Cheap llama foetuses and getting frightened on the death road

Near La Paz is a road designated by the International American Development Bank as the most dangerous road in the world, every year buses and lorries plough off the crumbling edges down vertical cliffs. Bizarrely this has turned mountain biking down the road into one of Bolivia´s biggest tourist attractions. You start amongst the snow, cycle 64km dropping a massive 3500m, passing though cloud forest and end up in a tropical valley. The ride and views are spectacular. For most of the way the road is unmade and at times, where waterfalls crash onto and wear away the road, only as wide as a lorry. Although vieing with other traffic it is quite safe because you and your bike are thin and you are in control. But just to increase the interest level the rest of Bolivia drives on the right but at some point, its not obvious where it starts, you drive on the left on the death road. Marilyn came down the road in the truck instead of cycling but much to my disgust still got the tee shirt

At the end of the ride we stayed in a beautiful hotel with pool, suana and the most spectacular 180 views of the mountains and valleys. Our mistake was to come back to La Paz on public bus and up the death road. I found it truely frightening, you go round corners and come face to face with massive lorries bearing down on you. There is no chance of passing so one of you has to back up close to the edge. For most of the journey all I could see out of my window was the sheer drop into the valley. When you could see the edge it was crumbling away and seemed to be worse than when we came down because of a massive storm during the night. We had to endure this for two and a half hours before we got back onto asphelt. Although its fun doing scary things we didint enjoy this and I never, ever want to go back onto that bloody road

La Paz is a exciting city. The highest captital in the world , it fills a valley surrounded by snow topped mountains. The city is full of contrasts. It has modern offices and restaurants but the majority of the popoulation are indigenous peoples and they produce some amazing markets and street food. There is even a witches market where you can buy all sorts of dried animals including llama foetuses, hallucinatory plants, weird herbs, model gods and good luck charms

We had booked a direct bus from Peru to La Paz but when we got to the terminal at 10pm it had been cancelled. So our 13 hour journey turned into a 19 hour odyssey consisting of 4 clapped out busses, crossing a freezing pass without any heat for 5 hours, a ferry where the passengers had to go on a different boat from the bus because they tend to sink and a swerve off the road to miss a donkey. Tomorrow we are moving on to Sucre- we are flying!