La Paz & The Worlds Most Dangerous Road

We didn't quite know what to expect from La Paz had heard varying reports about the danger of the place, how cheap it was and the dizzying height at which it was located.  As it turns out it wasn't that dangerous, nor as high as originally thought.....it is cheap though.

It is none the less an impressive city which as you drive in looks massive, it is located in a crater like canyon and the city fills the thing completely with buildings crawling up the sides and pretty much built on everything which isn't a vertical cliff face.  Once you spend a few days wandering around you realise that the central bit itself is deceptively small and easy to navigate although we still managed to get lost a couple of times.

We spent the first couple of days buying enough souvenirs for 10 months of travel and then took 3 hours and an amazingly convoluted posting process to get them all on a plane home to Oz....had to laugh at the guy behind us who had also spent 3 hours wrapping and filling out paper work to have the guy close the post window in his face directly after he had finished with us as he was closing for the day...the poor guy lost it (as I would have) and I reckon I learnt a few new swear words from him.

In total we spent about a week in La Paz going out quite a bit and spending far too much money waiting for a couple of mates to arrive from Arequipa, one eventually turned up and we booked the worlds most dangerous bike ride for the following day.

THE WORDS MOST DANGEROUS BIKE RIDE

Let me preface this bit by saying the ride isn't actually that dangerous and lets face it if Jo can get down there without falling off a cliff it can't be that bad.  The road is called the most dangerous road according to our guide book not because the road itself is inherently dangerous but because all the bus & van driver drive like maniacs and it has the highest number of fatalities a year, I think roughly 100 people on average per year or if you prefer one bus load a month end up over the edge....oh and the odd bike rider.

There was about 40 different tour operators we could go with so naturally we ignored all recommendations and went with the cheapest....of course we did a fairly rigorous safety check before agreeing to go which involved checking if the demonstration bikes brakes worked (they did) also all the tour operators give you a free tee shirt and ours looked quite cool with "extreme bolivia" blazoned across it so signed up on the spot for the next morning.

Next morning the guys surprisingly enough looked well equipped with seven bikes for the four of us (myself and Jo, Neil who we'd been waiting for and Brodie another Canadian bloke we had met in Arequipa).  They drove us up to the top of the road gave our bikes a perfunctory check and kitted us out in our snazzy reflective vests which we soon worked out did absolutely nothing but get in the way.  The first bit whilst quite steep, was completely tarred and wide enough for two cars and not particulary dangerous...we were starting to think the worlds most dangerous ride should be renamed the worlds most pleasant sunday bike ride.  Fortunately after a bit off uphill riding (which was definitely not mentioned in the briefing) we hit the dirt and the real fun started, our little group of four daredevils quickly started passing the bigger expensive groups with there dust masks, full jump suits and fancy goggles...some even had full on BMX bandit helmets with the face guard which I really don't think is going to help you if you go over the edge and into a 200m vertical drop.

Admittedly it wasn't all smooth sailing Jo managed to have a small run in with the cliff face on the good side and I managed to re arrange one of my pedals after a run in with a rock which almost put me over the edge.  Other than that there was some minor technical difficulties with the bikes in which we kept breaking them due to our extreme biking techniques in fact the last hour of the ride we did without a guide as we had completely destroyed three out of the seven bikes.

Finally six hours after setting out we reached the bottom only slightly bruised, very dusty and with sore butts, in the process we managed to pass most of the other groups and Jo did a really good job (for a complete unco) of keeping up,   finishing only five minutes behind three reasonably competitive blokes.

The town at the bottom was not much to write home about, dry, dusty and hot we spent four hours waiting for our bus and a 14 hour ride to Rurrenabaque and the jungle.

By the way photos will be forthcoming once we can locate a computer with a dvd drive in La Paz