Death Road and Monkey Time!

Hey everyone,
So just a few hours ago Lynz and I stepped off the bus in Cochabamba, Bolivia after a seven hour bus ride from La Paz where we have spent the last week. We have come to Cochabamba just for the night and in the morning we will be getting into a van for the four hour drive to Villa Tunari where we will be volunteering with the monkeys for the next two weeks! But first I have to tell you all about the notorious DEATH ROAD adventure we had on Friday...
Basically you can not come to La Paz, Bolivia without doing at least one of two things; everyone and I mean everyone who passes through La Paz ether goes mountain biking down the worlds most dangerous road, or takes a tour of the La Paz prison. The tour of the prison was the first thing we heard people talk about weeks before we even arrived in La Paz. Apparently the prison is open for tours, sort of...The prisons here in Bolivia are not at all like the prisons in the U.S. where the prisoners are locked in individual cells and separated from their families. When you go to prison in Bolivia, you can choose your ¨housing¨, if you are poor you get stuck in a cell with ten other people and if you are rich you can live in a house and move in your wife and kids, all within the prison walls. Well some of the prisoners figured out that if you bribe the guards they will look the other way when you bring in your ¨family¨ from the outside. So for about 500 Bolivianos (about $70 USD) you can get an unofficial tour of the prison from a prisoner! The tours take you all over the jail and show you how the prisoners from different classes live (the poor ones in overcrowded cells, the rich ones with flat screens and laptops in their houses). There is no guarantee of your safety, and its not exactly legal so we opted for the death road, obviously the more sensible choice.
The Death Road is a narrow one lane gravel road that use to connect La Paz to much of the Bolivian Jungle, built by captured Paraguayan soldiers in the 1930s it remained in use until 2006 when the new road opened. The new road by the way is the hell road we took to Rurrenabaque that we told you about in our last blog, which is almost equally as dangerous! Although there is the new road, a few cars, trucks and buses still come up and down the Death Road each day, and the last car to take the plunge over the edge was on Tuesday....three days before our tour!
The company we decided to go with was called Vertigo biking, and they picked us up at about 8:00am from our hostel. We were able to find 10 other kids from our hostel to go with us making for a really fun day spent with people we already knew. The total count of bikers was about 25 including our guides and camera people.

The tour takes you to the top of the mountains at almost 16,000 foot elevation where you get on your bike and head down the highway on pavement for about half an hour to get use to your bike. The downhill is so fast we covered about 17 miles in just a matter of thirty minutes. We then arrived at the beginning of the Death Road, where the road turns to gravel and suddenly a 1,500 foot cliff appears on the left side of the road where it remains for the next 23 miles.

Our ride took us down 12,000 vertical feet over the next few hours passing hundreds of crosses and memorials, a constant reminder of how many hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives on this road over the decades. Our guide explained to us that up until 2006 when the new road opened, the largest cause of death was the buses that were too large for the narrow road, resulting in an average of 1,500 deaths per year! But he assured us that since bike tours began in 1996 that only 28 bikers had rode off the edge to their demise, a much more comforting statistic!

The bike ride ended in the jungle below, where they had showers and a lunch waiting for us. As we boarded the vans and started the four hour drive back up the Death Road, we no longer had tunnel vision and now had time to really look out at our surroundings and take in the details of the road we had just conquered. It was actually much more terrifying on the way back up then it was on the way down!

The company provided us with a ton of pictures and videos of our trip, but because none of the computers in Bolivia have a CD slot, you will just have to wait to see our action shots.

So tomorrow we will start are volunteer work at the animal refugee which you can check out here: http://www.intiwarayassi.org/articles/volunteer_animal_refuge/parque_machia
The internet and phones are suppose to be pretty unreliable, so you may not hear from us for the next two weeks, but be ready for a big blog upon our return!

Ciao
Sean & Lynz