Bolivia - World's Most Dangerous Mountain Bike Tour - 2006

Fluid does The Worlds most dangerous road down hill mountain bike tour.
Damo & Muz as part of their South American trip this last winter made a bee-line for the famous Bolivian tour.
'This ride is one of the worlds most famous down hills and when you get to South America there is such a huge buzz about it with so many 'you have to' recommendations. We started our travels of landlocked Bolivia in the city of La Paz, high in the South American Andes. After much deliberation and research we got the low down about which companies had the best bikes and safest track record, we decided on www.GravityBolivia.com as the company that would take us on the 5 hour down hill ride along the infamous road, a road that takes the lives of over 100 people a year.
On the morning of the ride at 6am we are hooked up with our instructors and bikes in La Paz.
We boarded our bus with the bikes strapped to the roof and head up to the mountain pass on the road between La Paz and Coroico. When we jumped off the bus we where standing at the dizzy height of 4700m/15,400 feet, at this height the air is really thin and the air temp of around -10 deg. We soon learnt if you over exerted yourself at this altitude you simply can’t get your breath back, so after donning our helmets and given our bikes we where taken through all the safety and bike handling drills. At this point the guides told us to make a sacrifice to the mountain gods to keep us safe?
The first section of our ride was 28 km's of tar road all down hill, we reached speeds of  70-80 km weaving around trucks, potholes, dogs other slower riders, through tunnels, drug check points and around long bends very similar to the Clyde Mountain here on the South Coast of NSW, only with snow and glaciers along the roadside. Then after a small break we got our first glimpse of the huge valley where the road steeply descends, your first thought is how anyone in their right mind could think it is humanly possible to build a road down that, it really takes your breath away. The group is silenced by what they see, I think every one had the same thought ‘this might be my last thing I ever do’.
We descended 3,600m / 11,800 feet over the next 4 hours with vertical drop offs on the edge of the road that averaged 400m/1200 feet with no guard rails while passing maniac truck and bus drivers along with dozens of mountain bikers all struggling to stay on this badly kept single lane gravel road.
We road under water falls around land slides and past crosses from people that hadn’t made the down hill. We lost so much altitude that by the end of the ride at Coroico it was a tropical 28 deg.
The whole thing was madness and so much fun at the same time, when we arrived at Corioco late that afternoon we where all saddle sore, totally exhausted, rattled to the core and covered with a combination of bull dust, mud and sweat. After the ride a feed a beer and a shower our only concern was that now we had to travel back up the same road to La Paz, only this time in the dark on a dodgy bus!
If your ever in this part of South America you gotta experience it.

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