The ¨World´s Most Dangerous Road¨

Verena and I biked the ¨World´s Most Dangerous Road¨ (64 km – with a 3600 m total vertical drop according to the website) today from La Paz to Coroico – and got a T-shirt to confirm it

We left our hostel at 6:30 a.m. and left La Paz in a minibus with 12 other travelers and our guide Ben at 7:30 am. About one hour later we arrived in La Cumbre at 4660 m, tested our gear – superb mountain bikes – and started going down around 9 am. The first 20 km were on a sealed road and then 40 km on a dirt road, which is often only 3.2 meters wide and next to cliffs going down 600 meters right next to it. It´s important to go with a good, safe company and I feel we went with the best: ¨GRAVITY Assisted Mountain Biking¨. Our guide introduced himself as: ¨Hi, I´m Ben; (pause) I´m from the States – and I´m sorry about that.¨ It´s kind of interesting to meet people from the US when traveling around the world, i.e. outside the U.S.; the few I have met on my trip often either apologize for being American or pretend to be Canadians…

Back to the ¨World´s Most Dangerous Road¨, though, so we started at 4660 m at La Cumbre around 9 am and arrived at Coroico at 1760 m around 1:30 pm. There we had lunch at an animal refuge and just hung out until 3:30 pm, when we drove back up the road (this time by car), back to La Paz where we arrived about 4 hours later. - The nice thing is that although we are out of breath fairly quickly at this altitude (in La Paz), we have gotten used to it and have no headaches or other problems.

The bike tour was phantastic! If you like mountains, biking and great views, I can totally recommend it – but make sure you go with a good and safe company (people have died here by going over the cliffs)! Check out gravitiy´s website if you´re interested:

http://www.gravitybolivia.com/

PS: Flying to Rurrenabaque tomorrow morning, then going on a 3-day pampas trip, returning to La Paz on Thursday and then heading to Copacabana on Friday