The World’s Most Dangerous Road
(AKA Death Road)
When I posted the Death Road mountain biking photos on Facebook a few days ago, it probably seemed like I was a total fearless badass about doing it, but the truth is that I struggled quite a bit when deciding whether it would be worth the risk. I’m a risk-taker to some extent, but I’m generally braver with emotional risks than physical ones. I posted in the Bonderman Facebook page, asking people to help me evaluate the true danger involved; it looked awesome, but I didn’t feel it was an experience worth dying for. Everyone said it would be safe/amazing, and my Seattle University friend-of-friends who lives in Bolivia said that I if I biked the Death Road and took the bus from the town at the end (Coroico) to Rurrenabaque, it would be much safer and easier than taking the bus from La Paz (I was hoping for a bus option because flying from La Paz to Rurrenabaque would have cost me $300).
Obviously, I decided to go for it and 100% survived.
Here is the tale I live to tell.
The group convened the morning of the ride at an English pub so that we could get breakfast and coffee first. During breakfast, Robbie came around with the liability waivers, which noted: “Let the instructor know if you are inexperienced with mountain biking or if you are especially nervous.” So when he came back around to pick up the form, we had this exchange:
Me: “I’m inexperienced with mountain biking, but not especially nervous.”
Robbie: “Most people are nervous.”
Me: “Okay, I’m nervous.”
(This was actually a half-lie. I honestly didn’t know whether to be nervous or not without seeing what the actual road was like. Not being as scared as I should be about certain things seems to be surfacing as a theme for this trip. Then again, it’s all been okay, so maybe I’m exactly as under-informed and not-scared as I should be for pursuing these experiences...?)
A young yet salt-and-peppered-haired Australian man next to me confided that he was also nervous. As it turned out, no one in our group was an avid mountain biker, and I took comfort in the fact that there wasn’t some “try out” process beforehand to verify a minimum skill level – it can’t be that bad if they’re letting a bunch of people with zero mountain biking experience do it, right?
The first 30-minute stretch of the road was fully paved, with two-lanes. When we got to the rugged, narrow part of the road, the fog was so thick that we couldn’t see what lay beyond the cliffs AT ALL. I looked down the trail; the fog cut off visibility about 50 feet away, and I thought, “how are we expected to bike in this? People are going to fly off the trail at the first turn because they can’t see the trail!” Then I thought, “No, people aren’t that dumb. If they can’t see the trail they will just stop and get off their bikes and wait until they can see it. I have faith in humanity.
(… and if not humanity, then at least in myself).”
Fortunately, the trail made itself visible as needed, and the fog lifted (or maybe we just got beneath it) enough for incredible views most of the way down. We were specifically instructed to NOT check out the views while in motion, but it was so tempting… thankfully, they promised they’d email us all hundreds of photos from the day so we would not have to worry about capturing anything on our own cameras.
Before we headed out on the trail, our group leader, Robbie (a gregarious Dutchman who used to travel the world finding work as a chef) told us that we needed to stay to the left of the road… the side with the cliff. I was all, “what now? I must have misunderstood…”
Robbie explained that back in the day, the road was built for llamas, donkeys, and people going on foot. The cars mostly stayed in La Paz. But when La Paz grew and people wanted to use their cars to go north, this road was the only one they had. For a while, Bolivia had a rule that the road would be open to north-bound traffic only for the first half of the day, and then the second half of the day it would be open only to south-bound traffic. However, Bolivians aren’t fans of traffic rules (didn’t need Robbie to tell me this, as it is evident after being in La Paz for about ten seconds). So even though it’s a one-lane road, there would be north-bound and south-bound traffic all day anyway. Of course, this led to problems.
One rule that was generally followed, however, was that everyone hung to the left of the road, rather than to the right. This was because the driver’s side in a car is on the left, and the driver with the most direct/closest view of the cliffs should be the one to drive on that side because it’ll be easier for him or her to accurately judge how much space they have to back up toward the edge before crossing the critical threshold. So the cliff-side person gets as close as they can to the edge, and holds steady while the other car passes. (Although we were supposed to ride on the left side, we were instructed to dismount our bikes to the right, lest we snag a foot and trip.)
