The World and Elsewhere...: La Paz: The World´s Most Dangerous Road

After another short bus journey, we hit La Paz. Although not technically Bolivia´s capital (which is Sucre) it may as well be, being the largest city by far. As you approach the city you can´t really see it - you roll along the high Andean plains and then suddenly there´s a huge canyon in which the city is built; a very strange view to see. Some of the houses at the sides of the canyon are nearly built on a vertical, its madness.

One of Bolivia´s most famous tourist attractions is "The World´s Most Dangerous Road". Pretty self-explanatory really. Since Em has been here (a little longer than me) she´s seen in the news about a bus that fell off the side, killing all the occupants. Very sad really. At points, there is a 400 metre vertical drop off the side of it as it drops from 4800 metres to 1100 metres over 64kms. Naturally, we had to ride down it on a bike.

Me saluting at a million miles an hour.

I´ve done a bit of mountain biking before, but I´ve never gone so far downhill on such an expensive bike (worth $2,500). It was totally awesome. We all got suited and booted up in all the gear and just went "Wwweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" downhill for about 4 hours. Lots of fun. For me, Leon and Em, but Marie-T bottled it 3 seconds in and sat in the van, which was probably more scary. Didn´t look that dangerous to me, but then I was on a skinny bike, not in a truck trying to pass another truck coming the other way. So the journey back in a jeep was more scary - thankfully we were on the inside of the drop and had right of way. Still a little scary mind.