La Paz is, well, La Paz. It’s the highest-altitude capital city in the world. That being said, Bolivia is one of the poorest countries in south america, so La Paz isn’t exactly a shining, beautiful, extravagant place. Backpackers love Bolivia for two reasons:
- Its cheap
- It’s difficult to travel in, so places to visit are all the more exotic
We got to La Paz on a tourist bus that had to drive on a gravel road for 2 hours (because that’s what the roads are like in Bolivia) and through farms for another two hours (because a strike had closed down the aforementioned gravel road). We made it from our bus to our hotel safely, which was a slight surprise because approximately 10% of all taxi rides in la Paz end with the passengers being robbed (including tourist gringos, gringos who have lived there for 20 years, and locals!).
We spent a day planning out our Bolivian adventures, and then I went on a tour with Gravity to ride a mountain bike down The World’s Most Dangerous Road. It’s an all-day affair, leaving at 7:30 am and returning at 8pm. They call it the World’s Most Dangerous Road because:
- You spend most of the 40-mile dirt road trip with a 1000-foot (or greater) drop to the valley, that’s usually no more than 2 or 3 feet outside of the dirt road (which, coincidentally, is wide enough for two cars or buses to pass each other – but just barely, and not in every spot. Sometimes the drivers have to backup to find a good spot to cross paths).
- Typically, someone falls every 5-6 days, and there is usually a death on the road once every two to three weeks. There are 10 or more guiding companies that offer rides down it, and moat of them run every day.
It was actually a really fun ride, with a great short uphill section (like 2 miles, but starting at about 14,000 feet), awesome bikes and guides, and a few incredible views:
Check this one out (yes, that’s me in the photo! Taken in the afternoon on the way back up):
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| From La Paz – The Death Road |
The next day, we walked around La Paz, trying to see some of the sites, but we couldn’t find some of them and at others, random people kept telling me I wasn’t allowed to photograph.
Then, we hopped on a night bus (the last one of our trip, and the second-worst ride since we crossed the border from Ecuador to Peru) to Uyuni, where the next day we were going to begin a three-day tour of he salt flats and southwest Bolivia…