So that’s why we were supposed to stay left. Makes sense. But also, no.
What makes MORE sense is staying center or to the right, because making one fatal mistake on a mountain bike near a death cliff is not how I’m going out. Nope. Given the choice between trying to dodge an oncoming bus by crashing my bike into the side of the mountain to the right or trying to survive a 3,000 meter fall off the cliff to the left, I’m going to bet my survival on the former. So that’s what I did – breakin’ them traffic rules, Bolivian-style.
We biked the road in what seemed to be about 10-15 different legs, stopping every 10 minutes or so to regroup. This gave our leaders a chance to make sure everyone was still accounted for, and to brief us on what to watch out for in the next stretch of the road. At times it felt like too much, like too hand-hold-y, but ultimately everyone’s #1 priority was (and should be) to just get down the road in one, still living piece, and in that respect, it was definitely not too much stopping and instruction.
Along the way, Robby would give us small Death Road history lessons, two of which I remember and think are worth sharing:
1. One of Bolivia’s presidents, Gualberto Villarroel, assumed the presidency after a coup d’etat and faced a lot of backlash for being perceived as not-a-legitimate-president. One of the drastic things he did to maintain control was to kidnap five leaders of opposing parties and have them thrown off a 3,000 cliff on the Death Road. According to the story Robbie told, the leaders held hands as they stepped off the cliff. According to my online resources, they were executed elsewhere and their bodies disposed of from the cliff. Either way, this cliff was involved. SHOCKINGLY, this had the opposite effect as intended, as it further fueled the case for his illegitimacy as a leader, and gave the other parties more support for a revolt that eventually ended in Villarroel being hanged from a government building, his body left there for days as a warning to any would-be dictators.
2. The worst Death Road accident was in 1983, when a bus carrying at least 100 people was backing up to let another vehicle pass, and the driver had miscalculated the edge of the cliff (supposedly he was also egged on by drunk passengers). A man who lived in Coroico lost his wife and son in the accident, and for the next 12 years or so, he went to the site where the bus had fallen and personally directed traffic to help ensure safety – completely voluntarily, compensated only with tips and donations.
Robbie was an excellent tour guide, but it was interesting to notice how his phrasing of certain things would never be used (not without some backlash anyway) in Seattle. For example, he would sometimes get our attention by calling us “cowboys and angels,” clearly meant to be a fun and flattering way to refer to us as men and women, and I didn’t mind it. However, I did notice that the knee-jerk gender-progressive side of me totally knew exactly how someone could potentially take offense: “Why are the women angels instead of cowgirls?? What kind of moral purity are you trying to impose on us? Maybe we want to be rugged badasses too, why else do you think we’re doing a Death Road mountain bike tour?” I think it’s a special super power one develops living in an uber-liberal city like Seattle, this ability to anticipate what could be socially problematic in anything related to race, gender, sexuality, etc. As another example: Robbie would warn us of sharp turns by saying, “in this next part of the trail, there are some corners as blind as Ray Charles / Stevie Wonder.” Which…. Yeah, those guys were really blind, so it’s an apt comparison I suppose. But also, it kinda rubbed me the wrong way. I guess you can take the angel out of PC culture, but you can’t take the PC culture out of the angel.
Anyway, more photos!
At the end of the road, we all gathered in a pub to enjoy a beer and collect some SWAG: free “Death Road Survivor” t-shirts and tube-y head cover things. I didn’t keep either, because I have less room in my backpack than ever, and I am just not a logo t-shirt person anyhow.
After our beers, the group headed to a wildlife refuge called La Senda Verde for showers and a late lunch/early dinner. Then, I shared a cab with another cyclist to Coroico, the small town nearby; from Coroico I could catch a bus to Rurrenabaque for an Amazon tour.
