If you have googled Bolivia at all, I am sure you have run across the pictures of “The Road of Death”.

Unfortunately, those lovely paved roads and carved out mountainsides are NOT in Bolivia! They are, in fact, in China (Guoliang Tunnel) The Yungas Road is also falsely attributed as the “Stremnaya Road”. Neither of these locations is accurate.

So, does Bolivia have a “dangerous road” O YES we do! But it is not a highway… it is little more than a path, carved shallowly into the side of a very high mountain range, and it is called The Yungas Road.

To my knowledge, Bolivia does not have a national program of highway construction and maintenance. We do have a new, more stable, road that replaces the Yungas Road, but many buses and cars still use the old, dangerous road.

The old Yungas Road is not paved. Parts of the road have rocks pressed down into the mud during the rainy season, but only by individuals who can afford to buy or gather the rocks and who can carry them to those stretches of road.

All of this kind of “infrastructure improvement” is done by individuals who are not repaid or subsidized in any way. Needless to say, such improvements are few and far between.

Many parts of Bolivia are mountain desert geography. During the rainy season, the dry dirt is quickly washed away. The layer of dirt in the altiplano is not very deep. So even when the dirt layer gets saturated, there is not enough dirt to hold the vast amounts of rain that we get every rainy season.

So what happens with the excess rain? It washes away the dirt and loosens the boulders beneath… which causes entire sections of the mountainside to be loosened and washed away. The parts that are loosened but not washed away are then broken off by buses and trucks traveling along that road.

Narrow timbers are place across the gaping maws of broken off road. The buses and trucks then cross carefully along those timbers. Bus passengers will often debark, walk across the timbers and then wait for the bus to cross safely before re-boarding the bus… to wait for the next portion of washed-out road.

It is not unusual for us to lose over 25 vehicles off the side of the mountain, with the common loss of over 100 lives each year.

Many of the buses race along that road at speeds that are not safe, even in the best of conditions. On top of this danger is the reality that the majority of the over-the-road bus drivers are drunks.

Just a few weeks ago a bus load of passengers were killed when a drunken bus driver refused to stop driving and then got up from the wheel to attack the men who were trying to persuade him to pull over. Yes… that’s what I said… he LEFT his SEAT with the bus RUNNING, traveling at over 60 mph!

Back to the Yungas Road… the road is just a bit wider than one vehicle, with periodic “turnarounds” for the descending vehicle to pull over to allow the ascending vehicle the right of way.

The ascending vehicle has the right of way because it is so hard to get traction and empetus at those altitudes. Once your vehicle is in motion up that mountainside, you don’t want it to stop. As you may imagine, brakes get a lot of wear and abuse coming down that same mountain. Many deaths have been attributed to faulty brakes. There is no real program of vehicle inspection here, so a passenger really has no clue or way of determining safety.

==[coming: pics of the "fake" road in China and the real road in Bolivia]==

Accurate links:
http://villageofjoy.com/most-dangerous-roads-yungas-road-bolivias-road-of-death/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yungas_Road
http://www.travel-bolivia.com/yungas-road.html
…..(I know people who have taken the bike tour down this road… I don’t think I will be doing it!)

False/misleading links:
http://officespam.chattablogs.com/archives/2006/11/stremnaya-road-of-death.html
http://wikimapia.org/3330562/Stremnaya-Road

Guoliang Tunnel:
http://www.mdolla.com/2008/01/guoliang-tunnel-danger-china.html
http://www.ssqq.com/ARCHIVE/vinlin27a.htm

Stremnaya Road: seems to be in Russia, but we haven’t been able to locate it with accuracy.