Leaving Its Mark

There's surprisingly little to say about the capitol city of Bolivia, La Paz. The city is more or less one giant black market; walk down one street to find stall after stall of hot electronics, another to find shoes or suits or toys or knives or kitchen sinks, often right next to each other. More often, you have entire blocks devoted to clone-like entities all selling colored light bulbs or school supplies. Bizarre.

Nor do I have much to say about the nightlife. The most exciting thing I've done at night was charity pub trivia in my hostel. I arrived late, missing the first category, and joined a random team. Turns out I knew 3 answers to the first category questions, and our team lost by 1 point. Winner wins a whole handle of tequila. All we got was a paltry free shot each. Not that a whole handle of booze would've done me any good that night.

Nor do I have much to say about the food. I've eaten knockoff Thai, knockoff Welsh, even a knockoff McDonalds that I found somewhat superior (but still no In-N-Out Burger), but nothing really Bolivian, if such a cuisine exists outside Arroz con Pollo. I did however at at one of the fanciest, swankiest, most expensive restaurants in the city, just to see what it would feel like to eat like a king for under 15 bucks. Don't sneer; I couldve bought 5 or more normal dinners for that price.

A little money goes a long way in Bolivia. It takes 7 Bolivianos to equal just 1 American Dollar, and the average cost of a meal is 10 to 20 Bolivianos, ($1.50 to $3). Most restaurants, bars, and hostels wont have change for anything higher than a 20. So when I went to the ATM and took out 700 Bolivianos, I was a little bemused and a little horrified to see it come out as seven 100 Boliviano bills. I walk into the bank and ask if they can break some of it down into smaller, more manageable bills. The woman behind the counter takes my money with a smile, and comes back later holding my 700 Bolivianos, transmogrified into 10 Boliviano bills. Yes, she gave me a stack of 70 bills. My wallet suffers in silence.

What I can tell you about is a little bike ride I took. A short jaunt, only 68 kilometers (that's about 40 miles). Downhill, mostly. We started at an altitude of 4700 meters (that's nearly 16,000 feet, or about 3 miles above sea level, a new personal record), and ended at around 1500 meters (1 mile up, merely the elevation of Denver). The ride went down a little curvy road, half paved and half dirt, leading from outside La Paz to a small town and animal sanctuary on the border of the Amazon Basin.

Coincidentally, the road is known as the World's Most Dangerous Road, aka the Death Ride. It gained the reputation because the road is tight, winding, and wet, and sleep-deprived Bolivian bus drivers tended to tip off the edge and take the direct route to the bottom of the 600 foot cliffs. Bicycles are safer, according to our guide, because you can't be trapped inside a burning bike. That said, on average 15 cyclists die per year, and many more are injured. Don't worry, the guide assures us, he's trained in first aid and brought a rescue rope. The rope is only 100 meters.

Speaking of dropped threads, that's why the bottle of booze would've been useless at best and awful at worst. Drunk-seeming riders get breathalyzed and kicked off the trail. Even if I could fake it, that doesn't seem the ideal situation. And even if I could drunk-bike well (and I can, I've tried it), I'd end up drunk sleeping my way through the tour departure.

As is, I nearly did anyway. I forgot to set my alarm, and would've slept through, but was woken up at the typically-awful-but-today-perfect time of 6:30 by some drunk schmuck stumbling into the room drunk, making his way to the nearest trash bin, and rehashing his last few round of drinks. Oh sweet irony.

The ride starts at a cold mountain pass, and starts tearing its way down an easy paved road for the first third of the trip. We pedaled fast, faster, until the wheels were spinning faster than the pedals could keep up, flopping uselessly like dead fish. We soared down the road at immense speed...

... or, they did. I was no slouch, but I couldn't gain real speed no matter what I tried. I pedaled on the highest gear past the point of not catching, stood up, sat down, crouched over until I was nearly throwing my body over the handlebars prematurely. Nothing worked. Even the most timid girl in our group outpaced me easily. Maybe it was a problem dirty brakes, or a defective tire, both suspects in later problems, but to this we had no clue. The guide postulated that perhaps I have an atypical mass-to-weight ratio. In other words he suspected my light, thin, wide-torsoed body gave me little momentum and acted more or less like a giant windsail, retarding my speed and making me look retarded all the same.

