Then there are the unlucky ones. Hundreds of people die on this road. People die when a pebble sends them sliding off a vertical cliff on the left, or smashing into a solid rock wall on the right. People die when slick water dislodges their bike wheels and sends them skipping off into the mist. People die because a dense and blinding fog unexpectedly descends upon them—or because, suddenly confronted by a mass of sharp rocks, they are audacious enough to hit the brakes (which we all know, of course, reduces wheel traction). People die taking photos, stopping to reach into their backpacks for a Cliff bar, or taking their eyes off the road to glance at the passing scenery. They meet their ends by looking over the edge after a friend has fallen, perhaps down one of the road’s 1500-foot cliffs (the antenna of the Empire State Building doesn’t reach that high). Mostly, people die in car crashes. They’ll smash into buses careening around blind corners and plummet off the edge in a screaming heap of limbs and metal. Once, a single crash sent a hundred people flying off into the abyss. That’s right: a hundred.
All this excitement has inspired many other names for the road. Most include the word “death.” If you’re an English speaker, you might call this the Highway of Death; if you’re a Spanish speaker, perhaps, El Camino de la Muerte. Or you can stick with the classic: Death Road. One of its most famous names comes from the Inter-American Development Bank. Back in 1995, having been informed of the road’s legendary perils, some sub-sub-committee of statisticians thought it would be useful to find out how many poor saps met their end on this sad mountain pass. Having discovered a new record (congratulations!), they swiftly christened it The World’s Most Dangerous Road. The name stuck. And not only did it stick, but it encouraged a whole host of macho thrill-seekers to come bike down it. Your basic granola-crunching, twenty-something, adventure-seekers unaware of their own mortality. Dopes. Like me.
So back to the crushed bus. Back to me, standing near the first of many cliffs, clutching the handles of my mountain bike and peering over the edge in an extraordinarily inadequate pretense of detached interest and composure. I had, entirely of my own free will, taken time off of my unpaid job and spent the Bolivian equivalent of two months’ salary to book this trip with a group called Gravity Assisted Mountain Biking. And, knowing full well that gravity wouldn’t assist me as much as drag me forcibly down steep mountains, I woke up at 6:30 A.M. to sign my life away on liability forms (“I will not sue Gravity Assisted Mountain Biking in the likely event that I die”). And I arrived. Here, where I would catapult myself down a wobbling path of dust and ruin on a spindly scrap of shaking metal. Here to babble to myself in terror, passing over razor sharp rocks and under pelting waterfalls, on a two-way road no wider than a hatchback. And I’d be 5,000 miles away from my doctor, hoping to make it from the continent’s highest peaks to its sweltering jungle on a road named after death.
Yes, it was a fantastic idea.
Like all regrettable undertakings, this one was conceived impulsively in a bar.
The place was called Casa Blanca, and it was one of those hole-in-the-walls that was frequented by anyone with a semblance of a social life. We all had our own reasons for discovering it, but I’ll tell you why we all came back: of all the cafés and eateries in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba (a city known for its good eating) it had—by far—the best pizza.
The four-cheese was Dave’s favorite. (I have to agree). Dave, or Davíd, as his Latin name is pronounced, became a good friend of mine while I was working in Bolivia. Reserved yet easy-going, lanky yet muscular, and a fantastically awkward dancer, Dave was a 6 foot 4 inch eyesore from Colorado who worked with a local organization giving loans to small Bolivian businesses. Though quiet, Dave led a spontaneous life. From bumming around as a surfer in Costa Rica (“All I could afford to eat were rice and beans!”) to bartending in Alaska (“Have I seen bar fights? You’re kidding, right?”) to ranching in Colorado (“Ranching is really just building fences and watching cows…”), Dave had seen much in his twenty-five years. The two of us liked to make lists of the crazy adventures we wanted to thrill our lives, trying to avoid ones more likely to end them altogether. (It’s harder than it seems.) This particular evening we were talking about my upcoming travels.
