The Worlds Most Dangerous Road

Otherwise known as The North Yungas Road, or Corico Road, or the Death Road, its 64km of narrow gravel road snaking down from 4,650 meters to 1,200 meters cut into the side of steep lush mountains. There are a few points where the drop over the side of the road is a sheer drop, and this is what everyone takes their photos of, but otherwise its not as steep like that all the way.

The route starts on a big paved road that descends for about 15km high up in the mountains where it starts very cold and gets warmer and warmer through the descent. Most of the traffic on the Death Road gravel section is one way traffic these days and the majority of that are tourists on bikes tours, but it is still an open public road.

I took a tour with Gravity, they were the first to pioneer the road as a tourist attraction and have the best safety record, they also give you a free T Shirt. Apart from their use of BMX helmets instead of proper mountain bike helmets, the equipment was very good, and being run by people who were not South Americans it mean they actually cared about the quality of their tours and the people on it. The tour lasted a full day with regular stops for people to regroup and for the guide to explain the next section, plenty of snacks and drinks were provided and the tour ended in a nice slightly hippyish nature reserve full of  parrots and monkeys, here we had a very nice buffet lunch and showers. Most of the group survived intact, one guy seemed OK in the morning and on the gravel road for the first few sections but seemed to come down all of a sudden with some kind of fever. He had been in Africa before Bolivia and it was feared he may have a tropical disease. Another girl took a fall early on, on the gravel and was a little concussed for a bit and had cut up her arm and hand, so they spent the rest of the trip in the support van.
On return to La Paz, the guy was taken to a doctors as he didn't seem to be getting any better.

The scenery was wonderful, the mountains could be appreciated more on the way back and some areas on the paved road section back to La Paz reminded me of Scottish hills but with tufts of tall grasses instead of heather's  For me it was a really fun day and so nice to have some self powered adventure again, which apart from Machu Picchu had been missing since Colombia. It was also nice to see some greenery, as a lot of the Altiplano and lower areas of Peru and Bolivia are dry with yellow sparse grasses.

La Paz itself is far more modern than I imagined, I found plenty of Western style clothes shops as well as all the usual quaint cobbled tourist streets with every shop selling exactly the same things, a great tradition of South American school of economics. There's a bunch of nicely carved churches and the main avenue into town has a central pedestrian walkway with nice flower beds and statues. There's even a chain of Western style coffee shops called Alexander Coffee, where you can buy an overpriced latte that's almost good. It even has a newspaper rack so you can pretend to be an important city person having their coffee in the big city.

My room in La Paz

Notes:

A tour with Gravity cost $107 USD, its about a third more than other operators but from talking to other travelers who did similar tours, the food quality is better with Gravity, they have better instruction during the ride and they have the nicest ending point.