mmmmmmm safety.This was an awesome day.
The actual mountain biking was to last 64km.Starting at the altitude of 4200 metres and dropping right down to around 2400.Thats a lot of kms down and metre's in altitude decsent.When i booked the ride i inquired about insurance,safety and rescue equipment."well we dont supply any of that,especially insurance",yeah i thought this will be fun.
The start of the road was bitumen which meant nothing but pure speed.We were cruising down at about 70 to 80 km's per hour around long winding bends.I told the guide,"yeah i've had heaps of experience on mountain bike's" which is absolute bullshit but it meant we could go ahead heaps faster than the rest of the group,it was hard to keep up with him,had to get into the full tuck position and it was fast,real fast and hairy as but i tailed him the whole day,without dying.
My guide was a real legend,(there is a foto of me and him pulling retarded face's),
Aaron,crazy,loose and extremely funny,a perfect guide and he liked to be "naughty",as he put it so we could be a crazy as we wanted.
After some fast "downhill madness" (also the name of the company) it was time to hit the single laned dirt,bumpy dusty track with the added obsticle's of bus's and truck' coming up and down.You actually go faster down than vehicle's so overtaking is quite the challenge.There was big boulders sticking out every now and then that you could do jumps off and i hit them at every chance.
Still keeping up with aaron i hit a few corner's with maybe a little too much speed,thought i was gonna die and go over the edge sabout 5 time's.The corner's are sharp and steep drop off's that usually drop straight down into valley's at a couple of hundred metre's.The biggest is a verticl drop of a whopping 600 metre'e,so you really don't want to get too close to the edge,let alone ride off it with speed.
This is a common thing for rider's to do occasionally,"why", don't know (maybe problem's back home) but there is crosse's from top to bottom from tourist's going over.One chick even got off her bike,pulled to the side for a truck to pass and stepped off the cliff and plunged to her death.
We would stop at every major site were there had been some sort of horrible accident,it was every five minute's.Aaron would just point,"yeah 42 there, 12 here last month, and the most famous a whole bus packed with 82 over there,all dead".
It was morbid maybe but if i counted from the start the deaths from taxi's,bike's,trcks and bus's going over it would have been up there with the 6oo's.
Anyway back to the fun stuff,as i did'nt die and no one else did that day.
So yeah,it was four hours or so of downhill speed,crazy cliff's,crazy corner's,one crazy guide and a shitload of dust in the eye's.At some stge's visibility was about ten metre's due to the dust,handy when your racing down a hill.
It was so fun and fun to really push the limit's but the best was the end.
A huge dirt speed hump to get seriuos air on,then skid into the shop for an extremely cold beer,mmmm ilove beer.And i loved the second,3rd,4th,5th one after that.Then i lost count as we drove back up that scary hill in the fog and the dark happily for the last time ever.
Then me and aaron hit the town for yet more beer,i was so hungover the next morning and will never know just how he took another group down that hill at 7.30am the next day.If ever in Bolivia,a must do.
