7th August 2007 By now we had had enough of walking around La Paz sight seeing, so we decided to go on a down hill mountain bike ride through ¨the worlds most dangerous road¨, so called because of the annual deaths on the road and the sheer 600m drops and hairpin corners. It´s an 80 kms stretch that drops 3000 metres to Corricho. We booked our trip with Gravity Assisted Mountatin Biking, highly reccomended by all and extremely professional. We arrived at the start point at 4700 metres elevation, after a hair raising bus trip up the mountain, overtaking on blind corners and all of the other usual South American highway stunts. The air was thin and very, very, very cold. Our mad guide, Alastair, talked us through what we should and shouldn´t be doing on our bikes for the next 6 hours if we didn´t want to go base jumping off of the sheer drops in to the jungle below. The first section was a steep down hill but very easy as we were on a good tarmac road with excellent visability. The only danger at this stage was the huge trucks speeding past us, honking their horns for the sake of it, as every vehicle in Bolivia does. After a few breaks to check the bikes we had a 6kms uphill section, which we all found punishing as we were still at around 3700m. Sal lagged behind for this stretch feeling particularly unfit and cycled up with the guide Alistar for company. He had homed in on the fact that Sal was a little nervous and seemed to be trying to help with this. During their lesiurely cycle and chat up the hill Sal found out that this guy actually owned the company. He was originially a Kiwi and moved over and started up the business and now owned a hostel too, complete with brewery. What an inspiration. After going through a drugs check point, where we were neither searched, questioned or internally examined, we entered the rather more difficult rocky, gravel downhill stretch of the original death road. before we made this leg of the descent, we all sat down for chocolate and banannas whilst Alistair told us how easy it was to die if we didn´t take things seriously. This experience wasn´t made any easier as the visability was less than 10 metres due to the surrounding mist. As far as we could see a gravel narrow one car (if your lucky) muddy track ran off down the side of the mountain, into what appeared to be oblivion due to the mist. It seemed like a real effort for Glen to stay on the bike around the corners as he chased down Alastair at the front, who just seemed to be going faster and faster. Sal opted for the back of the group for the whole trip. Being quite happy to dawdle along at her own pace, with just the support vehicle behind her, a little too close at times! Taking Alastairs advice when hitting a particularly rocky section, Sal began to think nice thoughts (candy floss and fluffy bunnies) and could be heard humming Bob Marley. After a while the mist thinned out and the visability was much better, we both felt more confident and the speed increased, Glen felt like he was flat out by the end of the ride getting as much speed as he could out of the bike, but he still couldn´t catch Alistair! We continued down the road taking small sections at a time with a little briefing from Alistair before to tell us what we were up against. We passed through a waterfall, a few vehicle wrecks, shrines to the dead and crossed over 2 small rivers. The scenary changed dramatically from when we started as we drove down the road, from high cold desert mountains to humid green jungle. Eventually by 4:00pm we hit the end of the road. The relief and adrenaline that we all felt to be at the end of the road was amazing. We rolled our bikes into a animal sanctuary where we were presented with a pint of beer and our free t-shirt, followed by a shower and a plate of pasta. Glen immediately followed up his plate of pasta with a good old vom session in the toilets, which continued every two hours for the rest of the night. The altitude on the up hill section had made him ¨Hurraz eye of the needle ¨ ill again. After we were all refreshed we hoped on the bus for the drive up the same road we had just cycled down, this did appear to be madness. Having just survived the journey we were now going to attempt to drive up the "Worlds Most Dangerous Road" in a bus in the failing light. Somehow it didn´t seem to matter now. Sal stocked up on beers at a local pit stop to numb any aniexty for the trip. Glen sat next to her looking green from alititude sickness. We ascended the road in the mist listening to Alistairs music collection, the sounds of Bush, Pulp, Metallica and such like, as we passed large trucks and looked down to the deep jungle floor below. What a surreal experience, bloody amazing!