Leaving Copacabana along the Bolivian Altiplano (a barren flat landscape at around 4,000m, where conditions mean that not much survives) you pull into El Alto, a shanty town full of people, animals, cars and chaos. As you reach the edge of town suddenly the land falls away, dropping around 500m and you see La Paz laid out below you. La Paz is the highest capital city in the world and has been built in a huge canyon, with every available piece of land housing as many people as possible, including up the steep sides of the canyon walls! We spent a day exploring the city and its witches market….it sold a lot of llama foetuses?! Apparently they are good luck, was going to send you all one home but wasn’t sure how well a llama foetus would actually go down just turning up in the post one day!! We had basically come to La Paz for one thing, 'The worlds most dangerous road' bike ride, sounds pretty cool! It’s a 60km bike ride starting at around 4,600m and dropping down to around 1,000 (over a 2 mile vertical drop). It has the tag 'dangerous' because more lives have been lost on this stretch of road than any other in the world – due mainly to the fact that mad Bolivian bus drivers have occasionally dropped a bus full of passengers over one if its 600m edges! We started the ride in snow and poor visibilty whizzing off down nice paved roads. Then after a while we reached a small junction where the nice paved road ended and gave way to a small, narrow, dirt/gravel road…this was where the real fun started! The road ahead wound its way down through thick vegetation and was just over a few meters wide, waterfalls crashed down over parts of it, rock falls covered some of it and tangled heaps of metal lay at the bottom of 600m drops reminding you that it’s a little more dangerous than your average bike ride….although to be fair, it’s not really that dangerous unless you’re a bit of an idiot on a bike – having said that that they do make sure that along the route you have plenty of safety chats and breaks all designed to stop you whizzing off like a mad thing and accidently over an edge (every now and then they'd point out bits of the road where cyclists had misjudged a bend or stepped off the wrong side of their bike etc!!). It was a great day with some amazing views along the way and a bit of an adrenalin rush thrown in.
Wanderlust for Life
Adventure travel around the world