“You should take a few days in La Paz,” Dave said, biting into a particularly thick slice. “Hmmm,” he said through the pizza, “you know what you should do: Death Road.”
As if this is something one does. Oh, wait. He’s serious.
“It’s one of the best things I’ve done. Hands down, you should do it.”
I eyed Dave, who was balancing his slice, the cheese draping elegantly from the sides. I couldn’t help but indulge him: “What, do you hike it or something?”
“No. No, no, no. Mountain biking.”
“Dave, I’m not a mountain biker.” Although, I thought with a flash of confidence, I do bike around campus.
“It’s all downhill,” he said matter-of-factly.
“It’s not hard? Besides, I only have one day.”
“It only takes one day.”
Hmmm. Death Road. What’s with these tourist attractions and their dramatic names?
“Go with Gravity Assisted Mountain Biking. They’re the best.”
I get easily inspired by adventurous people. Unfortunately, there’s a mercilessly thin line between the thrill-loving soul with a sparkle in his eye and the hairy guy in the trailer park who’s building a paraglider out of cardboard. My mother, bless her, has always attempted to dissuade me from emulating foolish people. “If everybody were jumping off the Mill Valley overpass, would you do that too?” Ok, Mom, let’s ponder this image: I’m standing at that overpass, a bulky slab of highway concrete connecting my picturesque hometown with another California suburb, and looking over the Western wetlands of San Francisco Bay with one of my best friends. Let’s say she hops over the side, vanishing faster than I do when your friends ask if I’m applying to grad school, and I’m left gazing over the edge in a full-blown panic attack. If, minutes later, she appears next to me, smelling like a sea lion, strands of slimy brown kelp decorating her shoulders like oversized necklaces, and she says something along the lines of “Dude. That was awesome. You’ve got to try it!”
Guess what? I would.
“Hi Mom.”
“Hi honey! We’re so glad you called—we’ve been thinking all about you. Sending positive vibes your way,” she cooed from the other end of the scratchy connection. Scrunched into a tiny telephone booth at an international call center on calle Santa Cruz, I didn’t forget for a moment that we were speaking from opposite edges of the earth.
“We sent you a card! Did you get it?” came an enthusiastic query.
“Um, no.” It took me a second to get used to thinking in English again, “When’d you send it?”
“Must’ve been three weeks ago.”
I pictured the abandoned army bunker the city calls a post office. I thought about the two employees working there: one who sat at the counter stacking envelopes into elaborate structures while avoiding eye contact with anyone resembling a customer, the other marching in and out of the solo empleados door as if the back room would disappear if left unattended for two minutes. I imagined the mail of a million city residents filling that room with giant paper mountains that the staff would swim in on slow days. “Yeah, Mom, I’d give the post office another couple weeks.”
There was a long pause. I struggled between a million stories, tried to grasp something that she could picture: toothless street vendors selling buckets of oranges, mountains of flowers and home-baked cookies at the plaza festivals, boys kicking old soccer balls in abandoned basketball courts at the foot of mountains. I twisted the ivory phone cord around my finger in contemplative silence, listening to the static on the line.
“Are you traveling again?” she asked.
“Yeah, I am. I’m meeting up with Carolyn at Lake Titicaca. We’re going to see some ruins.” God, I sound like a tourist.
“That’s wonderf
ul!” she sounded positively delighted, “How are you getting up there?”
“Um, I’m going to bus into La Paz.” Hmm, hope there aren’t blockades. Or riots.
“Are you going to explore the city?”
“No. Actually…” I shouldn’t tell her.
“Actually?”
Don’t tell her.
“I’m going mountain biking.”
Idiot.
“Mountain biking? Really? You’re not much of a mountain biker.”
“Yeah. Well, this is a guided trail.”
“Oh, what’s the trail?”
“Um, it’s just a trail. It goes to this little town…Coroico,” I muffled.
