Near Death On The Worlds Worst Road - Bolivia Travel Story

Read any guide book on Bolivia and you will find gushing reports of a traditional local culture and your impending discovery of the El Dorado like ‘real South America’. Get in quick before it changes!. It was after just a few weeks in the country that this traditional culture came flying past me, my best mate, fellow bus passengers and through a neighbouring window. For in Bolivia serious road accidents are as much a part local life as panama hats and t-shirt inspiring socialist revolutions. The guide books are right. Bolivia is country with a great many draw cards for the average tourist. From the Amazon jungle to the vast salt flats, said traditional culture, the brilliant white of the Andes and an abundance of cheap cocaine.* Bolivia has enough to keep you on your toes. When you’re with a good mate in a country so appealing to the senses, and to the budget, it seems almost like nothing can go wrong. It might be this sort of free and easy attitude that one so easily finds on the road (and is often quickly lost at home), that lures many travellers towards one of the countries more dubious attractions. Perhaps it says a lot about a country that this particular drawcard is a piece of infrastructure so monumentally poor it’s been rightly dubbed the world’s most dangerous road. This danger was never an attraction for me or my hetro life partner (think a male friend of significant importance, being on mancation, a bromance). After a few months in South America we had become all too familiar with the daily dice of riding local buses at speed along routes on which mountain goats would struggle keeping a sure footing. For us the infamous ‘most dangerous’ road was more an obstacle in the backpacker quest to get to a destination by any means for as little as is possible (in this instance 16 hours on the bus for less than the price of the local daily tabloid back in Australia) than it was a goal in itself. The road in question winds down from the capital La Paz, through mountain passes and eventually into the Amazon basin. A popular activity is to mountain bike the worst of the road: A silly challenge posed by operators cashing in on some travellers burning need to tell people at home just how ‘crazy’ their trip was (just Google it or look on You Tube for examples). Our goal was past this section of road. Rurrenabaque is a town nestled at the foot of the mountains and is a popular gateway for budget travel into the jungle and wetlands. This was our destination and after over a month spent in the mountains over 10,000 feet finally hitting the oxygen rich jungle was a legal high enjoyed without the risk of ten years in a Bolivian prison (though this amount of jail time might give you the material for a best seller, or win you fame on ‘banged up abroad’). The finer details of our week in the jungle on a ‘tour’ costing $6.00 US dollars per day (food, transport and guide included) are probably better left for another story. The short version starts with an accidental mohawk haircut, disco clothing, snakes, sandflies, jaguars and an Israeli companion losing his mind in the jungle 30 hours from help. Our time in the jungle finished with a 24 hour bout of food poising so violent I can barely remember making my way back onto the bus to La Paz. It might have been an easier day if I hadn’t recovered so quickly once we got going. For days in the jungle and now following us back to the city was rain, and lots of it. This is not a great thing if you are on a dodgy bus humming along dirt mountain roads with the driver showing scant regard to corners or his passengers safety. If there is one rule for bus travel in South America it might be that the more religious paraphernalia driver has at the front of the bus the more worry this should inspire in the passenger. You might be not ready to meet your maker but the more obviuosly prepared the driver very well maybe. So it was that we were making into the mountains at speed. We were at around 4,000 feet (a safe estimate when you can’t see the ground beneath the road) when the bus shuddered, skidded towards the edge of the road, back the other way and tipped over. The impact sent passengers from one side of the bus crashing onto us and into the windows. One finely dressed Bolivian woman ended up in my lap after hitting the window next to me. The fuel tank had ruptured and we had diesel up to our knees, it was dark and it was carnage. Luckily nobody was killed. While there were a few serious injuries the end result of us losing control was far better than if we had ended up at the bottom of the mountain. After four hours we were pulled straight by a passing truck and with a jerry rigged tank providing the fuel we were on our way again. The driver put his foot down as ‘he was now behind schedule’. We got off before the 'worst' of the road ahead, sat in the dark with a bottle of local rum and waited for the morning to continue our jouney on a new bus. I’ll never forget it. While a new road has been built to bypass much traffic away from the worst stretch of the road, if your riding along the old trail spare a thought for those that were not as lucky as us and came of the cliffs with alarming regularity (250 or so per year). You will be riding past the site of literally hundreds of peoples graves.