La Paz and the Worlds Most DANGEROUS Road

So we leaped up the breath taking and mind numbing 3400m from Villa Tunari jungle to La Paz Andeas in one not so fowl bus ride only to find ourselves in the capital at 6am without a hotel room and out of breath. After several wrong turns and knee grasping huff and puff moments we finally found a place to lay our heads.

The rest of the day was spent exploring La Paz, its markets, churches and the unending stairs that hit us like a brick in a pillow fight! Since the plan was to get to Cusco asap for the Inca trail we didnt have much time for much other than fact finding, how to get from here to there and with who, that type of thing. Not very exciting I know but even the Mavrix need to do admin sometimes.

The next day we got picked up bright and early for one of Bolivia´s biggest tourist attractions, ¨The Worlds Most Dangerous Road¨ (BAM BAM BAAAM)! The road was dubbed The WMDR because of its rather dismal safety record, it used to lose a bus a month on average but now tourists scream down it by mountain bike for sh1ts and giggles! This 64km stretch of road takes you from the clouds at 4200m to the jungle at 0m on part tar and part dirt (ok mostly dirt) on a single lane road with a sheer sometimes 300m drop just a meter away waiting to gobble you up. Although this road is pretty safe they tell us there have still been 8 fatalities in 10 years and many a broken bone, but the Mavrix are no strangers to danger so after some weeks of debate and a promise to behave all the way down we climbed aboard our double suspension, hydrolic brake mountain bikes and set off down hill with another 14 Gringos on bikes much like the flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz.... fly my pretties!

The first thing that occurs to you is that pedalling doesnt do anything even in the hardest gear...your going too fast for it to matter, the second is that there are really big buses on this road and you have to figure out how to OVERTAKE them... trust me you dont want to mess with Bolivian bus drivers, they´re more hardcore than our taxi drivers and play worse music!

One thing about the sheer drops on the side is they give awesome views, one thing the guide warned us not to do was look at the pretty view as thats where most accidents happen and 1 life was taken....oooowww thats pretty, why am I flying? So the Mavrix tried to abstain from bird watching and view gawking until predesignated stops.

At the begining of this little adventure Vix was a little worried to say the least, but as the day went on she started leaving the M in her wake on the down hills, some would even swear they heard a ¨wheeee!¨as she flew past (Sorry Sandy), the M on the other hand was a lot more reserved (read chicken) on the downhill but was never last and always looked cool doing it....ok part of that last sentence was a lie, you figure out which part.

So after a day of spectacular views, dodging buses and pot holes we pedalled the final stretch into the jungle and another animal refuge (didnt we say we had enough of monkey poop?).

All in all it was a good experience but not nearly as extreme as all the brochures make it out to be and the Mavrix maybe didnt need the super duper luxury bike package, but then again we think the M´s package thanks him for the super suspension.