“What was that sweetie? Wait, let me get my pen…”
“Actually, Mom, don’t worry about it.”
“No, I want to know.”
“It’s O.K. I’ve actually got to go. I’ll talk to you later …”
Click. Idiot!
At the trail-head, our bikes were lined carefully on their sides in the dirt, each rider positioned at a pair of wheels. In the silence, we fidgeted nervously with our black racing gloves. One of our guides, a peppy English-speaking Canadian with red-flamed bike shorts and blonde hair wedged back as if in a wind tunnel, paced ominously before us. It was time for our pep-talk.
“There’s a reason we’ve stopped here,” he said, pausing in his paces, “and it’s because this is the last chance you have to turn back.” He took his shades off to illustrate the ceremonious profundity of the occasion. “There is no shame in getting back on that bus.”
I glanced at the others: they gave him a tense but attentive silence.
“In that case, I want each of you to listen to every word I say. Your lives depend upon it.
You’ll see other tours where people bike along untroubled by the constant threat of death and danger. Groups where people make stupid mistakes because they don’t understand the magnitude of their peril. We don’t do that. I’m serious,” he took on a genuinely grave face, “this is serious, what we do.”
Fortified by our rapt expressions, he continued, “There are rules. First rule: always bike on the cliff side.”
The group burst out in murmurs: What?!? On the cliff side??
“If you want, you can bike close to the rock-wall, but when a bus comes screaming around the corner you have less than a second to react. You’re going to be squashed like a little bug. Either that or you skid out of the way and break every bone in your body on the rock face. We had a guy break both wrists, several ribs, a collarbone and lose all his front teeth that way. Had a gorgeous scar across his face,” he drew his finger above his jaw-line, “skin ripped clean off. If you want several seconds to see the bus and react, bike on the cliff side.”
Duly noted.
“Second rule: always get off on the right side of your bike. We each go at our own pace, so to let the people in the back keep up, those in the front will be stopping from time to time. Couple years ago, there was a French woman, real nice lady, got off on the left side of her bike. Most right-handed people tend to do that. How many of you are right-handed?” He paused to survey the group. Every single person raised their hand. “O.K., listen up then. This woman gets off her bike on the left side. Now, what’s on the left side? That’s right: the cliff. So her friend takes out a camera, tells her to take a step back, and—fft! She’s gone. Blank picture.”
I sat riveted. Bike on the cliff side. Get off on the right side. Bike on the cliff side, get off on the—
“Third rule: you lose traction, especially on curves, last thing you wanna do is brake. That causes you to skid, and you’ll skid off the cliff. So whatever you do, DON’T BRAKE ON TURNS. Ride out the bumps. Keep your gears low to angle yourself and keep your inside knee high—that’s very important. Stay to the outside of the hairpins, on the left of the track since cars are coming on the right. Go straight through water, always look forward, don’t look down. Ignore what your body tells you. You have to override those signals if you don’t want to end up off the cliff. You have to listen to every single one of these rules, because you can’t trust yourself. You trust the rules. If you don’t, you’re fucked.
Any questions?”
We stared at him dumbfounded.
“Great!” he grinned fiendishly, “Let’s get going then.”
O.K.. Totally doable, right? I peered down into the shifting mist, catching glances of the sharp ridge that marked the cliff-side. I just needed to bike there, along the gravelly brink, and make sure not to brake, especially if I skid…towards the ravine where they would never find my broken body and I would die among thousands of rotting corpses! No, alright, calm down. Just remember the rules. Bike on the cliff side. Don’t brake on turns. What was the second rule again?
“You’re over-thinking it, Bergmann,” said one of the other bikers, a tanned Aussie in his mid-thirties sporting a dime-shaped goatee.
Over-thinking! I wanted to shout at him, I’m supposed to be following the rules! I gave him a look of indignation, which may or may not have disintegrated into a petrified plea for help.
“You’ll be fine,” he said, the last word pronounced foyin.
