When Civil Engineers have a laugh

La Cuimbre to Coroico - it doesn´t take much imagination to see how this road earned its title.

You have to keep an eye on the civil engineers. They pretend that they´re civilised over there on the other side of the engineering school, hanging out with all the girrlies and building touchy-feely things like sanitation systems (unlike us chemical engineers who just make profits for large multinationals and generate toxic waste). But underneath it all, they´re still just engineers like the rest of us, and want to build something really cool and interesting, regardless of how stupid it is. And that is exactly what they have done in creating a road from La Cuimbre to Coroico, also known as The Worlds Most Dangerous Road.

La Cuimbre is one of those places that doesn´t even really exist except on a map - not even a house or church, just a road marker really. But then that´s to be expected, considering that it is at 4800m, a high pass on the altiplano to the east of La Paz - cold, windswept, and very barren. But it is also rather spectacular, because it represents the start of the eastern escarpment of the Andes - from La Cuimbre, the road plummets 3600m vertical in around 70km down the hill to Coroico (1200m), on the very edge of the Amazon basin. But this is not any ordinary road. The upper sections, maybe - sealed and just your standard high-mountain road, but the middle. Ooooh, the middle is truly impressive. A narrow, winding, shingle road cut into the side of the hill. And I mean literally into the side of 1000m vertical cliffs. If you go over the edge, you´ll have a good while to think about the fact that maybe you should have used the brakes a little more (or less, for that matter!). Unfortunately, there have been plenty of people in that predicament - the average is 25 deaths per year on the road. And you can understand why - it is extremely narrow (one small lane for 95% of the way), with big drops, and it has a lot of traffic - not your standard passenger vechiles either, but lots of large camiones packed with produce heading to La Paz. A common scenarios seem to involve two camiones trying to pass on a turnout, and the road subsiding underneath one or both of them - one such incident in 1983 killed the driver and 100 passengers in the back. In an attempt to prevent this type of accident, there are set times for going uphill and downhill, so that traffic only flows in one direction - in theory, at least - but it doesnt really work that well, as we discovered. And its not just locals either - there is a monument halfway down, amongst all the other crosses, to an Israeli girl who failed to take a corner on her bike a few years back.

So with all this death and destruction, it is inevitable that the road has come to the attention of western backpackers, and there are now many, many companies in La Paz running cycle tours down the hill to Coroico - "Ride the Death Road" sort of thing. Some of it is a bit borderline when it comes to taste, but to be fair, it is also a fantastic downhill ride (where else can you find 3600m of descent over 70km?), and quite a spectacular one also. My love of cycling eventually overcame my doubts, and so we headed off down the hill with five or six other gringos.

Dorthe takes a bend cut into the cliff at pace and kicks up some serious dust. You´ve gotta feel sorry for the guy behind her!

We were pleased we did - the road is truly spectacular. We started high on the barren, cold altiplano at around 9am in the morning, with lots of clothes on! As we descended over the next four hours, things warmed up considerably, and with it the vegetation changed dramatically - first more ground cover, then trees, and then the hot humid steaming jungle and coca plantations of the Yungas region around Coroico. And as we got lower, the road got worse, and worse, and worse, changing from a nice wide two lane asphalt highway, into the aforementioned one lane shingle track cut into the side of a cliff. Coming around a dusty corner at full pace and riding straight into the hot humid air of the Yungas jungle is a feeling that I will never forget!

We had three guides with us whoose main role was to ride ahead and warn us when there were trucks coming up the hill - there were plenty, and we were thankful for the guides - I can assure you that coming around a corner at pace and seeing your only two options being a 25 tonne camione or a 1000m drop would not be much fun. As it was, even with the guides, there was often very little room for even a bike to squeeze between the truck and the drop! In spite of the odd scare, and the everprescent drop 3m to your left, the ride actually felt quite safe - you have so much control on a bike, and there are so many more options available to you. I remember thinking to myself that I´d much rather do this on a bike than in a car.....

...and so, after negotiating 70km of rutted narrow road, things eventually began to flatten out - although interestingly, they also became much more dusty - several inches deep on the road in places (we were grateful for the dustmasks supplied, even if we were initially a little sceptical!). Waiting for us at the bottom were a big feed, a swimming pool, and the van to carry us back to La Paz. But the one thing that they didn´t tell you in the tour agency was that the return trip was the same way that we came (makes sense, I guess). And so then, just like the locals, we took our chances going back up The Worlds Most Dangerous Road in a car - exactly how I did not want to do it....

...and it was as about as stressful as I can imagine a car trip being. Our crazy bolivian driver (is there any other sort) drives that road twice everyday and he clearly knew it like the back of his hand. And he drove it that way as well - there was no slowing down for corners, which, when you´re you´re sitting in the backseat and can´t actually see the edge, leads you to think "this is it" on pretty much every turn. After a while, I sort of settled into a state of half shock - half resignation, which wasn´t too bad really. It won´t get any worse than this, just get used to it......

...and then it got dark. And then we climbed far enough up to be in the clouds. And being tropical clouds, they were really, really thick - visibility fell to 3m. And then because we were in the clouds it started raining, turning the dust on the windscreen to mud. As this point we were still barrelling up the hill, with rain and mud covering the windscreen, so not only could we not see the size of the drop to our right (although we all knew how large it was), but the driver couldn´t really see out the window either. Our driver might as well have been blind and and driving by feel alone, for all the difference it would have made. Oh well, at least there is no traffic coming the other way...

....At least it was dark, so that we could see their headlights. We came barrelling around one corner and there was a passenger bus coming back the other way towards us. My stress level quadrupled instantly. Oh f**k, what do we do now? Contrary to convention, the driver offered to go around the outside of the bus, taking the side closest to the drop. I was unhappy. But the bus refused, stuck to convention so that we were closest to the cliff, and somehow we managed to negotiate our way past . And then past the truck around the next corner. And then past three more buses, ten camiones and about a dozen light vechiles - it seemed that we had just met the downhill traffic!

Dorthe and Mark, happy to have survived the dusty, dodgy, descent from La Cuimbre. But how do we get home?

Somehow we managed to make it back to La Paz alive, and without witnessing a truck plummet off a cliff. How, we don't actually know. Trying to pass the buses and trucks was very tight in places, with lots of back and forth on the part of both vehicles. But somehow they managed to do it, just like they do it every single day of the year - being patient and trusting your own judgement and equipment goes a long way on that road - as do nerves of steel. All of the gringos in the van that night had nothing but the upmost respect for the way in which the locals tackled what would be an unimaginable task in our own countries. And we also unnaminously agreed that driving that van was a job that none of us would accept, not matter how much they paid us!