A little outside of La Paz is the North Yungas road, otherwise known as Death Road. It is a road in the mountains leading from La Paz to the town of Coroico and is famous for being extremely dangerous, being christened in 1995 as the world’s most dangerous road. At its peak the road had around 250 accidents a year. The road is very narrow and most of it is around 3.2m wide (so you can imagine two trucks from opposite directions trying to pass!) Some of you might know about it from my favourite Top Gear episode where the boys travelled the road in Jeeps and Jeremy’s Range Rover got into trouble and nearly fell off the cliff!!
People claim that most of the accidents were due to Bolivian drivers being too tired/drunk/crazy but nevertheless a new route was made (a safer one obviously) so nowadays really large trucks go down that route. And the old route is free for smaller cars and tourists cycling down which is what we decided to do. It was fun and very safe we had a guide in front of us the whole time but it was definitely an experience 🙂
