World’s Most Dangerous Road

[Martin Hash]

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Some coincidences are beyond description – but I’ll try… My friend, Mohamed, who lives in Saudi Arabia, and whom I’ve known since my college days, still keeps in touch via email – mostly forwarded humor, etc. One random day I received a Google link of a car driving on the “World’s Most Dangerous Road,” a place I had never heard of before. (Here’s a link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXLxszv9eCM at 6:33.) It was frightening – hard to believe people would drive on that thing, but I wouldn’t have thought anymore about it except… I happened to be in Bolivia, where the road is, and I happened to be in La Paz, where the road is (Mohamed did not know either of these facts), AND it just so happens that my wife, Gwynne, had scheduled us to mountain-bike down that VERY SAME ROAD the next day!

The ride is what “white knuckles” are named for: narrow, steep, loose gravel, a 600 meter straight drop immediately on the left. Looking it up on Google, I found that on average of 290 people are killed each year going over the side – and there are 2 casualties a year on mountain-bikes! I fully expected to be number three… Well, maybe number four because it looked like my wife, Gwynne, was going to go over the side before me!

Coca plants covered the terraced mountainsides. Whatever U.S. sponsored drug enforcement in Bolivia might exist, it’s not happening on the most dangerous road, even though we had to pass through a drug checkpoint. It turns out that Bolivian coca farmers can legally transport up to 2 kilos of coca leaf over the road at a time – which explains all the traffic!

The total 82 kilometer trip took about five hours. We stopped frequently to crawl and peer over the edge to observe where some grizzly dictator had booted their hog-tied failed opponent into the abyss, or where a bus had taken dozens of people to a fiery death - the wreckage still visible. Gwynne & I were the last ones to arrive at the bottom of the hill – our brakes smoking hot. Other folks who started long after us flagrantly barreled past us at breakneck speeds - I must be getting old.