Yungas road, also called the "death road" and considered the most dangerous road in the world!

Day 39 (222 km)

  Picked up the bikes in the parking lot and rode it back to the hotel to pick up a rucksack with some small items to take on our side trip to Corioco. To get to this place you had to take the Yungas road and this is the only road to get to the tropical lowlands of the north east of Bolivia. This road is considered the most dangerous road in the world and in the past has hundreds of fatalities, due to trucks and cars falling of the mountain edges which have shear drop offs of more as 1000 meters and the road is not even that wide that trucks can not pass each other. Lots of documentaries has been made in the past about this road!

     Few years with funding of Unesco, they made a second paved road on the other side of the mountain, what solved the amount of fatalities this road had each year. This new road we decided to take down to Corioco about an hundred km away and it took us almost 2 hours to get through traffic and asking directions in this insane city with congested traffic and soon after that we reached La Cumbre at 4700 meters and the rain start pouring and turned into hail. The fog was so thick that you could hardly see anything , especially the scenery.

        La Cumbre was the highest spot and just before Corioco it was only 1200 meters altitude, so everything was down from here fast with hundreds of winding curves. All the heavy trucks were doing only 15 km p/h due to the steep roads and 3 hours later, we reached Corioco in tropical weather and sunshine to get lunch in a German restaurant with a Dutch woman running the place!

   We dried all our clothes and 3pm took off for La Paz again and the intention was to take the old road back. But the weather conditions of the last few days, the road was so bad, that people told us not to do it and it was to late anyway to go back that way and reach before dark La Paz. So we took the same road back, but this time there was no rain or fog all the way to La Paz and rode through stunning scenery and saw the other side of the mountain clearly. So late around 7 pm we reached the parking lot and late had a good dinner in a Dutch bar restaurant and had bitter ballen and Swarma with pita bread and all the good ingredients and tap beer. For sure I will have a Dutch breakfast here tomorrow!