The world's most dangerous road (La Paz, Bolivia)

The highlight of my time in Bolivia saw me tackling the infamous 'Death Road' from La Cumbre to Coimbre by mountain bike - an at times terrifying, but ultimately fantastic experience. Although a popular activity among backpackers visiting La Paz, this is not something I undertook lightly as the road's notorius reputation is enough to strike fear in to the hearts of even quite experienced cyclists like me.

The world's most dangerous road

The road runs for 66km down the Yungas Valley (descending over 3000m en route) and is legendary for its high death toll, which saw it christened 'the world's most dangerous road' in 1995. At one time, over 400 vehicles a day were making the treacherous journey along the narrow gravel road, and up to 300 deaths were estimated to occur on the road every year. In places, the road is little more than the width of one vehicle, with 600m drops to the valley below and nothing in the way of guard rails and barriers to prevent vehicles careering over the edge. More recently, the road's use (and therefore death toll) has declined following the construction of a new road on the other side of the valley, but vehicles do still travel along the road, along with hundreds of thrill-seeking travellers with the many companies offering mountain bike rides down the road from La Paz. The road also gained greater awareness in the UK when the Top Gear team travelled down the road in 2009 which you can see more of here (but also see note at the end of this blog).

Although there are numerous companies in La Paz offering to do this trip at various different prices, I booked to do this with the original and best company to offer this tour, Gravity Assisted Mountain Biking, who while perhaps not being the cheapest operator in town have by far the best reputation of the companies offering this tour. As with my experience on Mount Meru in Tanzania earlier in the trip, this didn't feel like the kind of excursion I should be making savings on!

We set off from La Paz early in the morning in a minibus containing 13 other travellers, our guides Marcus and Rodrigo and our driver Santiago, with 15 top of the range full suspension mountain bikes on the roof. The road climbed to a height of 4700m to La Cumbre where we were to start our descent. As we neared this point a song came on the minibus stereo system which I couldn't help singing along to. Although it was actually a dance remix of the original that was being played, Getting Away With It All (Messed Up) by James has always been one of my favourite songs not only as its by my favourite band, but also because of its Daniel-mentioning lyrics. I took this to be a good omen for the day! Once at the top, we were each set up on our bikes and given a detailed safety talk by Marcus which he helpfully summarised by encouraging us to 'have fun but don't be a f***ing idiot' - wise words indeed!

Bikes at the ready

Safety briefing

A blessing to Pachamama (Mother Earth)

...and a little sip of dutch courage each

The first section of the ride was along a paved road that took us down to the start of Death Road itself. We took advantage of the wider, smoother road and the safety of the crash barriers to cruise down the road as quickly as we could, although with our mountain bikes geared up for descending on rougher terrain it proved difficult to get too much speed up. After passing through a drugs check point (set up to try and reduce the illegal exportation of cocaine) and stopping to pay a 25 boliviano fee to support the maintenance of the road, we were at the start of Death Road.

After further detailed instructions from Marcus about how to descend as safely as possible, we were off. The road from here onwards was rough gravel and very narrow in places and so we all had to concentrate hard and keep a good distance between each other. The sight of crosses and flowers by the side of the road certainly helped to focus the mind!

Although the day had started dry and bright, by now we were amongst the clouds and cycling in a steady but light rain. The clouds meant that the views across the valley (and over the edge of the road to the 450m drop below!) was obscured, but it is still rainy season in Bolivia after all and the conditions further helped to keep me concentrated on the road ahead. The road descended down for turn after turn, crossing streams, ducking beneath waterfalls and crossing the path of a number of partially cleared landslides. However, our guides stopped us regularly to explain each upcoming section of the road, so at no point did I feel particularly scared or in danger.

After a couple of hours of descending, Marcus stopped us again and explained that the next section of around 8km would be our longest without stopping and with the most treacherous sections of road behind this would be an opportunity to relax a little and build up a bit more speed. I took this advice a little too keenly and promptly managed to come off my bike at the very next corner, albeit in a rather staggered and controlled manner. However I didn't let this hold me back so pressed on to catch up with the other quicker riders in my group and to make the most of the longer and safer stretch of road.

