Latinalicious: The South America Diaries (16 page)

The North Yungas Road is beautiful by anyone’s standards. Winding through the Bolivian Andes, it provides sweeping views of lush rainforest, soaring birds, billowing clouds and loud, gushing waterfalls. But all of this is marred somewhat when you’re on it, because this rocky road is undisputedly the most dangerous road on the planet. It’s so dangerous, in fact, that a multitude of Bolivian tour operators beckoning you to come ride it with them on extra stable ‘super-hydraulic’ bicycles call it the Death Road.

Bolivia’s Death Road spans a near seventy-kilometre stretch between La Paz and Coroico, boasts a mad descent of some 3600 metres and includes over 200 hairpin bends. At any one time, you’re pretty damn close to a sheer 800-metre drop into the abyss. Stone and wooden crosses decorate the route, sometimes almost completely masked by flowers, and each one serves as another sinister reminder that someone attempting to make exactly the same trip as you quite literally reached the end of the road.

Naturally I thought 2 November, the official ‘Day of the Dead’, was the ideal day to take one of La Paz’s Death Road tour operators up on the offer of a cycling adventure. (I’m actually kidding — when I signed up, I had no idea of the significance of the date, but it seemed as good a day as any for a dangerous downhill bike ride.)

The idea of cycling on this hair-raising road was turned into a touristic money-spinner in 1998, by a thirty-nine-year-old New Zealander called Alistair Matthew. He started the company Gravity Assisted Mountain Biking, although I was warned against doing the tour with them, purely because they’re now more expensive than the rest. That’s what being a
Lonely Planet
-favoured business will do, I’m discovering. The more popular you get with budget travellers, the less budget travellers can afford you.

Up to 25,000 backpackers a year are known to join the Death Road thrill ride, all of whom, like I was, are keen to see if it’s as nerve wracking as everyone says. Let me clear this one up for you. It’s fucking terrifying. Even now as I think back to what I did, I can barely believe I was so stupid. And neither can my mum. The only thing more stupid would have been riding down it (or up it) on a juddering public bus. But then, everything seems dangerous here …

After much deliberation I decided not to join the horse-riding girls in Potosi — a UNESCO World Heritage site and the world’s highest city at 4090 metres — for a Cerro Rico mining tour, even though it featured the option to buy and ignite sticks of dynamite. As yet another popular experience in Bolivia that’s clearly designed to kill you, I’ve heard it’s well worth it for the fact that, while crawling through the tunnels as thousands of miners still do, you learn an incredible amount about the colonial and corporate greed and corruption that made much of South America what it is today.

It was in Potosi that the Spanish found what they were seeking back in 1545. Silver. The Indians found it first, actually, but being more interested in their llamas at the time, it was the Spanish who thought to mine it, turning Potosi into the heart of the Spanish colonies here and one of the richest and biggest cities in the world.

I’m sure the experience of the mine would be as eye-opening as it would be horrific (the lung-eating dust claims many workers after ten years, and kids as young as twelve still work down there), but I’m kind of on a deadline to reach Cuzco in time for my Inca Trail expedition. So, having taken a hideous sixteen-hour bus ride from Tupiza to La Paz, I signed up with Barro Biking for the Death Road instead. This company won me over in the booking office with their slideshow of on-screen photos, a promise of a CD and video documenting my own personal experience, plus the essential ‘I survived the Death Road’ T-Shirt.

I paid 450 bolivianos all up, which included breakfast, lunch, all my gear and a bike with double suspension, which is apparently better. I wouldn’t know too much about suspension on bikes, to be honest, but I wasn’t about to go cheap on a tour with ‘death’ in the title, so I paid what the lady asked me for … and still worried about my imminent doom all the way back to the hostel.

‘Oi don’t normally get loike dat, oi don’t,’ the Irish lad protested at 7.30 the next morning, as he sat with his head in his hands next to me in the minivan.

