Picking up from Uyuni’s Train Cemetery and Back to La Paz. The series starts here: Peru and Bolivia: The Andes, the Altiplano and the World’s Most Dangerous Road.

Over the Andes

The original plan was mountain bikes. Janine had altitude sickness. The plan changed.

The drive to the top of the Death Road was the opening act — switchbacks dropping into cloud, the valley floor far below, the whole descent visible in a single view. 

Offered coca leaves again on the way to the Death Road. Worse, this time — grass, essentially.

Must have been a cheaper product.

At the summit, La Cumbre pass, 4,650 metres, a Christ statue stood over the road with offerings piled at its base. Flowers, bottles, plastic. The road ahead had earned the attention.

The guide made an offering. We did not.

The welcome sign read Camino de la Muerte. Death Road, Bolivia. Someone had added a mountain biker to the artwork. I pointed at the sign. Janine read it.

North Yungas Road

Single-lane gravel, cut into a cliff face by Paraguayan prisoners of war in the 1930s, drops of hundreds of metres, no barrier. It carries traffic on the left rather than the right — the 1 stretch of road in the country where that’s the rule, so a descending driver can judge the cliff edge rather than the oncoming lane.

Officially the world’s most dangerous road, so designated by the Inter-American Development Bank back when it still carried buses and trucks and averaged the kind of death toll that made the title uncontested. A newer, safer route now takes most of that traffic. Tourists pay to ride mountain bikes down the old one instead.

The road environment is alive. Waterfalls cascade directly onto the track from the sheer cliffs above, turning parts of the gravel route into shallow rivers and providing a sudden, cold wash for anyone standing outside. The drop-offs are immediate; sitting on the rocky outcrops along the edge, the valley floor disappears into a massive expanse of dense green canopy stretching across the canyon.

Tourists are not permitted to drive it. The guide mentioned the tour company had asked whether I might like a go. I jumped at it. The driver swapped seats and got in the back with Janine. There was visible concern for the first few corners. Then Janine got the thumbs up. The driver focused on his phone.

Buzz flew here too, charting the narrow corridor between the rock walls and the open air, capturing the absolute verticality of the place.

Personally, Kyrgyzstan was more challenging.

But we don’t say that to the guide.

Coffee and Home

After the Camino de la Muerte, a coffee plantation — the road drops more than 3,000 metres from the pass to the valley floor, cloud forest giving way to something almost tropical by the time the engine cools down.

The Yungas region on the other side grows some of Bolivia’s best coffee and no small amount of its coca, the two crops sharing hillsides with a matter-of-factness that says more about the local economy than any guidebook would. Whether the stop was to calm the nerves or simply good scheduling is unclear.

The coffee redefined fresh — picked, roasted, and brewed on the same morning. It made all previous coffee seem like a different beverage entirely.

Walking down through the trees, concern grew about the walk back up. The hill looked long. Would our lungs make the climb back? Forgotten, briefly, that we were only at 1,500 metres, not 4,000 plus.

The climb was easy.