All was fine until shortly before our next stop when I caught up with a slower cyclist from another group......as I pulled out to overtake her I stamped down on the pedals to gain some acceleration only to find that my chain locked up beneath me, stopping the bike in its tracks but sending me flying forwards. Fortunately years of cycling experience (and therefore years of experience of falling off bikes) meant I instinctively threw the bike to one side and got my arms out in front of me and rolled sideways, avoiding any impact with my face, shoulder or collarbone. This did however mean landing hard on my right pelvis and elbow causing a couple of impressive friction burns and some deep cuts. 

Surveying the damage after my fall

Marcus did a great job of cleaning up my wounds so despite being a little shaken I was able to continue down the last few kilometres of the road, although I now chose to hang back at the tail of the group and adopt a more leisurely pace. Before long we reached the end of the route, a small village called Yolosa, where the old road and the new road meet.

Finishing the ride a little gingerly

Celebrating successfully completing 'Death Road'

After completing the ride, we had lunch at the fantastic Senda Verde, an eco lodge set up in the village which seems to have almost by accident become a reserve for several species of monkeys (including spider, howler and capuchin monkeys), along with numerous bears, ossolotes, macaws, camen, and coati. The centre relies on donations and contributions from tourists, so we were happy to oblige by buying a number of desserts and beers, safe in the knowledge that the profits would go towards feeding a hungry primate!

Macaws

Coati

Spider monkey

Capuchin monkey

So it is with some relief and a few scars to show for it that I'm now able to say that I successfully conquered the world's 'most dangerous road' and despite falling off, had a lot of fun doing it. The scenery on the way down the road was fantastic (although obviously you couldn't look too closely while riding along!) while the guys from Gravity Assisted did a great job of looking after us and making sure we got down safely.

Finally, while I don't take any pleasure from ridiculing Top Gear presenters (ok, so maybe I do), our guide reliably informed us that most of their 'hairy' experiences on Death Road were staged and set up to make it look much more dangerous than it really was. Apparently if you watch the show back you can see them passing the same vehicles over and over again, while the famous bit where Clarkson's vehicle appears to be about to disappear over the edge was actually filmed on a much wider section but edited to appear much more dramatic. Sorry Top Gear fans!

Bolivia bound (Salar de Uyuni tour, Bolivia)

The next leg of my journey through South America saw me heading off on an epic three day journey into Bolivia, crossing the spectacular Bolivian altiplano to reach Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt lake. This three day trip is a popular part of the backpacker trail in South America so as a result there are numerous companies in San Pedro de Atacama offering trips in to Bolivia, nearly all following the same route in a 4 wheel drive carrying up to seven travellers.

Our Land Cruiser to take us to Bolivia

Jake, Tom and Colin were all heading for Bolivia too so we signed up with a company in San Pedro together and were then joined in our 4 wheel drive by Glenn, from Australia, and Tom, from Ireland. Fortunately this meant we had a good group of like minded travellers with a shared first language which made the next three days crammed in to a Land Cruiser together a lot more enjoyable. After being ferried to the rather basic Bolivian border post, we met our Bolivian driver Nelson who would also act as our guide for the next few days. We quickly established that he didn't speak any English, but this at least gave me a chance to practice my Spanish and between the six of us we understood enough to get by and understand most of what Nelson was telling us about each place we visited on the tour.

Tom, Colin, Glenn, Tom and Jake

Bolivian border post

Although the tour is largely billed as being a visit to the salt flats, the first two days are actually spent driving across the Bolivian altiplano (high plain). While this was slightly unexpected, the scenery was absolutely stunning and we were all blown away by the spectacular surroundings. On the first day, we stopped at Laguna Verde, a large green tinged lake, before heading to a geyser field which though not quite as impressive as the El Tatio geysers in Chile were still great to visit. Although there was nothing to stop you getting right up close tothe geysers, we later heard that a member of another group that visited the geysers on the same morning ended up with some very nasty burns and an emergency trip to a doctor at a nearby mine after the ground next to a geyser cracked beneath him sending him in to the boiling water below - ouch.

