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Photo Album: Death Road Mountain Biking
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If you needed to read another post of this trip, please go to the left side to select from the list. Expanding each month, opens up the posts within that month.
If you needed to read another post of this trip, please go to the left side to select from the list. Expanding each month, opens up the posts within that month.
A few of us, the daring ones, were picked up by Gravity Mountain Biking, to do some, you guessed it ! mountain biking business – dashing down the World’s most dangerous rd, the North Yungas Rd, also known as the Death Road, connecting Coroico, just to the east of La Paz.
Here is Wikipedia’s description.
Worry-beads we were, as we went along on the bus.
After reaching a mountain pass, under the nose of Mt Illamani, we were kitted up with all the safety gears; a helmet, a thick jacket and pants etc, ready to hit the dirt, so to speak.
Thrilling, indeed it was, especially to me, who had not touched a bike in anger for nearly 30 years, never mind a mountain bike, going downhill on a very winding road fast, and on the Worlds Most Dangerous Rd., let’s get out of here !
We started from 4620m elevation, it was bitumen down hill for the first 20 Km, on a two lane highway with busy road traffics, descending to 3386m elevation, in just an hour, a good practice run for a novice like me....
Now it would get a little serious after that.
We regrouped, paid for our Death Road entrance fees. Then we were driven for about 11 Km to the original Death Road ( Yungas Rd ) entrance, and the real adventure began.
For the next 3 hours, we rode 30 Km, descending from 3150m to 1234m along the scenic but dangerous Death Road, making a number of stops, for photos and briefings of the next section ahead, what to lookout for etc.
They are waterfalls, wet spots and dangerous bends to care about, not to mention the ever present danger of going too fast on the rocky dirt, braking the wrong brake too abruptly, catapulting over the cliff etc.
And we began to strip down, as the temperature rose, and soon, it began to resemble an Amazon forest.
But I did it, slower than the young and brave, but it was done!
Soon we were overlooking the Coca Valley, where Coca Cola probably still have a few contract plantations for their ingredients. Coca leaves are from an indigenous plant, which is legal to use locally as a light stimulant. However, it is illegal to transport across international borders, Coca leaves are the basic ingredient for Cocaine, so it’s not a great surprise.
And the video....
And this is the elevation and distance profile of the entire 60 Km of mountain biking down the Death Rd.
After a well earned cold beer at Coroico, and the obligatory end-of-run photos, it was then, a short drive to the local animal sanctuary for a sumptuous buffet lunch and monkey watching.
It is not the animals there that are in the cage, we are. And the birds, the monkeys are there, congregating for their daily human-watching fixes.....
In the meanwhile, some of us chose to ZIP between mountains, to keep the monkey’s happy !!!
It was a long drive home via the new road, not driving on the Death Road in the dark.
And the shoulders and the back-side was aching for a few days, wonder why!
All of this, added another little blip to the footprint.
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