The South America Chronicles - Siete

It´s been over a week since my last update and you may be wondering if I biked off the side of the World´s Most Dangerous Road. Well, I can (obviously) report that I am safe and sound and there are many highs and lows to report from the last week or so.

At the moment, it is a definite low, as we are stuck in Rurrenabaque in the Bolivian Amazon. There is this thick haze caused by a combination of the heat and farmers burning off fields and flights haven´t being going in and out of here for four days now. We were booked for a flight this morning, but there are no flights today and there might not be for another week! The alternative is to take a harrowing 18 bus ride back to La Paz, something I want to avoid like the plague. So at the moment we are sitting tight, hoping that a big storm or wind will come in and clear the sky enough for us to take to the air. But how did we get here....

Where I left off last time we were about to do the bike ride, and that was most definitely a high. We ended up going with the original biking company which was set up by a New Zealander nine years ago (Gravity Assist). They are a bit more expensive than most, but they seemed well organised - something you place some value on when you are going to be on two-wheels just a few centimetres from 1000m drops. You start off the day by getting a bus up to 4700m where we try out the bikes and get the first of many safety briefings. Our guides were a South African girl and a local from La Paz who is supposed to be one of the better mountain-bikers in Bolivia. The first 18km or so are easy enough, all downhill on a paved road. But even here we came across an accident between two buses that had happened earlier in the day and where a bus had rolled down the slope - and we hadn´t even made it to the ´Danegrous Road´yet! After this though came the toughest part of the day, a 400m climb. Normally I wouldn´t find this too difficult, but when you are at over 3000m it is another thing altogether. Not wanting to do it half-arsed, I pushed myself as hard as I could to stick to our Bolivian guide. It was absolutely knackering and my breathing was reduced to ever-so-short gasps. I managed to stick to him most of the way, but at the end I was a wheezing mess and had given my lungs a clean out they took the rest of the day to recover from.

But now we had arrived at the reason for the ride - the World´s Most Dangerous Road. It is all dirt and stones and the sheerness of vertical drops and the thinness of it makes it difficult to believe that someone had the audacity to call this a ´road´. But the bike itself is something else. It takes a little while to get the hang of it, but pretty soon I was tearing down trying to keep up with the guide ahead and trying little jumps (including a spectacular entrance into a river near the end of the day that left me soaking wet). The views are stunning as well, and you had to be careful that you weren´t staring off into the distance while going head long off the side of the road, or be mesmorised by the drop beneath you. It was certainly adrelenin-spiking stuff and a lot of fun. I´m still a roadie though - the bikes were still big, bulkie and slow - but if I could ride down that road every day I could be converted.

For the next two days we stayed down at the bottom of the bike ride (rather than return to La Paz) in the small town of Coroico - a full 3000m below where we started the ride earlier that morning. Coroico´s climate is sub-tropical (a big change from the altitude of La Paz) and is surrounded by groves of orange trees, banana palms and coffee plantations. We spent two nights at what must be our favourite place so far this holiday - Sol y Luna. It sat a 15 minute walk above Coroico and is set amidst its own little sub-tropical garden. We stayed in the small hut ´Jatata´, where our ´room´sat upstairs and had no door but just a zipped up curtain. The trees and plants surrounded us and no other guests or huts were visible. In the morning we could just open up that curtain and take in our spectacular view from our bed, listening to the calls of the birds around us. At night, we could sit in our hammock watching the sun set and the chorus of insects take over and the fireflies come out.

It was with much regret that we had to leave, and if we were to do it all over again we would have stayed there for a week. But we had booked on the jungle boat cruise to Rurrenbaque and were picked up in the morning to be driven the 6 hours to Guanay, where the boat cruise started from. And if we had biked the World´s Most Dangerous Road earlier, this must be the second most dangerous - and the most bumpiest. Travelling in a 1984 Toyota 4WD it wasn´t much fun and already we were reminiscing about our little hut at Sol y Luna. Arriving at Guanay we found out that our boat cruise to Rurrenabaque was now 13 people, which turned out to be far too many, and that the normal guide also wasn´t going. The next two days turned out to be a bit of a regret for us. The boat ride itself was great and the scenery along the river was pretty amazing. But on the second day we went for a jungle trek that was anything but fun. The first hour or so was interesting enough, though the lack of wildlife was evident (except for the insects - who seem to be the kings of the jungle) and it was damn hot. But the next 3 hours was spent walking along a muddy creek - apparently to see more wildlife, though the only thing we saw of note was a boar. It was hard work and not very enjoyable, wading through thick mud and having to swat away numerous insects. This jungle walk was Anna´s ´Cotopaxi´and I don´t think she´ll be making plans to return to the Amazon jungle anytime soon. By the end of it, we had only spotted one monkey and one boar and were all sporting enough insect bites to reignite a smallpox scare (and these are no ordinary bites and more resemble stab wounds from an ice pick). And then on our final night, while camping on the river bed, a big storm came through, turning over some of the clumsily put together tents (fortunately ours stayed together) and making a mess of the campsite. And then the icing on the cake was finding out that my favourite icebreaker top had disappeared overnight (probably blown away). We were definitely regretting this route to Rurrenbaque and if we were reminiscing earlier, we were now craving for our Sol y Luna paradise. But we did pick up a new friend on our cruise - our Scottish spanish-interpreter Rogan - and the three of us have spent the last week together travelling around.

Arriving in Rurrenabaque, we needed to find ourselves a tour of the Pampas - the fertile wetlands that are home to lots of Amazon wildlife. After much investigating we finally plumped with one company as their accomodation looked slightly nicer than the rest (only to find out that those photos were of a completely different camp!). Overall though, the 3-day tour was really good with an amazing array of wildlife to see. Most of the time is spent boating up and down the Yacuma River, which countless number of different animals call their home. There are the strange supersized guinea pigs, the Capybaras; multitudes of alligators and cayman of differing sizes; different species of monkeys; and numerous birds - herons, storks, cormorants, maccaws, and many others. We also swam with Pink Dolphins - who we were reassuring told keep away the alligators and piranha, though it can be a bit disconcerting when you can see the alligators on the banks of the same river you are swimming in. We also went looking for Anacondas and Anna - the ´wildlife spotter´- found one in the first 30 minutes. We looked for more over the next three hours to no avail, but even to find one is quite lucky. It wasn´t a large one (by Anacona standards), but you could definitely feel its grip when handling it.

The three of us came back to Rurrenabaque yesterday afternoon expecting to be flying back this morning to La Paz. But as I have mentioned we are now stuck here, pondering what our next move should be. It´s a Catch-22 - if we take the bus it will probably cost us a couple of days anyway, but obviously if this haze doesn´t clear and the planes can´t fly then that will cost us time as well - and we so want to get away from the mozzies. So it looks like whatever eventuates we might have to reconsider our plans for the next 5 weeks. I guess we just have to put it down to the joys of Bolivian travelling! I´ll let you know how we get on....