‘Yeah, right!’ his British mate laughed, slapping him on the back and making him go so green I thought he might actually be a leprechaun. I recoiled slightly against the window, gulping in air. The pair of them, both no older than twenty-one, had brought with them into the vehicle a smell of alcohol so strong I’d have believed them if they’d told me they’d slept in a beer barrel. Apparently, they hadn’t slept at all.

The Irish lad had participated in a game called Drunk-Fucker, or Shot-Shitter, or something equally inebriating and had consequently wet the bed at around 3 a.m. and wound up in a heap on the floor. Shortly before we’d collected them from The Wild Rover Hostel (a hostel in La Paz which is famous for its parties), he’d actually come close to being evicted.

‘I can’t believe they had to drag your mattress out into the corridor! You dickhead, they’re gonna make you pay for that when we get back!’ the Brit chastised. Both were completely oblivious, of course, to the fact that the
rest
of us in the van couldn’t believe they’d come on a day-long cycling tour of the world’s most dangerous road, still half drunk. Myself and a French couple had to sit in the abhorrent stench of their hangovers for over an hour, while they nodded off and drooled on their own chests.

When our van arrived at our high-altitude starting point, we started pulling on our supplied knee and elbow pads, plus waterproof and windproof jackets and trousers. We quickly discovered a group of equally hungover backpackers had been in another van behind us, so in actual fact there were around ten 21-year-old Irish and British lads on our tour, all suffering immeasurably and about to hurtle themselves around more than 200 hairpin bends.

Still, all credit to them, they were definitely chirpy and polite as we went through the safety instructions. They also seemed to be less visibly intoxicated by the time we set off. And each set off with the determination and velocity of Lance Armstrong with a rocket up his arse.

The first part of the cycling experience, on the way to the Death Road itself, was all perfectly paved and smooth. A chilling fog descended and gripped my fingers in spite of my gloves, though, and thank God for the Power Rangers-style cycle helmet covering the majority of my face, else the brutal wind probably would have given me frostbite. I found myself trailing behind the rest, and then I lost my group altogether as the clouds pulled in around me. I tried not to panic. It was all downhill, so all I had to do was sit there, avoid the traffic and steer, and it wasn’t like I couldn’t still see the curves in the road.

Octavio, our guide who’s been doing this for seven years, had told me he expected the boys to go fast. Apparently, the people who ride the fastest on the Death Road are the young Brits and Australians. The ones who get themselves killed most are the Israelis.

‘They have no sense of fear,’ Octavio told me in his perfect English. ‘The Israelis have to do military service when they’re young, so after that they do crazy stuff and they just aren’t scared of anything.’

When we finally reached the Death Road, we stopped for yet another safety briefing and it was instantly apparent why the road claims so many lives. You can see it narrowing off instantly in front of you, like a thin brown ribbon wrapping itself around the mountains, or a slippery snake slithering off into the distance. The fog had cleared and cars were sparkling in the sun like beacons at random points. Octavio said there might be more on the road today, it being a public holiday. Everyone’s out on the ‘Day of the Dead’ in Bolivia, travelling to the cemeteries with picnics to share with their deceased ancestors. I shivered in my Power Rangers headpiece.

‘Let’s get another photo with our cocks out next time we stop!’ one of the British guys yelled as soon as we’d set off again. The rest of his friends cheered.

‘Yeah! Man, isn’t it sick how we’ve got all these, like, photos of us, like, giving the finger to nature?’ another guy replied, pedalling furiously to build up speed. ‘Like, fuck you, Machu Picchu! Fuck you, Death Road! Yeeeaaaah!’

He was hollering this last part loudly, getting faster and faster in front of me. And then he promptly fell off the cliff.

That’s right. He fell
off
the cliff, on the Death Road. He hurtled over a rock (of which there were many), tumbled down the slope and took his bike with him.