Still, handicap aside, I was enjoying it. I was enjoying it even past the time the guide stopped us and said "Surprise! We have to go uphill for 10 kilometers". However, he gave us the option to get back in our transport bus and take the easy way up. Half of us immediately hopped on the bus. The other half decided to be masochistic, pounding uphill at absurd altitude. Any loyal readers should know what group I picked. After all, did I not volunteer to get whipped and flogged on stage for a newspaper article?

All things considered, I was doing well for myself. I stood up on the pedals, pulling my body down by with the handlebars, using both gravity and upper arm strength to aid my flagging legs. The slope itself wasnt too bad, but that's comparing this experience to biking as a kid (before my father unapologetically sold my bicycle), at sea level in New York. This was 3 miles higher, and I could barely catch my breath. One guy fell behind, another girl crapped out. A third managed to snap his chain with the effort. I pulled ahead, and was holding the lead. Then the road forked as I approached a steep hill. I stopped to consider which way to go, waiting for the guide (on the bus), watching cars make their choice. After a minute or two, I decided it wasnt a fork as much as a temporary road split, and right was the only way to go. I got back up on my bike to move, and immediately hopped off. I'd lost all my motivation.

I sat and waited, and the guide showed up before long, boy with a new chain in tow and crapped out girl in tow. The four of us walked our bikes up the hill, where the guide informed us we'd reached kilometer 8 of the uphill. We almost made it. Renewed competitive, we all got back on our bikes to kill off the last 2k. We biked 9.5 of the 10 kilometers, while every other tour group just got back on their bus. I felt proud of myself, but I also felt exhausted, dehydrated, and nausious. Ready for the Death Ride?

Asphalt, smoothly downill, continued on for a time, to lull us into a sense of security. But it came to a rather abrupt end, replaced by dirt and bumps and big rocks. I barrelled over the dividing line, nearly loosing my control with the change in medium. Acceptable speed on smooth asphalt is not acceptable speed on a bumpy dirt road. I bounced, skidded, jumped, and swirved, nearly crashing into the girl in front of me. I pulled hard on the brakes, the bike nearly throwing me over the front like a bucking horse. I held on and managed to ease myself into a comfortable speed, but the thought lurked in the back of my head that getting thrown was nearly a matter of inevitability for me.

After a short break, regroup, and pep talk from the guide, we resumed driving down the real Death Ride. I drove much slower now, but was no longer maxed out by my bike defects or disproportionte body type, so it felt more satisfying. The girls fell behind me, the guys drifted ahead, and we all came to an unspoken pecking order.

The ride was more difficult now: the road became steeper, the turns became tigher, constant bumps created a deep vibration in my bones, and abrupt fatal cliffs materialized on our left (the side of the road we were biking on). I had little mountain biking experience, and was taking the turns all wrong. I would break to half my speed (bucking horse...), turn the handlebars, waiver, hold the brake, skid through a turn. It felt unstable and unsafe, and likely was. The jarring ride would've been murder on my testicles if they hadn't already retreated into my body in abject terror.

However, it was the fishtail that did it. Somehow, I managed to lock my rear wheel up while breaking, and fishtailed wildly out of control, bike waving langoriously back and forth, mere feet from certain death on my left. Somehow I managed to maintain my balance (God bless momentum), and biked out of it like one drives out of a skid, and kept going at pace until the next rest stop. But the close call had its effect on me. I went from joyfully scared, like a rollercoaster, to deep life-threatened fear. The next two sections I felt like I was crawling along (I was, compared to the mother-curdling speeds from before), and every turn made my gut knot with dread. Ironically, this dread response and my slowed brake-controlled turns made me more likely to spin out again.

