Around about 1989 I was the proud owner of a Specialized Hard Rock, my very first mountain bike. And my dad had a two-foot-high stack of cycling magazines for me to paw through to learn about the wonderful world of grown-up cycling. Mostly ¨Bicycle Guide¨, the best all-around magazine ever, until someone bought them up & ruined it. Anyway, there was a short article in BG about this epic mountain bike descent in the Andes, which dropped something crazy like 10,000´continuously. They said it was a dirt road, not singletrack. But it ran along big sheer cliffs, under waterfalls, without guard-rails. There was a little picture that I still remember to this day. Ever since then I´ve know that there are things to be done by bicycle that defy my domestic-based concepts of scale. Moving from Maryland to Oregon, where climbs and descents suddenly became miles long instead of minutes, broadened my experiences immensely. But I always knew there was this big descent in the Andes.
Well, now we did it! It´s gotten quite famous since 1989. La Paz has dozens of tour companies offering similar rides down it, some better-run than others. One company requires full-face helmets. No thank you. Another uses really cheap bikes. We choose to go with the most highly-regarded company (Gravity-Assisted Mountain Bikes) and paid $55 each for the trip. That included a nice Kona hard-tail with hydraulic disc brakes, helmets, gloves, face-mask, safety-vest, shuttle service, and food. They were quite professional and we had a blast, but the best thing about them was the place we finished. It´s a private property along the river at the bottom of the valley in the jungle. We got showers & all-you-can-eat pasta lunch there. But in the last few years the owners have turned the place into an animal sanctuary. They take in neglected or abused pets that simply don´t belong in apartments in La Paz and let them live out their days in the jungle. Spider monkeys, Squirrel monkeys, two other kinds of monkeys, macaws, parrots, boa constrictors, cute raccoon-like animals, turtles, geese, ducks, and an occelot so far. And they have cabins for us to stay in too! So we stayed a couple nights. We needed the thick soupy oxygen, for one thing. But we also thought playing with monkeys for a few days might be kinda fun, y´know?
My favorites were the three spider monkeys. They kinda liked me too. How nice! I usually ended up with a little monkey-piss on me when they climbed on me, but just a little. And the sight of macaws flying overhead was pretty special. An amazon yellowhead parrot (almost just like Dock,the one I spent my youth being scared of) flew through the dining hut, stole a piece of our butter without even landing, and perched on the nearby chair. I went & took the butter back, picked him up on my hand, & sorta tossed him back into the trees. I felt quite brave!
So we spent three days doing that, hanging out with the volunteers, checking out the nearby waterfalls, and breathing the thick air. There were bananas growing all over. It was a great relaxing interlude.
I remain blown away by the ride there. ¨The World´s Most Dangerous Road¨ isn´t as dangerous anymore, because they built another road and most of the traffic takes that one now. But you could easily find yourself flying off a 3,000´cliff if you don´t pay attention. Nothing like going around a downhill corner when out of the corner of your eye you see the grass part at the road´s edge and just beyond you see the valley´s bottom a few kilometers away, almost straight down. And it just went on and on and on! From 15,500´to 4,300´! Getting warmer all the way, and greener, and more wet. Sure, it was a basically beginner mountain-bike ride. But we loved it!
My sense of scale now has a new dimension.
Anyways, we´re striving to get out of La Paz today before our lungs get any more soot in them. We´ve got less than a month left, and kinda a long way to go. This had been a heck of a week though!
Thanks for reading, and next time we write we´ll be in Copa, Copacabana.
Hasta luego,
-Andy