At Laguna Verde

Laguna Verde

Close, but not too close, to a geyser

Desierto Salvador Dali

Later that morning we stopped at a thermal pool for a swim, where the water was even warmer than the pools at El Tatio. By now we had risen to over 5000m so the altitude was beginning to affect us all, particularly given we had been down at 2500m in San Pedro only a few hours before. The guide books all warned about the long bumpy roads and risk of drunk Bolivian drivers on these trips, but were all strangely quiet about the altitude which was to affect us far more during the course of the trip (Nelson was a great driver so the horror stories on that front provide unfounded). By mid afternoon we had reached our accommodation for the night, a rather ramshackle set of buildings that seemed to exist purely to host trips like ours.

After lunch, we headed to Laguna Colorado which for me was probably the highlight of the three days. This huge lake is a vibrant pink colour due to the red algae in the water and is populated by hundreds of flamingos (whose pink colour also comes from the algae), which along with the spectacular snow capped mountains around us made for an incredible sight.

Laguna Colorado

That night we had a rather bad night's sleep as we all struggled with the altitude and cold temperatures. It was hard to sleep peacefully with a raging headache and shortness of breath so it was with some relief that we awoke alive and well the next morning! The second day matched the first for spectacular scenery as visited several more huge lakes as well as the Piedra del Arbol, a large rock that resembles a tree.

Piedra del Arbol

Laguna Honda

Stone throwing competition while we waited for lunch on Day 2

Spectacular volcanic rock on Day 2

Our second night was spent in a small frontier town called Culpina where we had a slightly better night's sleep after losing some altitude on the second day and being able to have a shower for the first time in two days. A quick wander round town revealed little of interest so we got an early night as we were pretty tired after the restless night of the day before.

The third and final day of the tour saw us reach Uyuni and the eponymous salt lake. Before reaching the lake we stopped at an eery train 'graveyard' where several old steam engines have been left to rust in the desert following the closure of the train line to Chile some years ago.

Our group at the train graveyard

Train graveyard

After clambering around the the trains for a while, we then headed through Uyuni and on to the salt lake. After driving on to the lake it wasnt long before almost all you could see was white salt save for a few mountains on the horizon which appeared to be floating. The huge expanse of salt plays several such tricks on your eyes and alters your sense of perspective. We stopped at a museum made almost entirely on salt towards the centre of the lake and proceeded to take the obligatory comedy photos that all backpackers do when visiting the lake, playing around with the distorted horizon that the white salt gives you when taking pictures.

After lunch in the museum, we headed back to Uyuni where the tour finished. It had been a demanding and tiring tour in many ways, but thoroughly worth it for the amazing scenery and the incredible remoteness of the altiplano. We had originally planned to spend an evening in Uyuni but the town seemed to have little to offer other being a jumping off point for Salar de Uyuni tours so we decided to press on further in to Bolivia that evening. While we said goodbye to Tom as he headed for La Paz to meet some fellow Irishmen for St Patricks Day, the rest of us caught an evening bus to Potosi, a mining town set high in the mountains and supposedly the worlds highest city at 4090m. At one time Potosi was the largest city in all of the Americas thanks to the discovery of silver in 1545, but it is a long time since its 16th century heyday, so we just stayed one night before all heading on to Sucre the next morning, another large city around three hours away.

Waiting for a bus in Uyuni

With no bus tickets available until that evening, we decided to hire a couple of taxis to get us to Sucre which proved a bit of a challenge to arrange, but once sorted was a much more pleasant way of getting to Sucre. I sat in the front and passed the three hours by practising my Spanish on our driver Thomas. We got on well enough although I think my attempts to explain the hereditary monarchy and why we have a Queen but no King was rather lost on him!

We then spent the next couple of days exploring Sucre, a pleasant city with a UNESCO listed centre of white colonial buildings and an impressive array of churches and cathedrals. In reality most of our time was spent in Cafe Florin, a popular bar and restaurant where we spent many hours enjoying how much cheaper food and beer is in Bolivia compared to Chile. We also watched the climax of the Six Nations there, but the less said about that the better!

