Known as the « world’s most dangerous road », its nickname says it all: Bolivia’s El Camino de la Muerte, or Death Road, is one of the world’s most perilous tourist activities, yet more and more curious people are venturing along it.
More than twenty cyclists have been killed on Bolivia’s so-called « Death Road », attempting to descend the 3,400-metre vertical drop from the snow-covered Andes to the rainforest. This danger is part of the reason for its appeal.
Of course, there’s beautiful scenery and waterfalls along the winding 60-kilometer strip of dirt and gravel that clings precariously to the mountainside. But it’s the occasional tragedy, when a cyclist takes a hairpin bend a little too wide, that has madeEl Camino de la Muerte the stuff of legend, making it one of Bolivia’s biggest tourist attractions.
Photo credit: Flickr – Marco Antonio
Since January 2014, three cyclists, including a guide, have perished on what is also known as the Yungas route. Yet bike traffic on the route gains around 5% every year, says a guide working for Bolivia’s largest bike tour operator. Arriving whole at the bottom of the trail « gives people the impression that they’ve somehow cheated death », he points out. « The media hype serves us very well. We use it.
In the Bolivian capital of La Paz, it’s not surprising to find some 30 specialized agencies, with names like Madness, Vertigo, Barracuda and Black Wid ow. Every day, they accompany hundreds of thrill-seekers, most of them foreigners, down the Death Road. Bolivians, some of whom have made the journey in buses along the route, avoid the visits.
The road was built in the 1930s to link the high-altitude city of La Paz with the rainy, humid and warm forest valley of the Yungas. The hard work was carried out by Paraguayan soldiers captured during the Chaco War, in which the two nations fought over a border region rumored (incorrectly) to contain vast oil reserves. The road was built with shovels and pickaxes, and the work was terrible. Many workers died during the construction of this road.
For decades, the road had its own rules. The most important was to drive on the left side. This allowed downhill motorists to see how close their wheels were to the precipice. With fog, rain and landslides, accidents killed between 200 and 300 people a year. The Inter-American Development Bank dubbed it the « world’s most dangerous road » when it recorded the death toll for a feasibility study on an alternative route in 1995.
A paved road between La Paz and the Yungas opened in 2007, taking virtually all the region’s road traffic and transforming the Death Road into a mountain bike trail, with a few macabre souvenirs, such as the Christian crosses that litter the route.
Photo credit: Plan Your Escape
An extraordinary discovery
During a typical descent ofEl Camino de la Muerte, your guide will not hesitate to show you some rusty bus chassis at the bottom of a canyon. At the edge of another precipice stands the « Martyrs of Democracy » plaque honouring five Bolivian opposition leaders who, in 1944, were pushed out by henchmen of the country’s military dictatorship. Further on, adventurers will pass a small bungalow that local guides explain was once inhabited by Klaus Barbie, a Nazi torturer, known as « the butcher of Lyon », who fled Germany after the Second World War and spent the early 1950s running a sawmill in the Yungas.
You’ll only come across a few pickups on the road. This radical drop in traffic has made the Death Road a little safer. Most of the 22 cyclists who have died in the last 17 years did so before the opening of the new Yungas road. But without the road traffic of yesteryear, mountain bikers often become careless.
Despite the danger, the scenery is breathtaking – Photo credit: Flickr – Matthew Straubmuller
What’s more, the fact that it’s virtually all downhill, requiring a minimum of pedaling, means that the route attracts tourists of all abilities. Some make beginner’s mistakes, such as braking hard with the front wheel, throwing them over their handlebars. What’s more, some careless local agencies (usually the cheapest) offer badly maintained bikes with completely dead brake pads.
If you’re feeling adventurous, you should also watch out for the other cyclists in your group, as some of them have just come off a drunken all-nighter and are still on the road. Speed is one of the main dangers. Fatal and not-so-fatal falls have also been caused by the inattention of a cyclist filming the scene or trying to adjust his or her front or handlebar-mounted camera.
Did you know about the Death Road?
Main photo credit: Wikimedia – Warren H