13/3/2012 - Death Road

Staying at the Wild Rover hostel is mostly a chore if you want to do anything other than party. And by party I just mean drink a lot, try and cop off with another traveller then drink more. Sigh. The night before we were due to do the bike ride down Death Road I didn't manage to get a wink of sleep not least because some idiot sat near out dorm and drunkenly attempted to play Arctic Monkey's covers on an out of tune guitar using his out of tune voice at 2am. To add insult to injury, as I started drifting off around 4am he, having failed to get lucky, returned to continue the concert in an even worse state.

We all looked a little sleep deprived as we woke the next morning. As we waited around the hostel reception at 8am, I was startled by a gruff voice behind me. “Phil!? Death Road!” barked a man gleefully looking at our sleepy-eyed crew. Show time.

Views from the start of the ride

The lovely tarmaced road we started on

After a van ride which saw us climb out of La Paz to a height of 4700 metres and kitting up (and our guides reminding us many times that it wasn't a race.. yeah right) we were off!

The first hour's ride was along sweeping nicely tarmacked roads with spectacular views. Although it was initially fun, I had no idea why anyone would call this Death Road. That is, until we got to the seconds part of the ride. Tarmac gave way to loose rock and gravel, wide gentle curves became fiendishly steep hairpin bends and a pleasant ride was transformed into a hair raising experience.

With gay abandon we bombed downhill after our guide, the ride seeming to become easier the faster you went and the more control you relinquished to the gravelly gods.

It definitely wasn’t for everyone and more than a few times we passed other cyclists taking tumbles and moaning bitterly about how much they hated it.

As we left the tarmac behind the road began to live up to it's name

We raced under mini waterfalls and rode through a couple of small rivers, all the while plummeting further down the road which now clung to the imposing cliff face like a caterpillar to a tree trunk.

Although the ride lasted several hours, the injection of adrenaline into the bloodstream was constant and I gave no thought to the fact that I'd hardly slept the previous night. Finally arriving at the end of the road where we procured much needed showers and food, I felt absolutely drained.

A free tacky t-shirt and a CD of photos later, we were back in the hostel and, since this would be our last night in La Paz together, we had a night out in the city which, despite being gringo-heavy was good fun.

The next day we spent wandering La Paz and picking up cheap gifts for folks back home. On several streets the market stalls spilled out on to the pavements in true south American style, but to my dismay the locals weren’t quite as up for haggling as they had been in Peru. Fortunately Bolivia is ridiculously cheap (owing to it being the poorest country in South America) so on several occasions it felt almost rude to try and get even more of a discount.