Sucre

We did venture out of Sucre to visit the nearby Parque Cretacico,  however, a visitor centre dedicated to dinosaurs thanks to the discovery of dinosaur footprints on a cliff face by the adjoining cement works twenty years ago. This is in fact the largest collection of dinosaur footprints ever found so although we couldn't get particularly close, it was a worthwhile visit. The visitor centre has done a good job of trying to bring the prints to life with a series of scale models of dinosaurs and an informative guided tour of the centre, but they seem less sure of how best to protect the prints themselves (a large section of them collapsed three years ago), particularly with the cement works allowed to continue working around them.

The cliff face of dinosaur footprints just outside Sucre

That evening I said goodbye to Tom, Jake, Colin and Glenn as they were heading south to Cochabamba to visit the Bolivian jungle while I was catching a flight to La Paz the next morning, where my adventures in Bolivia would continue.

Oop north (Norte Chico and Norte Grande, Chile)

After waving goodbye to Alex and Rosanna, I caught a flight back up to Santiago to continue my travels in the northern half of Chile. My next stop was the coastal city of Valparaiso, a hugely important port throughout Chile's history and an interesting and exciting place to visit. The city is less than two hours west of Santiago with buses running there every few minutes, so after spending my Sunday morning watching Spurs win the North London derby :-), I was able to jump straight on a bus and be in Valparaiso by early evening.

Valparaiso

The city is divided in to two main sections - a flat section along the sea front known as El Plan and the hills (or cerros) surrounding the port, most of which are accessed by a complex web of narrow steep lanes and several ancient funiculars (at one time there were over a hundred, although only around 30 remain, many of which are out of service). Valparaiso's glory days very much came during the mid 19th century when it was a major stopping point on the sea route from the east coast of America to the west, when marine traffic still had to pass around the Cape of Good Hope. However, the construction of the Panama Canal in 1914 (along with a massive earthquake in 1906) swiftly brought the golden era to an end and to some extent Valparaiso is a pale imitation of its former self. Nevertheless, it still has a certain vibrancy and appeal, not least because of the large array of street art that exists across the city (providing you like that sort of thing).

Valparaiso funicular

On my first morning in Valparaiso I joined a free walking tour around the city, similar to the one I had done in Santiago several weeks before. Our guide, an American who had studied here and fallen in love with the place and so had come back to live permanently, walked us around the city pointing out various points of interest and telling us about Valparaiso's history. On the way round we stopped to buy some Chilean alfajores (biscuits similar to wagon wheels), took a ride on a trolley bus, and sampled the famous Chilean drink pisco sour (although Peruvians would dispute this!).

That afternoon, I headed along the coast to Vina del Mar, a seaside resort a 15 minute bus or train ride north of Valparaiso, accompanied by several other tourists I'd met on the walking tour - Tom, Jake, Colin, Vanessa, Anna and Mor - some of whom I was to spend quite a lot of the next couple of weeks as we were all heading in the same direction north through Chile. Vina is more of a typical beach resort so less appealing than Valparaiso, but we spent a pleasant afternoon soaking up the sun on the beach, although attempts to swim in the sea were quickly aborted due to the cold temperatures and the rather greasy sea water!

Vina del Mar

The following day I went to visit one of Pablo Neruda's houses, La Sebastiana. I had been to the outside of La Casona, Neruda's house in Santiago, but this time I decided to pay the fee to have a peek inside. The house had spectacular views across Valparaiso and out to sea (Neruda was a big lover of the sea) and was full of weird and wonderful trinkets and ornaments, making for an interesting hour wandering around the five floors of his house and learning more about an interesting character in Chile's cultural and political history.

La Sebastiana

I spent the rest of that day wandering around the intricate maze of narrow streets visiting several of the cerros that make up the city and taking lots of photos of the incredibly diverse street art and graffiti - a few of my favourites are below:

After a third night in Valparaiso, I caught a bus seven hours north to La Serena, another coastal town in the Norte Chico region of Chile. I had originally planned to head straight for San Pedro de Atacama in the very far north of the country, but the potential 25 hour bus journey from Valparaiso persuaded me to break the journey here.

