The World´s Most Dangerous Road

Attention Familiars: This may upset some of you. My apologies. You know me. Anything named the World’s Most Dangerous Something has an unshakeable appeal. Plus, in addition to being the World’s Most Dangerous Road, it’s probably the world’s most beautiful. I couldn’t help myself.

This weekend I went to Coroico, via what has been termed the World’s Most Dangerous Road. The Inter-American Development Bank bestowed the unfortunate name on the road a few years back, when hundreds of people would die enroute each year. In reality, the road is not so dangerous these days. As a result of the title a new $120 million bypass has been built and most of the traffic diverted. Also as a result of the title, there a tourism industry around the road, and most all of the remaining traffic is mountain bikers. All of the towns along the road have been abandoned and there are only a few houses.

I was a little too timid ride a bike down the road, so I talked a taxi driver who lives outside of Coroico into taking me there and back for a small fee. At the start of the road there is a gigantic statue of Jesus, as well as an indigenous rock altar called an Apacheta. Travellers pray for protection before they set off. Some people bless their vehicles with alcohol and feed the dogs that stand like sentinels along the road, in hopes of bringing additional luck. There’s also a sign which directs drivers to honk their horns liberally, which made me laugh.

The road itself is no laughing matter. It’s just a dirt and gravel track. Sheer walls rise above the road and drop-offs fall thousands of feet below. The road twists and turns like a corkscrew, into river valleys and out onto ridges. At points, waterfalls flow over and erode the road. Occasionally, they were so strong it was like being in a car wash. Towards the top of the road the clouds close in, and it’s hard to see the edge and the abyss below. The route is so dangerous that normal road rules don't apply. The downhill traffic always travels on the outside, so that the driver with the best view of their wheels takes the greater risk. The road is so narrow, that when you have to pass, the vehicles lean out precipitously over the edge, leaving you wondering if you’re in a car or an airplane. I felt thankful that I was in a tiny taxi, and not a big tour bus. Even so, on particularly tight turns I would involuntarily scoot towards the inside and my driver would ask me if I was alright.

The road is not so dangerous for its quality, which can be safely navigated by a sensible driver, but for the quantity of traffic it received. It used to be the main link between the Northern Yungas and La Paz, and the Brazilian Amazon and the Pacific Ocean. Each year dozens of downhill passing vehicles would fall off the edge and into the abyss, taking their passengers to their deaths. In 1983 more than a hundred passengers in a single camion plunged over the precipice and met their ends.

The road was dotted with constant reminders of the deaths. Crosses, big and small, singular and in clusters of ten to twenty lined the road. There were even a few memorials in other languages. Most poignant was a man with a little red flag, who would stand at a particularly dangerous corner signalling traffic when it was safe. His entire family, wife, children, parents and in-laws, died there in an accident over ten years ago. He lived where they died, surviving on food donations from passing travellers. The Bolivian government, for their part, took far more extreme safety measures, putting yellow caution tape along precarious stretches.

I am often cavalier, and have spoken fondly, of the Latin American safety ethic. Driving the World’s Most Dangerous Road was a reminder of how unacceptable it actually is. In the late nineties they made the road one-way on alternating days, which saved hundreds of lives, but generated so much opposition that it was scrapped. A bit before I left, the Bolivian BBC correspondent was killed in a car crash in La Paz. It’s insane that people drive drunk, without seatbelts, at night, in overcrowded camions over these sorts of roads. I was glad for my driver, who actually snapped at me for sitting with my feet out the passenger-side window, in classic Ally style.