Biking down the "Worlds Most Dangerous Road"

Hola Amigos!

Finanlly some pictures! Our Ipod is still giving us fits posting pics, but here are some pictures from our trip down the so-called "Worlds Most Dangerous Road." Why does it deserve that name? Because about 100 people on average die on it every year.

(Picture caption: A swig of local booze, then a "sip" for PachaMama, or Mother Earth, for Good luck. Hey, when in Rome...)

The good news for us, is that most die in buses and trucks, and not on bikes. Before you decide that we have gone loco, we are pretty sure we, statistically speaking took the safest way down.

The road starts in La Paz at 14,000 ft in the bitter cold, and ends 5 hrs later in the rain forest, in the Coca producing region of Boliva at 3000 ft, where we were stripping off layers. The road is the main throughway for the transport of Coca, coffee, and other Bolivian produce to the city. As you can imagine, we were not excited to hear our guide say, "Bikes and cars downhill have to stay on the cliff-side because it safe for climbing vehicles to be further away from the edge." (greaaat...) On the way down, we passed US DEA checkpoints for Cocaine-producing chemicals, herds of cows, llamas, and stray dogs. The ride was exhilarating and the scenery beautiful (note from Kristen, exhilerating is a common euphemism for really scary and it was hard to look at the scenery due to the extreme focus placed on NOT falling off the side of the mountain).(Picture not from our ride, but another day on the trail)

By the end of the ride, Kristen had overcome her fear of the side of the road and we were happy to celebrate our survival with a cold Paceña (the LaPaz beer). We spent the night at the bottom of the mountain in a small town called Coroico, where there was a GREAT hostel with a pool, hammocks, and anything else one could ever desire! We spent the next day hiking through the coca farms terraced on the hillside and napping and reading by the pool and in the hammocks....we think we like this travel thing OK:)

Interestingly, although Coca production is officially illegal in Bolivia, as the leaf contains the Cocaine alkaline, which is extracted mainly through the addition of lime, in some regions its cultivation is allowed. In almost all of the altiplano, which is the Andean region of Bolivia, Peru, etc., you can easily find HUGE bags of dried coca leaves at the markets. The leaves are constantly chewed by the locals, who swear by its ability to mitigate altidude sickness, ward off fatigue, and decrease appetite! The levels of cocaine absorbed into the blood from chewing the leaf are negligible in most cases, but an interesting fact of the day: Despite the anti-coca growing policy of the US government, which has devestated many Bolivian communities who subsist on coca cultivation alone, Coca cola uses the coca leaf to this day in Coca cola to enhance flavor. It buys its leaves from Colombia, not Bolivia!

So, there´s the science lesson for the day on the coca leaf!! We are now in Cuzco, Peru, and begin language school tomorrow. We are living with a Cuzceñian famaily here, who have been very good to us, although dinner table conversation remains a comedy show of body language and spanglish. Last night, the family introduced another exchange student to us who is from Holland (in spanish Ollandia). We proceeded to chat with him for 5 minutes about the weather in ORLANDO, FL (we did most of the chatting)!! It was not until this morning that we understood our mistake, when we heard him speak English with a Dutch accent, not an American one! Hope to add more pics and good stories soon....

Chao,

Kristen and Jon