I nodded at him, still unconvinced, and he joined the end of the line of bikers. Those in front of me had already taken off, their tiny figures bouncing over the rocks, each one looking like a discombobulated Raggedy-Ann on ineffective seizure medication. Pebbles flew from their tires. When they came to the first bend, they skidded around the corner and plunged out of sight. When it was my turn, I took a deep breath and stepped on the pedal. I lurched forward, and I felt like Icarus must have felt when he realized the wax was melting from his wings.
My first instinct was to go as slow as humanly possible. I clutched onto the brakes as if I could fuse them to my hands, which didn’t slow me down as much as create a lot of turbulence. To say that I was biking would be inaccurate. Bumpy would really be an understatement. Picture a chubby, mischievous six-year-old aggressively shaking a cola bottle to make it explode with foam. I was the cola bottle.
Then there was the first corner. I realized right away that the guide was right: I couldn’t trust my own body. As the corner approached, my gut told me to brake. My rational brain stepped aside a second, took a good look at my gut and said, Look, pal, we can’t brake on this corner, because we’ll lose traction. At which point my gut looked from the brakes to the cliff, then back at my brain, and erupted in a laugh of incredulous betrayal. This complicated things. As we (my brain and gut and everything else attached to them) approached the first curve, I started to chant aloud, so that all my organs were clear about what we needed to do:
“Don’t brake, don’t brake, don’t brake…”
My fingers released their Tonga death grip and my tires flattened into the dirt, the jolts replaced by quick (but relatively smooth) undulations. Immediately I picked up speed, and as I began to fly towards the corner, my chant rose in pitch:
“Don’t brake! Don’t brake! Don’t brake!”
In a moment of curious insanity I felt the urge to close my eyes. I battled this unexpected compulsion by willing myself towards an invisible point on the other side of the turn, which I approached like a shrieking banshee:
“DON’TBRAKEDON’TBRAKEDON’TBRAKEDON’TBRAKE!”
And I didn’t.
A middle-aged Bolivian man was driving up to La Paz on El Camino de las Yungas, minutes from the end of a long journey. He’d passed dozens of cars and bikers without scratching a smidge of paint off his car, quite an accomplishment. He daydreamed of a cold beer and wondered if the watchmen at the drug check-points were on strike today. He approached the last turn, and that’s when he heard it: a crazed scream in some unidentifiable language. Before he could wonder at its cause, a tall blonde woman in racing gear hurtled around the corner in a jumble of screeching metal and exclamations. She flew past his car, skirting the edge of the cliff, her face a mess of emotional fireworks. As he craned around to gaze at her shr
inking figure, he shook his head in weary puzzlement. It’s been a long day.
We stopped at a crescent-shaped lip of gravel, waiting for Cesar, the last of the guides, to bring up the end of the line. I rested my right foot on the gloriously solid ground, and peeled my reluctant fingers from their desperate handlebar clench. My eyes wandered off the jutted edge, and a wave of beauty pummeled my unprepared eyes. We stood at the edge of a ring of mountains, circling the valley like giant green countesses sitting for tea. They were blanketed with lush forests of a dozen green hues, lined with ridges sculpted into deep gullies. I peered up at the crown of my mountain, where rocks the color of rain-clouds drizzled my eyes with mist, and I saw that from the billowing mists rose a spectacular peak, a pinnacle of bare rock piercing the cloudless sky. When I lowered my eyes, I was met by the cavernous expanse of open air which sat eerily before us, curved in the belly of the circlet of mountains. It was a crystal ball of cloudless nothing, world-sized and distant. We peered into its center, mere dots along the mountain’s cracked roots of rock, like ants standing at the shoelaces of a giant. Aware of my swift breathing, of my timidly positioned feet, of every standing hair on my arms, which flexed as I grasped my bike handles again, I took one last look at the towering mountains and then took off down the road.
The Best Travel Writing 2011 Page 27