World’s Most Dangerous Road Bike Ride
We’re in Bolivia… we’ve got to go on the world’s most dangerous bike ride on the worlds most dangerous road. And we need a t-shirt saying so too!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yungas_Road
Lots of companies offer this trip and we had been recommend “Gravity” a load of times. I’d recommend them too. We bumped (not literally fortunately) into loads of different groups on the road and none of them seemed to be as professional as our Gravity group. There is real danger involved and even though a new road has now been built to take the traffic off this original road the official death count so far this year is 43. Unofficially it’s much higher. Two of these were cyclists.
(pic from http://www.gravitybolivia.com )
(pic from http://journals.worldnomads.com/mcgurk77/post/1518.aspx originally from http://www.gravitybolivia.com I believe)
Taking pictures yourself is pretty tricky but I do have some. I’ll upload when I can. Gravity take loads for you but the CD is being delivered to the UK.
The road is 64km long, the drops are 600m down, you start from an altitude just shy of Europe’s highest mountain – Mont Blanc at 4700m and drop from pretty cold mountain down to hot jungle via dusty, slippery road under the odd waterfall and through some amazing scenery if you can take your eyes off the road! You pass a huge number of crosses and shrines and if you take a peek down you’ll surely find the mangled reason why.
Our guide had recently introduced a “no punching the guide in the face” rule and we could see why. We also definitely appreciated his strict no nonsense approach as the day went on. Although I didn’t think the road was that scary you can’t be mucking about and one little easy mistake could send you over the edge. Fortunately the only accident I saw was into the cliff on the side of the road that didn’t plunge into the valley below!
I got a blue t-shirt.