Worse, we were passing under waterfalls, and the slick rocks, wet and lubricated foot grips on the pedals, and water droplets obscuring my sunglasses, all did nothing to mitigate my rising fear. This wasnt fun anymore, and I was tempted to get back on the bus. Before I could make such a choice, I came up to one tight hairpin turn, wet by small cascade tumbling from above, and I had grossly miscalculated my speed. I tore into the turn, convinced I'd slam into the wall. My mind blanked in terror, and instinct took over. I leaned sharply into the turn, cutting through the wet sand and mud, veering away from the wall and mercifully, not into the cliff. I leveled myself out and kept traveling at speed, slowly regaining full awareness. I quickly realized what I'd done. By instinct, I learned how to make a proper turn, leaning like a motorcycle rather than slowing and turning the handlebars.

The new revelation quickly slaughtered much of my fear, and practice nearly eliminated it. A little remained, just enough to keep the ride fun. The cliff retreated from the very edge of the road, and the safety margin gave me extra daring. Within a few minutes, I was racing along like the other boys, pulling turns like an old pro (almost), and fear was dominated by exhilaration. Even another wild fishtail wasn't able to shake my confidence.

Until that one time I tried leaned just a little too hard. The curve was especially sharp, and I was especially cocky. I leaned, leaned, and suddenly became certain the wheel would slip. I knew to trust instinct by now, and let it take over. I balled myself up, lifting my arm, using my hand to cover my face, making sure to keep my elbow out of harm's way, unlike the guy from yesterday who fell and shattered his. I hit on my side, simultaneously taking the ground with my hip, thigh, and forearm, and slid out to a stop. The cliff remained nearby, not close enough to be an immediate threat, but if I'd slid with more momentum...

I quickly stood up and brushed myself off. My competitive streak didn't want to let the girls overtake me. I moved my arm around, making sure the elbow worked, and finding no pain I got back on and immediately took off. Surprisingly, I didn't revert to panicky coward mode. I continued to bike at my new slick pace all the way to the next rest point, and it wasn't until I noticed the blood running down my arm that I felt anything at all.

My forearm had been roadburned all the way up its length. At the base near the elbow were three long cuts. Next to them, a short gouge, and next to it, a small canyon in my flesh. It looked deep, though it didn't go through the dermis. The guide cleaned it out, and the wounds looked like I'd been attacked by a werewolf. Cool Scar Story! We hastily patched it, but the tape started peeling off before I even got back on my bike. Pain started now, a throb, a wince, a stiffness in the elbow, but nothing severe. The guide offered to let me ride the bus to the bottom, but I politely told him "fuck off". I was going to see this thing through to the end.

And I did. A little more cautiously, but I did. The brakes squealed something awful since the fall, and something must've been wrong with the gears or chain too, since it clicked and popped and randomly changed gears as I pushed the last few kilometers. I was the last to arrive at the animal sanctuary at the bottom, but I'd made it, little the worse for wear.

The sanctuary would be alot more fun if I didn't hate monkeys, since that's most of what they had. A coati cuddled on my lap... then decided to give me a hug, and drive its nails into my neck. I had to tear it off, nearly tearing my shirt open in the process. A pair of juvenile squirrel monkeys roughousing with each other decided it'd be more fun to pounce on me and start biting my hands and ears. A spider monkey smeared banana and possibly shit on me. God I hate monkeys.

We took the bus back up, winding our back up our own bike trails on the World's Most Dangerous Road. In this more passive form of transport, we finally had a chance to admire the view, since soaking in the vista before usually meant driving off the edge of a cliff. I saw the road as it was meant to be seen, rather than just seeing the rocks ahead of me and the fear on the edge of my periphery. I saw just how steep, how narrow, how trecherous. I saw just how many hairpin curves we sliced and skidded through. I saw just how many seeps and cascades we bounded over and under. And trudging slowly up the mountain in our little bus, I was able to read the names on all the little crosses that lined the roadside, the crosses I'd never before even noticed were there.

The Death Ride had left its mark all right, scars of abject fear and naive exhilaration and a renewed sense of my own mortality, gouged maybe forever in my arm and in my brain... thank god for helmets I suppose. How bout elbow pads?