off the road (dropped several meters into the deep Amazon forest and are assumed dead), and we haven’t even entered the rainy season yet. Everyone tells us that we’re well on track to beat the average of 55 trucks a year.

These statistics came from our guide (downhill pushbike race tour) before we started—and by then, it was too late to back out. But let me start the story from the beginning.

We knew Bolivia had a road connecting La Paz with Brazil. This is an old road that holds the record for the most deaths from trucks and buses disappearing into the bottomless jungle. The road is often washed out by rain and is so narrow that it causes problems when two vehicles from opposite directions meet.

Riding a £2,000 mountain bike with front and back suspension and hydraulic brakes is probably the safest way to get down this road, which starts at 4,500m near La Paz and ends, after 42km, at a 1,200m small village in the jungle.

We got all our protective gear—an orange overcoat with a number and logo, and a helmet (you disappear into the jungle in style)—so after a 5-minute health and safety talk, we were ready (and qualified) to go.

I understood that the bright orange overcoat was there in case you needed to be seen at the bottom of the jungle, but I didn’t understand why; no one is coming to pick up up. For our group of 19 people, the numbers started at 3 and finished at 39. Where are the missing numbers?

Photos will tell you about the road, and how ridiculous we look with our helmets, but they can’t describe the muscle pain from sitting on a bike saddle for three hours.

Everybody reached the bottom one way or another, but the thrill wasn’t over yet. We had to get the bus back to the top.

Never in my life did I think taking the bus would be riskier than riding a bike...

In the end, we got a t-shirt to prove that we made it. It makes me wonder, though—do those riders who fall over get buried with a t-shirt saying, “I did not make it”?

On the way back (a 5-hour bus ride), our guide told us about all the accidents people had with the bikes in the past and other horror stories about this road.

Tomorrow will be less extreme and will include walking around La Paz and some coffee time to organize the next section of our travels.