Pictures, People, Places - Entry 9 - Bolivia

A million different landscapes, beautiful colonial towns, cheapness that your budget will love, political unrest with rather civilised protests, a town that exported an estimated 100, 000 tonnes of silver to Spain during the Spanish occupation which used to be the richest town in the whole of America and make coins for the rest of the world and now is one of the poorest and has its coins made for it, language school, and the el camino de la muerte or the death road.

El Camino de la muerte 

I am currently wearing a t-shirt that says on the front "Yo hice el camino de la muerte y sigo vivo" which means I did the death road and lived which is true. You ride from 4700m to 1200m in 4 hours which amounts to nearly 50km downhill. 

Normally it is clear and it is still dangerous enough but Dave and I had the pleasure of doing it in the snow and fog. We splashed out on the best equipment and saving money on brakes seemed a little silly and everything was grand except our goggles which were pathetic. Visibility was non existent as was the feeling in our hands. I reached for an extra pair of goggles and got rid of them as soon as possible. 

There were a couple of hairy moments of course but I always broke heavily on the blind corners and went a fast a possible when I could see a long way in front. A girl on our tour actually fell off but only her bike went over the edge. There have been 21 deaths on bike the whole time it has been open. Probably the scariest part was the bus drive through the mountains in a blizzard on the way back. Our bus had to drive on both roads at a 45 degree angle just to make up a small hill and they back kept sliding out toward the edge which was certain death. A day to remember and after facing such danger it really does feel great to be alive. I suppose this is the reason that extreme sports are so popular.

We elected not to go into the prison as we were not sure the gains outweighed the risk but found La Paz pretty crazy anyway with lots of drug victims and danger to be had just on the normal streets. As with any of these dangerous cities with bad reputations you avoid the worst spots at night, stick together, and only carry what you are prepared to lose. 

We left for Copacabana where music and passion have never been because it is not the one in the song and this was suppose to be 5 hours or so before we crossed into Peru. There was as there often is a problem. We had to cross a 500m stretch of water. This was not possible due to wind and a swell that there archaic equipment could not cope with. If someone asked you to imagine the most ridiculous vehicle and passenger crossing you could you would not even come close. The coaches, vans and cargo trucks had to drive on to rickety wooden barges with single outboard motors over a couple of wooden beams, which then turned around and bobbed precariously over to the other side. 4 hours past before this begun and when it did you had to join a queue of several hundred Bolivians and westerners and hope that you and your stuff made it to the other side safe and dry. This time both of these wishes came true but we heard that there are quite a few coaches a the bottom of the sea.