The World's Most Dangerous Road(s)

13 Oct 2002

Rurrenabaque is the gateway to the Bolivian Amazon, and getting there was an adventure in its own right. The first obstacle is the 'World's Most Dangerous Road', which navigates the extreme topography of the Andean slopes. Hundreds of people used to die each year on this road. Rather than put my life in someone else's hands, I decided it would be safer (and much more fun!) to ride down on a mountain bike. While inspecting the bikes from the tour company, I was distressed to discover that in the Americas the brake levers are on opposite sides to in Australia - left hand for front, not for back! Given that an Israeli girl had recently died by going over her handlebars and off a cliff, this was not something I wanted to get wrong! Thus began my mantra "Right brake first, right brake first".

We started our ride in the rarefied air of La Cumbre, a high pass at 4700m altitude, surrounded by icy peaks. The road soon narrowed to a single lane, the asphalt replaced by dirt and potholes. It barely clung to the side of a massive valley, a meager scrap of horizontal in a world of precipitous cliffs ("right brake first!"), lush vegetation and cascading waterfalls (some of which fell onto the actual road). Part of me was tempted me to cut loose, but the gravity of the situation was inescapable: blind corners hid looming lorries ("right brake first!"), and crucifixes at regular intervals marked the demise of whole busloads of people, the cliff below scored by their passing, inaccessible wreckage remaining as a stark memorial ("right brake first!").

Waterfall onto the road

The lower reaches of the road, where it was not nearly as steep.

I made it!

 

The worst of it was soon over, however, and I could relax into the ride and get up a little speed. Finally, after 3500m of vertical descent, I spent the night in a charming guesthouse nestled into a tropical hillside in Coroico.

Having escaped the clutches of the Andes with my life intact, the next evening I boarded an overnight bus to the Amazon proper. This would prove to be one of the least comfortable nights of my life. While the road I had ridden down had the most fatalities, I suspect the road from Coroico to Rurrenabaque was much more dangerous - it just gets less traffic. The agony began with the bus company selling more tickets than it had seats - there were only five spare seats for nine of us backpackers. We agreed to share the misfortune, taking it in turns to stand in the aisle for half an hour at a time. When I had a seat, it wasn't much better: looking out the window revealed just how fast we were going around blind corners, on the very edge of big drops; nightfall hid that horror, but also brought rain so everyone closed their windows and the bus turned into a stinky, muggy sauna; worst of all, the overhead luggage rack made a god-awful screech with every (frequent) jolt of the bus, drilling through my skull making sleep an impossibility. After 14 hours to cover 330km, we staggered off the bus with the dawn and found somewhere for a desperately needed sleep.