yungas
We spent a week visiting our friends, the Curi family, in La Paz. We enjoyed our time exploring the city and its variety of markets and street food as well as the many city parks and plazas. As usual, we also took time to preform general maintenance on the bicycles and gear. I was really looking forward to this next leg of the trip. After spending a couple of months in the Andes, it was time to work our way down in to a more diverse, tropical ecosystem. Our first section was to descend down the famous Death Road to Coroico. While we were in La Paz, we devised a plan on how we could ride the Death Road without cargo and get all our gear delivered to Coroico. Keep in mind, the Death Road is a huge tourist attraction, therefore most people rent bikes in La Paz and have a tour agency shuttle them to the top of the pass, follow them down the road in a van, pick them up at the bottom of the mountain, and drive them back to La Paz or into Coroico, all for a hefty fee of course. Erin and I on the other hand, bought some large grain sacks on the way to the bus station located at the edge of the city. Once at the bus station, we stripped our bikes of all cargo and stuffed everything into the grain sacks. We then threw our three large sacks of gear on top of a mini bus/van along with our bikes, loaded up in the already crowded van and headed to the mountain pass. The driver dropped us and our bikes off at the top of the pass and headed on into Coroico, via the new highway, where they would hold our gear until we arrived later that evening.
It was quite chilly at the top of the mountain; we began our descent at 4650m and eventually bottomed out at 1200m. We were still on the main highway as we worked our way down to the start of the Death Road. As we dropped in elevation the vegetation and terrain began to change. It was amazing - the stark differences in landscape from one side of the mountain to the other. We soon reached the entrance to the Death Road where we stopped to appreciate our environment, the excitement we were about to experience, and to take one last safety break before bombing down the mountain.
The descent was a spectacular feeling, especially without hauling pannier bags around. We started out in the clouds with low visibility, flying around narrow curves as we maintained our left, with shear drops of up to 800m on one side and steep mountain side on the other. The road was narrow, only 3.5m in some places, and rough, with waterfalls pouring onto and over the road. There was no outside traffic, only the vans that were accompanying the two small tourist groups that we passed on our way down. As we dropped in elevation, the clouds lifted to beautiful blue sky, exposing magnificent waterfalls and steep dense tropical forest. After descending approximately 3,450m in 50k we reached the small town of Yolosa where we began our 8k climb up a steep cobblestone road to Coroico. We made it just in time to pick up our gear before the station closed for the day.
We spent two nights in the town of Coroico appreciating our new environment. It was as if we had entered a new country. The food, the people, the terrain, the vegetation, wildlife, everything was different from the Andean climate and culture we had so recently left behind. The forest was full of green, leafy tropical plants and trees, birds and monkeys, water was pouring off from the mountainsides, fruit trees were growing everywhere, and the people seemed to live a more relaxed lifestyle. You didn't see many hammocks across the Alti Plano. Coroico was a nice andean valley town; small, touristy with not only people from outside the continent but it seemed to be a getaway for the Bolivian locals as well. It seemed as if the local economy survived on sales from the huge quantity of coca leaves we saw being loaded on trucks as well as a large variety of fruits and of course tourism.
The stretch from Coroico to Rurrenabaque is perhaps my favorite section so far on the trip, Erin was radiating joy as soon as we hit the clouds. The weather was warm or even hot at times, the traffic was light, and the scenery was beautiful. There were waterfalls around every corner, fast flowing rivers, exotic birds singing from the tropical forest, and fresh, cheap local fruit being sold everywhere. It was more difficult to find places to camp due to the steep terrain and the thick vegetation we encountered right off the roadside. We found our best luck around old bridges that were abandoned just off the main road. There were no shortage of swimming holes to take advantage of, which made it difficult to advance more than 50k a day. The road was a mix of rough pavement and even rougher dirt/gravel roads than anything we had experienced until then. It never ceases to amaze me the type of vehicles one encounters along these precarious routes. Huge loaded double trailer semis and crowded full sized double decker touring buses skillfully navigating their way around tight one lane corners with no more than a meter to spare from the exposed cliffs. We were gradually dropping in elevation, but we encountered no shortage of climbing until we reached the town Yucumo, Beni where the tarmac flattened out and turned to pavement. The last 100k or so was smooth sailing into the bustling river town of Rurrenabaque.