The main attraction to visit from La Serena is the Elqui Valley, so I booked myself on a one day tour of the valley, which Tom, Jake and Colin also joined me on, having also caught a bus north from Valparaiso the day before. The tour took in most of the main sights of the Elqui Valley, including a papaya farm, a pisco factory, a microbrewery, and the small towns of Vicuna and Pisco Elqui. The tour had been due to culminate with a visit to the Mamulluca observatory, but cloudy skies above meant this was cancelled, although we more than made up for this with a star gazing trip in San Pedro de Atacama.

The following evening, the four of us then caught an overnight coach to San Pedro de Atacama, still a 16 hour journey from La Serena. After a reasonably good night's sleep I awoke to the sun rising over a vastly different landscape to that which I'd been used to so far in Chile, particularly compared to Patagonia where I'd only been a week earlier. Gone were the glaciers, lakes and rivers I'd seen down south, and we were suddenly in the Atacama desert, the driest place on Earth.

After checking in to our hostel, we went for a wander round the small town of San Pedro and booked ourselves on some excursions in the surrounding desert. The first of these was to the Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon) so called because the Belgian priest who named it thought it resembled the surface of the moon. Here, we clambered through some caves and up and over the rocks and sand dunes that make up the valley, before being driven up to a good vantage point to see the sun set over the desert. Although the scenery was pretty much as dry and barren as I might have expected, what I hadn't anticipated was that we would still be in view of vast snow-capped volcanoes, which dramatically changed colour as the sun set against them.

Valle de la Luna

Sunset over the Atacama desert

The next evening saw one of the highlights of my whole trip so far - an evening visit to a small observatory for a few hours of star gazing. With not a cloud in the sky, the stars were brilliantly clear and in the course of an hour staring at the sky with the naked eye I spotted six shooting stars. Our guide for the evening gave an interesting and entertaining talk about the night sky above us, explaining how man had first used the stars above to rationalise and explain (often wrongly) the world around us and how the different stars and planets had come to get their names. I've always enjoyed looking at the stars, without really knowing what I'm looking at, so to have it all explained by an expert while the stars were so clear was really fascinating. We were then given the opportunity to look through some of the observatory's telescopes, which gave us some great close up views of Saturn and Jupiter, as well as several clusters of stars at the far reaches of our galaxy.

Jupiter

Saturn

Despite not getting back from the star gazing until nearly midnight, I was up again by 4am the next morning to head off on a trip to see the El Tatio geysers at sunrise. This geyser field is the highest in the world at 4200m, and with over 80 active geysers also the third largest in the world after the Yellowstone National Park and a site in Russia. We arrived to see the sun rise over the geysers, which was a spectacular sight, particularly as this is the time of day at which the geysers are at their most active, bumbling hot water to the surface and  pushing huge columns of steam up in to the cold morning air.

We were then led over to a thermal pool for an early morning dip in a warm natural pool of water. While it was tough to strip off given how cold it still was, the water was so warm that it was more than worth it, particularly as the pool was surrounded by the geysers and the mountains beyond them. The water was quite sulphurous so we couldn't stay in for a long, but it certainly made for a nice start to a Monday morning!

Monday morning dip in a thermal pool

The fourth and final excursion from San Pedro de Atacama was to a series of lakes in the Salar de Atacama, the largest salt flat in Chile. We were able to swim in two of the lakes, one of which was sufficiently salty that we could float in it and another which was a form of cenote (a limestone sinkhole most commonly found in Mexico) and thought to be up to 500m deep, meaning we could safely bomb and dive in from the side!

Floating in the salty lake

Cannonball!

The day finished with us taking in the sunset over the salt flats, watching as the sun changed the colour of the salt and the moutains behind. This proved to be a suitably beautiful conclusion to the final night of my six or so weeks in Chile, which had provided several fantastic highlights and allowed me to at last fully explore a country I had only been given a brief glimpse of fourteen years ago. The next morning we were off on an epic adventure in to Bolivia, but you'll have to wait for the next blog for that story...

Salar de Atacama

My last Chilean sunset