On the World's Most Dangerous Road Without a Seat Belt

We got some advice on Bolivia and bathing suits from a drunk Australian in the Galapagos. "You have to bike on the world's most dangerous road," he said. "You have to go to ____ Bar where they have really good coke." And we were complaining about how you can't buy a bathing suit with a butt in it in South America--even if they've got full frontal coverage, they diminish away to thonglike proportions in the back. "It's the way of the future, ladies," he told us. "Get used to it. My girlfriend designs swimwear in Melbourne. Accentuate the positive."

I wasn't really keen to take any of his advice, but when we got to La Paz we were surrounded by tour agencies and friends that wanted us to bike down the world's most dangerous road. Jodi had run into a friend she hadn't seen for six years, and he had a cohort of travelers he knew in La Paz, and they were all doing it, and didn't it look like so much fun? I allowed myself to be coerced. I mean, people do it every day. How bad could it be?

The World's Most Dangerous Road is a 60 km. stretch between La Paz and Coroico, which Lonely Planet describes as "a little Bolivian Eden." Which it may be, most of the time, but not on Good Friday (it is, after Copacabana, the Bolivians' spot-o'-choice for Easter Weekend). Good Friday has always seemed to be something of a misnomer to me anyway. Case in point: we are biking on the same road as two-way traffic, on a one-lane dirt road carved out of curving mountainsides, on the busiest travel day of the year. At first it wasn't so bad--it was paved, mostly downhill, and you could go thrillingly fast with no work at all. Then, the pavement ends. We were supposed to take a 5-minute trial run and then convene with the guide again. In this five minutes you were supposed to determine how fast you were comfortable going, and if you wanted to be in the fast group, middle group, or slow group. And in that five minutes, everyone I knew on the tour disappeared in the distance while I was riding the brakes, sure that every rock I hit was going to plummet me over the edge (you had to ride on the un-guardrailed left side), keeping my lips pressed shut so my teeth didn't rattle out onto the ground. When the group convened in five minutes, I got off the bike. "What group do you want to be in?" they asked. "The car group," I said.

They have a bus and two Jeeps following the group in case you want to access your stuff or ride in the vehicles at any point. I consigned my bike to the roof-rack and rode shotgun beside Hector, one of the maniac Jeep drivers. I reach for my seat belt. There isn't one. I suppose it wouldn't help much in the event of plummeting hundreds of feet to one's death, anyway, but still I felt a bit insecure. Hector drove like a madman, but like a madman who has done this every day for years. Contrary to instinct, I felt much safer in that car than I did on the bike. And then there was the traffic jam. There had been some kind of accident, and traffic in both directions was stopped. The cars might have to wait there all day, but bikes could pass. It appeared God was not going to let me off so easy. Perhaps I had not empathised enough with Jesus' suffering for his liking. So, when the slow group passed, I reluctantly left my vehicular safe haven and tagged onto the end.

I suppose it's always useful to learn that something is not your calling in life, because that narrows down the options. It is now official that mountain biking is off my list of potential destinies. Surprising, no? I stuck it out on the bike for the greater part of the journey, much to my chagrin, and I have to admit to almost total misery the entire time, except for about two minutes as we approached and passed under a small waterfall. The air became a prism and misty rainbows surrounded me. If I hadn't feared for my life, it would have been perfect.

At some point the traffic jam had dispersed, and Hector caught up with us again in time to hand out surgical masks to everyone as they passed a certain curve, after which you had to continue the rest of the way in clouds of dust. I used this as the golden opportunity it was to get back in the car. Soon, we were at the endpoint, a hacienda-esque restaurant and petting zoo with excellent showers, food, and pet monkeys and llamas. It turned out that I and one other American girl had hated it--besides us, the general consensus was that it was SO AWESOME.


If only the day could have ended on that note--but we had to push our luck. We wanted to see what Coroico was like, and had planned to stay there overnight and join in the festivities. Unfortunately, it was the one time that it would have behooved us to have a reservation, and we couldn't find anywhere to stay in the whole town. The bus with our fellow bikers had long since departed, so we had to pay for a public colectivo (van with jumpseats in every conceivable inch of space) that was embarking on the road we had just ridden down in the dark. It did not bode well.

Somehow, though, I lived to tell the tale. But I'm glad I had the wherewithal to stay away from the rest of that drunken Australian's advice.