Of course, we all thought that was it. He’d been taken by the road, or perhaps by Pachamama, in light of his blatant disrespect. But by some decidedly un-small miracle, his hands appeared around tufts of grass. Then appeared his helmet. Then his body as he hauled himself up onto the road again.

‘Fuck me,’ he said to no one in particular. He stood up straight and dusted himself off, visibly shaken. Then, with the help of two of his friends he turned to pull the bike back up, which had also landed miraculously within reach of the road, saved from an 800-metre drop by some springy vines.

Moving on, all slightly slower, we stopped to get a group photo taken sitting on the edge of a mammoth cliff. I couldn’t even see the bottom, just a jungly mass of green. At another point, Octavio told us to stop and look over the edge at the twisted wreckage of a black car that had rolled over and smashed almost beyond recognition some four years before. Octavio said that no one knew the car was there or where the people in it had gone until they noticed the vultures circling almost a month afterwards.

After that we heard all sorts of horror stories. We ate a breakfast of bread rolls (pleasantly fresh ones) filled with eggs as we sat around a fancy memorial, which was erected by the family of an Israeli girl who died on a similar tour in April 2001. She was waiting for a bus to pass her when she misjudged the distance to the edge and fell 50 metres to her death. Strangely, another Israeli girl died in the exact same spot on the road, on the exact same date in April, in 2010.

In another incident, two guys riding side by side on the road, instead of single file like you’re supposed to, were mucking about when one decided to stick his leg out and ‘pretend’ to kick the other. You can imagine what happened next.

Back to our journey. Several naked man shots later (yes, the boys really did take pictures lined up with their anatomy out), and a good few hours of cycling alone with the van behind me as I struggled not to hit a rock and hurtle forwards over my handlebars, we reached the end of the road. I’ve got to say, in spite of taking it relatively slowly with the bike, anything more than walking on the Death Road is enough to scare the shit out of someone. My hands were moulded into the shape of the handles when I was done, and moving them hurt where I’d been gripping the brakes so tightly. Half the time, I didn’t even notice the scenery because I was too terrified of missing a bump or a boulder to look up from the road.

You never know what you might see on Bolivia’s Death Road.

On the way back to La Paz we stopped at a hotel with a swimming pool for a buffet lunch, during which the boys refrained from yet another naked photo and it rained. The air was balmy and tropical, the pool was lined with palm trees and people lazed in hammocks. We’d reached more or less the Amazon basin, a totally different microclimate to the one we’d set off in that morning, when we were smothered with clouds at over 4000 metres. The Death Road tour takes you 95 per cent downhill and though several seasons in one day.

Back in the minivan with the boys asleep (but alive), Octavio told me a story about a driver coming home along the road one night. It was pelting with rain. He was tired and shoving coca leaves in his mouth to stay awake when he saw a little girl walking along the cliff edge. He stopped, obviously concerned, and asked where she was going, to which she replied that she’d been chasing an animal earlier in the day, taken the wrong path and got lost. The driver was confused but offered to drive her home.

When he got to the house (pretty much the only one built on the Death Road), it was still raining, so he offered her his jacket and said he had to drive the same way the next day and would pick it up then. Sure enough, he arrived the next day in bright sunshine to find an old woman working in the garden. He asked about the girl, but the woman freaked out and started praying.

‘There’s no girl here!’ she told him, shooing him back towards the gate.

Just as he was about to leave, he spotted his jacket hanging on a post across the garden and, thinking the woman quite batty, went to pick it up.

It was then that he realised the post wasn’t a post. It was a stone cross. The little girl had died along with her parents years before in a car accident.

Drivers on the Death Road are so scared that they often stop to pour libations of beer into the earth. These are intended to appease the goddess of nature, our good friend Pachamama, in the hope that she’ll grant them safe passage. But with a fatal accident occurring on the road every two weeks and up to 200 people perishing on it every year, it doesn’t matter how qualified your guide is, how many mountain biking expeditions you’ve endured and survived, or how much Pachamama likes your beer.