Walking through downtown La Paz, between the dried lama foeti of the Witches Market, the robust Cholita women wearing bowler hats and the pickpockets lingering for their next victim with a bottle of ketchup or a mouth full of spit, Calle Sagárnaga screams out offers of mountain bike trips down the world’s most dangerous road. On offer is the chance to cycle 64 km down the Yungas Road that heads north out of capital La Paz from 4,700 metres above sea level in the snow-capped Andes down to the atrophying heat of the Amazon jungle near at 1,600 metres. This road is putting Bolivia on the adventure tourism map, attracting those seeking thrills in an exotic location underpinned by a very real element of danger.
This is why I am sitting in a minibus with ‘Gravity Assisted Mountain Biking’ painted on the side, at an hour of the day that seems far too early with an international group that includes English, French, Canadians and Americans, dissipating the clouds of sleep with Marvin Gaye and The White Stripes, while chewing coca leaves to minimize the effect of the altitude.
Gravity took its first paying customer in July 22 1988 and as its business has grown from four to over 80 bicycles, the Yungas Road has developed into one of the most exciting and talked about activities in Latin America, with an estimated 13,000 people cycling it in 2005.
We are blessed with a sunny day and clear blue sky at the summit as the three guides (including two gringos) unload the bikes and we get ready to ride. While I have done off-road mountain biking before, many in the group haven’t and I can see that a few nerves beginning to creep in as people get ready to confront a road with a reputation for giving severe punishment for any error. Some babble nervously as others clam up in introspective silence, but when Kory Kramer, our guide from Michigan, USA, gives his ‘fear of God’ speech, he has everyone’s attention.
“Keep your eyes on the road because if you look at the beautiful valley below, that is where you are going to go. We had a German guy last year who rode off the cliff without making any attempt to brake. We rescued him and asked him what happened and he said he was looking at into the valley and just went over,” he says.
Kory says that the key to enjoying the ride is to keep within your ability, and he talks about rules of the road, how to mount and dismount, what to do if a truck comes, or a car comes, riding position, riding style and how to corner. “You have disk brakes so you do not need to use a Kung Fu death grip to stop. With a Kung Fu death grip you will go over the handlebars, so just use a couple of fingers and feather the pressure on and off,” he says.
The villages we will pass also add their own four-legged hazards, he says. “There are pigs and there are dogs running about, so if you see domestic animals slow down. You don’t want to hit a dog at 40mph,” says Kory.
Gravity’s founder, New Zealander Alistair Matthew, says the fear of God speech is the key element to ensure that everyone has a good day. “The fear of God speech is to keep people focused and to stop them from getting too excited. It is when you are not concentrating that is when you are going to fall, and you can fall anywhere from 4 metres to 800 metres off the edge,” he says, adding that, “we work up the drama. People don’t want to feel it is too easy. We are about myth creation here,” he says.
Suitably briefed we form a circle and offer a tribute to Bolivian earth goddess Pachamama and ask her for a safe journey. We swig some raw alcohol and spit it out on the ground, offering her alcohol so that she won’t take our blood.
THE RIDE
The first part of the ride is a smooth and fast asphalt section that gives us an opportunity to familiarize ourselves with the bicycles under relatively controlled conditions, particularly the bodyline for riding at speed, such as leaning into corners with the inside pedal raised so as not to catch any rocks, and of course feeling out the brakes. I opted to pay the extra for a bike with full suspension and enjoy the extra comfort and control it gives me as the road squiggles down the mountain.
We are so high up in the mountains that we ride through pockets of cloud, losing sight of the sheer valley walls that rise around us save for damp black rocks that peep out once through the mist, before bursting into the sunlight that shines down on the lush green valley below. The cold air biting into my face is compounded by the wind chill of speed and I have to twist my head so that the rush of air clears the tears forming in my eyes. My desire to look at the scenery is tempered by Kory’s speech but I cannot resist snatching glimpses of the beautiful landscape.
The Yungas area hosts coca plantations and so the road has a couple of police checkpoints as part of the government’s effort to restrict the movement of precursors, the chemical raw materials used in cocaine production. We pass through the Unduavi checkpoint and stop at a hamlet called Pongo where the guides check the bicycles and brief us about the next stage. The feeling of speed is addictive and has hooked everyone in the group. “I was a bit tense at first as this is fastest that I have been on a mountain bike,” says Jane from Nottingham. “This is free-falling on a bicycle, the ultimate two-wheel adrenaline rush," says Canadian lawyer Ben.
After 20km we pass from asphalt onto an uneven dirt track that just wide enough for a truck to pass. Riding out of the saddle, my legs are getting a real good shaking and suspension seems to have been the correct choice after all.
Riding on dirt at speed is a very different challenge, and I almost don’t adapt quick enough. I approach a right-hand corner and brake hard, but not early enough and I enter the corner too fast. My speed means I run wide from the track cleared by the passing of countless trucks and buses and takes me into the gravel banked up on the outside of the curve. I have entered the margin of error, the 30cm of gravel that delimits the edge of the road from the empty space of the valley below. I am riding too fast to brake hard while turning on the gravel and can feel the tightening effect of fear that comes with the knowledge that I am in a bad place. I fight the impulse to tighten up, try to keep loose, and lean hard into the mountain, using my body weight to get round the corner. All this happens in an instant.
