Hi I´m alive! I survived biking on the Death Road to Coroico! It was really cool really fun, highly recommend it if you happen to be in La Paz! Ok, I have to share all the details. First we started in this place called Las Cumbres at 4750m, beautiful landscape, put on gears, learned to use my bike (mainly the brakes) and had a lil´sip of this very sweet local alcohol as a blessing to Pachamama (what they call Mother Earth here). My group had about 12 ppl and we had two guides and a bus following the bikers. I was the slowest I believe because of my weight and my skill, so one of the guide spent the first hour biking on my side to make sure I´m ok! Actually the best part of the trip was actually the biking on the paved road which wasn´t the death road itself. I felt like I was a motorcyclist zooming downhill amidst barren hills in thin air. Then about two hours later, the Death Road biking part started and we were given new instructions. Basically we were told to bike on the left side always (which is the side of the cliff because that´s the side of downhill traffic) and we were told ALWAYS to get off our bikes on the right side, because if we get off on the left side, and a car comes by next to us, we will easily slip off the cliff, and... die (which has happened before to some girl in another tour group). Also, guides will whistle whenever there´s traffic coming behind us (downhill) or coming uphill (even tho we´re on the left side) so we´ll have to stop our bikes and wait until the cars have passed, because the roads sometimes can get very narrow where there will not be enuf space for traffic plus bike, it is that narrow. So anyway I was nervous, but actually the biking bit wasn´t really that scary cuz´ the whole time you´re focused on the road itself (you never wanna look at the scenery because you´ll then become a part of it!) and kept a healthy distance with the person in front of you. I was always the last in the pack because I was just so slow.. hehe. I figured that under normal circumstance, you really won´t slid off the edge, just like when driving on a bridge, you are not just suddenly going to fly off the bridge. So anyway, the ride was bumpy and tiring on my thumb cuz´ I had to keep the brakes slightly on most of the time because it´s downhill. The whole biking trip took about 4 hours, I had to stop in the last 30 minutes because I was getting too tired from the bumps so I decided to hop onto the bus to rest.

Coroico is a lil´ boony town, hot and low in altitude so I was able to catch a glimpse of summer weather. The scariest part of the trip was infact the bus ride home (4 hours at night). I thought I´ve seen narrow roads in China, but this one really has earned its name. We would see debris of fallen trucks from looking over certain parts of the road, apparently we were told that 4 days ago a truck went over and 2 weeks ago another one did. There were several moments where I thought the truck coming towards us will roll off! Normally, uphill traffic (which we were on the way back) has right of way and is on the inside of the road, which is much safer, however, there were numerous times where these huge Volvo trucks carrying I-don´t-know-what would force us to take the outside and that was a bit scary, cuz´ i guess they dun wanna risk falling over.. Nonetheless, our driver has had 31 years of experience on this road so that kept our confidence level up.

So that was my interesting one-day fun trip. Went to a bar with the groupie afterwards that served normal American cocktails like Red Bull and Vodka, which cost HKD38 dollars, more than probably alot of what many travelers´ are paying for their hostals here. Then we went to an oxygen bar where we had 10 minute of oxygen intake each, which I didn´t feel anything from at all.

Today is rest day, laundry day and travel arranging day. Hope to leave La Paz in a day or two to see the Salar. Bye now.

Photo: Las Cumbres at 9am