I FINALLY FIGURED OUT HOW TO CLEAR STORAGE SPACE ON MY PHONE!
All deleted photos go into a “just-kidding-we-are-going-to-store-these-for-40-days-in-case-you-realize-you-desperately-want-one-of-these-again” storage folder called “Recently Deleted”. So if you want to clear the storage space without waiting 40 days, you have to go in to the Recently Deleted folder and manually delete them. So that’s what I did to the 300 photos that were eating up 1.5GB of the 5.0GB storage space I have on my phone. This is a GAME. CHANGING. REVELATION.
This explain why – miraculously, right before Machu Picchu – my phone suddenly had a ton of storage space clear up and I could take a bunch of photo and video; the 40-day automatic delete feature must have kicked in for a bunch of Colombia photos taken 40 days prior.
The Bus from Coroico to Rurrenabaque
So the "bus station" in Coroico isn't exactly a bus station -- you buy bus tickets there, but then you take a car to the place where the buses actually pass through, which is called Yolosita -- a place where people YOLO, but just a little bit. (You have to be familiar with "YOLO" and rules of Spanish grammar to get that joke, but I really wanted to include it anyway).
There's also a place called Yolosa, and this became confusing for me -- for a while I thought I might have been waiting at the wrong place entirely. I got to Yolosita at 3:00. My bus – which I was told would be blue and have a license plate of 3006ANT – was supposed to arrive at 4:00. 4:00 came and went, and I began to have serious doubts that I was in the right place. I tried asking a policeman if he knew if this bus came through, pointing at my ticket and saying, in Spanish, “I need this bus, does it come here?” and he said “NO ENTIENDO NADA, NO ENTIENDO NADA, NADA!” and I took that to mean that I should not continue trying to get him to understand me. Also, my basic Spanish may not be as good as I thought it was.
Around 5:00, a bus came through with the right company name but it was green and had a different license plate than I was told. So I didn’t try to get on. It parked a bit down the road. Fortunately, the driver somehow magically knew that I needed that bus and he came and got me, so I didn’t have to use my backup plan of catching a cab back to Coroico or catching a different bus to La Paz after all.
The good news: the bus ride was only 12 hours, instead of the anticipated 15! I also made a friend, Celio, who I had a very difficult time understanding, but he was very sweet. The bus wasn't filled, so I was also able to find a two-seat spot open, so I could lie down and sleep a little.
The bad news: My iPhone fell out of my jacket pocket at some point during the bus ride, and someone must have scooped it up, because it was nowhere to be found when I finally realized it was gone and searched the bus repeatedly for it.
A list of things I lost when I lost my phone:
Calculator
Budget tracking app
Camera (an especially tragic loss, considering the fact that I JUST learned how to clear storage space and my phone would finally be useful for photos and video again)
Clock/alarm
WhatsApp / calls / texts
My most prized and essential items on this trip are my phone and my computer, because they connect me to the internet, which I desperately depend on. This was a heavy loss. If anything happens to my computer before I get a new phone, I am screwed.
The bus arrived to Rurrenabaque at 5:00am (3 hours ahead of schedule), so I waited in the bus with Celio until 6am. The bakery near travel agency wouldn’t be open until 6:30 so I really had nowhere to go until then. At 6:00, I got a motorcycle-taxi to the Mashaquipe agency, waited for bakery to open (the ride from the bus station was only 10 minutes at most), then got some coffee and a pastry (so warm and good - fresh from the oven!) while waiting for Mashaquipe to open at 7:30. I booked a 4D/3N combo tour of selva (forest) & pampas for $410 (… a touch more than the “less than $100” I had originally wanted to aim for). I went with this company on the recommendation of someone from the Death Road bike tour; quite frankly, I had zero energy for agency-hopping and shopping around for a better deal after the bumpy bus ride and the low morale from losing my phone. I was glad to at least have a recommendation to go on instead of just booking with the first agency I came across, which is what I probably would have done otherwise.
I got another pastry and read my book until it was 9:00am and it was time to leave for the Amazon adventure.