The Worlds Most Dangerous Road

We arrived in La Paz for the final leg of our GAP Adventure and I was sad to say good-bye to the group I had spent the last two weeks with. We had a big good-bye dinner that night. We were the only people staying in our hotel, so the whole group came back and we played card games (those Aussies have some strange ones) into the early morning. Additionally Mary was very excited because she was reunited with Hari that day when we arrived in La Paz. After La Paz Mary and Hari continued their travels north and I went south.

The next day it was off again to the world of hostels and eight person dorm rooms. Luckily many people in our group were going to be staying in La Paz for a few days and we all went to the same place. At first La Paz struck me as a very congested and crowded city, but over my week stay I learned to love it. It is a city full of life. There are loads of great markets- the witches market selling remedies or spells to everything that might ale you, the black market where you can find many illegal things to buy, and the general street markets selling llama gear and jewelry. Plus La Paz is very very cheap.

One thing we really wanted to do was bike ‘The Worlds Most Dangerous Road’. There are many companies that offer the service, but we went with the safest one, Gravity. The company drove us up to the start of the road. At the top we received our bikes, which are valued at around $3,000 usd and are the top of the line for mountain bikes, and an orientation on the road and what we could expect during our ride. The bike ride down took about 6 hours to complete, allowing us a couple stops for pictures or snacks. We had an instructor with us that gave us warnings about an upcoming section of the road. We also had a van following us taking photos and there to help if anything should happen on the trip. Now this road is very dangerous and going off the road most likely means death as most of the drops are around 1,000m. Although it was fun, I never took my eye off the road and never forgot that this road was not something to take lightly. We celebrated our safe landing with some beers and a bottle of rum for our drive back into La Paz. A few days after our ride we found out that someone who was riding with another company did go off the road and did not survive.