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By Root 983 0

If I didn’t know any better, I’d think some 70s hippie collective had taken an ill-fated road trip out here to the Bolivian cordillera. But I recognized it as one of the micro buses, the kind that rushed haphazard through the city of Cochabamba, tiny indigenous women crammed against their dusty windows. They lurched around corners in a blur of color, pedestrians leaping from their path, occupants swaying like the bobble-head Homer Simpsons and Catholic crosses strung from the rear-view mirrors. This micro had lurched too far. It looked like a toy, a little plastic truck thrown carelessly aside by a bored toddler. But another squint revealed rusted edges and missing doors, missing windows, the glass blown out and scattered among the rocks. These rocks, boulders I should say, were nearly the size of the bus itself, stark and bare in the dry of the Andes. Lying among them, the bus looked like a colorful fossil.

A sharp cliff and a crushed vehicle are not the sort of things one wants to see at the beginning of a mountain-biking trip. They are especially not the sort of things one wants to see before biking down this particular mountain. The road doesn’t seem all that dangerous, its medley of names sweet and inviting: North Yungas Road, Grove’s Road, Coroico Road, Camino de las Yungas. These are the sorts of names which conjure up images of meandering paths into chirping tropical woodlands. You feel like you could saunter along these trails with binoculars in hand and a Nutri-Grain in your pocket, stopping occasionally to snap photos for your I’ve been to the Andes! slideshow. You are deceived. The truth is that this is a boulder-strewn chute plummeting 11,800 feet in half a day’s bike ride. The lucky ones start in the bone-chilling cold of the Andes, shivering through their ten sweaters and five pairs of mis-matched socks. Their fear is magnified by the adjacent precipice, which, unlike their fellow travelers, stays by their side the whole way down. For several hours they descend at a near-vertical angle, passing bus memorials such as this, imagining their parents’ faces when the consulate calls to inform them that their child hurtled over the edge of one of the highest mountain ranges in the world, until they find themselves at the bottom, where they swelter in their shorts in the middle of the rainforest, thanking God to be alive.

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!),