This is stupid. I am riding too fast. I remember the words of Alistair the night before: “It is not actually a dangerous road. What makes it dangerous is people getting over excited.” Danger is relative of course, but with the Yungas road, if anything does go wrong, the chances are your that your F**ked, and with a 10- to 20-degree angle of descent, whoo!, the speed just keeps on coming on!
The road curves and turns so much that I lose sight of the rider in front of me. The person behind me has probably lost sight of me and so the thought occurs to me that if I went over the edge now no one would ever know until the next rest point. A sobering thought.
We pass under the patchy cloud and into a warmer climatic zone with rich greenery clinging to the sides of the valley that glistens under the Andean sun. The mountains rise vertically around us and waterfalls cascade in white ribbons down their sides. The distant sound of falling water impregnates the air and mingles with the low static murmur of the tyres on the gravel and the occasional warning blast of tri-tone truck horns. Bamboo and ficus grow in abundance and a host of other plants and vines cling to the mountains and black, iridescent yellow and blue butterflies flit about. We have descended several hundred metres and the air tastes fresh and sweet, and is scented with eucalyptus. It feels good to be alive.
The road passes through picture postcard scenery with views to die for as I look forward at the road squiggling ahead into the distance, or peep into the valley below that has a vertical drop from the road averaging about 400 metres.
We stop about half way down to snack on chocolate and a banana before entering a section with the exquisite San Juan waterfalls falling over the road from over a hundred metres above, cloaking the road in a diaphanous rainbow mist. The water is ice-cold and each drop stings as they hit me like a lead weights as I pass underneath.
As the road nears the bottom of the valley we see the village of Coroico, our destination, perched atop a spur. The road gradient softens and the gravel becomes a dusty surface that Kory says is more dangerous and slippery that the muddy sections.
Almost as if to prove this point, we pass a group of riders with Downhill Madness, another operator, who are gathered around an Australian girl who has just had a hard crash. It looks as though her bike slid out as she tried to turn with too much speed and she went slamming down on her right hand side. Her head is badly swollen, her eye closed, she has cuts all over her right leg and arm, and she is in a lot of distress but fortunately Kory is there to give her first aid since there is no sign of her group’s guide. We wait in silence as Kory helps her, the exciting fizz of our descent flattened by the reality of when things go wrong. “This is a sobering moment,” says Neil from Nottingham.
We ride the final section into Yolosa and gladly swap our mud covered bicycles for the cold beer that is waiting for us at the end of the road.
HOW DANGEROUS IS THE DANGEOUS ROAD?
The Yungas road has put Bolivia on the action adventure map. The many hundreds of deaths in vehicle crashes on the road serve to draw people from around the globe to flirt with danger. It is only as a result of this rush, and the explosion in number of tourists and operators, that people have died biking it. A handful of deaths over the years Alistair, a die-hard mountain-biker, admits that since he took his first paying customer in July 1988 that he has “created a monster”. “It is a legend, a myth. It is not about mountain biking in Bolivia; it is about the world’s most dangerous road.”
Gravity has grown from four to over 80 bicycles and an estimated 13,000 people cycled the Yungas Road in 2005, but just how dangerous is the Dangerous Road? Alistair is uncomfortable with the ‘Death Road’ sobriquet “because we have never had a death and we don’t think it is necessary to die on the road,” he says, because he takes safety very seriously including not riding in the rainy season, training his guides in first aid and rescue techniques and giving them regular days off.
Safety in part depends upon how much operators invest in their equipment. “Some companies operate with $50 bicycles but we import $1,000 Kona bicycles from the US, the mountain bike equivalent of a Clydesdale horse,” he says. On top of this, Gravity uses original Hayes hydraulic disk brakes that run $220 a pair and pads that retail at $22 a pair. “We go through 2,500 pairs a year. Other companies take sneaky shortcuts and may have a $1,000 bike with 50 cent recovered brake pads,” he says.
This difference was painfully clear for the Australian girl. She crashed because of brake failure; the brake plates had no pads on them, leading Alistair to speculate that they had been resurfaced with a substance that is little more than chewing gum and grit. Luckily for her, she had slid into the cliff. If she had gone the other way…
Safety boils down to individual responsibility and to this end travelers are perhaps their own worse enemy, seeing little difference between the different tour companies. “Tourists cannot assume that the difference between a $25 and $50 tour is the quality of the lunch. This is Bolivia. They cannot assume that there is a minimum safety standard here like there is in the US or Europe. The difference between what is promised by the operator and the product that is delivered can result in death, and since there is no investigation or follow up on accidents, there is little incentive for an operator to even try and meet the minimum safety standards that the tourist might assume will be in place,” he says.
The paradox is that in part it is the lax safety standards of many operators that have made the Yungas Road so popular. “Mountain biking could become a major attraction of the country but if there continues to be the safety issues to the level that exist it will turn people off. Or it will create the myth of the world’s most dangerous road,” he says.
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