After a 5 week excursion at wildlife refuge Inti Wara Yassi, spending my time playing with monkeys and running around the rainforest with wild cats, I decided to use my last week in Bolivia to explore some other parts of the amazingly beautiful country that it is.

I had a choice: go south and check out the Salt Flats, or stay north and see some more of La Paz, the mountains, and Lake Titicaca. Exploring the Salt Flats would’ve been a really wonderful trip (Uyuni is still on my bucket list), but I simply didn’t have the time to do it justice. Instead, I settled for traveling around La Paz.

Little did I know, that decision to stay in northern Bolivia would result in one of the most insane experiences I’ve ever had in my life. This is a great story -and not one that I’ve shared with many people- so, here goes.

summer in the U.S. = winter in Bolivia.

The beautiful thing about that was even though it was wintertime in Bolivia when I visited, it was only cold and snowy up in the mountains (La Paz, Lake Titicaca) and the altiplano area (Uyuni). Cochabamba was still a beautiful 75 degrees and the rainforest areas stayed warm at 80-85F, so, depending on where I was in the country, I could traverse from summer to winter in just a few hours. Cool, right?! Bolivia is seriously awesome.

Anyway.

A map of some of these places will probably help you visualize this a little better…each pinpoint is an area I visited during my trip in 2009:

1. La Paz
2. Cochabamba
3. Villa Tunari (where Inti Wara Yassi is located)
4. Copacabana/ Isla del Sol (Lake Titicaca)
5. Yungas Trail (mountainous area)

After I finished my time at Inti Wara Yassi, I made my way back to La Paz by bus with my traveling partner, Sara, and a fantastic new friend named Suz; a Kiwi woman I had met while volunteering at the refuge. She happened to be leaving at the same time as us, and we all made plans to travel together during our last week in Bolivia.

Sara, Suz, and I had a great time exploring the vibrant city of La Paz. Our hostel, Loki, (home to the highest oxygen bar in the world) allowed us to party our little hearts out with backpackers from all four corners of the globe. I have some great memories from Loki: playing drinking games with Irishmen, singing songs with some German girls, and, one faithful night, Sara even ripped my pants off –it was torn to shreds— in front of a crowded room.

We had fun.

While I was in La Paz, I wanted to experience something called the Yungas Trail, otherwise known as “The World’s Most Dangerous Road”. The Yungas Trail is an out-of-order, extremely narrow and curvy road along a mountainous area in northern Bolivia. Drivers apparently have had so many incidents of falling off this road and dying that it was invariably shut down and instead used to boost Bolivia’s tourism industry. Travelers from all over the world come to La Paz get a thrill from biking the Yungas Trail, and I wanted in on the action.

Now…I’m really not that great of a bike rider. This, I know for sure. There was no way I was going to bike the Yungas Trail on my own, let alone without any help, so I decided to go through a tour operator called Gravity- the most reputable biking company in La Paz. Looking back on this experience, the decision to go with “the best” really saved my ass because they were incredibly professional and very prepared; if I had gone out with a less expensive, inexperienced tour operator the situation I was put in might have ended pretty badly- who knows.

The night before I was supposed to bike the Yungas Trail, Sara had to go back home to the U.S., so after spending one (crazy) last night with her in La Paz and sending her off to the airport, I was able to get a couple of hours sleep before I needed to wake up at 6am and start prepping for the “The Death Road”.

Tired and hungover, I was not off to a good start.

This is how my day was supposed to go:

-1 hour bus ride outside La Paz

-Start on the trail high up in the cold, snowcapped mountains

-Do a five hour, downhill bike ride with frequent stops along the way

-Slowly transition from snowy mountains to warm rainforest

-finish at a wildlife refuge in the rainforest, eat dinner

-take a 3 hour bus ride back to La Paz

Suz and I arrived to join a group of about 20 people that was split into two smaller groups of 10 or so. Each group had their own guide and their own little mini-bus that had racks to haul the bikes on top while we could sit in the bus at the beginning and end of the trip. The mini-buses were supposed to follow us as we were doing the five hour downhill bike ride, just in case if anything happened and someone needed to be taken to the hospital, etc.

Indeed, we had heard horror stories about biking this road; people passing out, getting broken bones, even falling off the mountain face and dying.

I, for one, was really nervous about what I was getting myself into…..was I going to end up “that girl” who ran into a rock and fell off the edge? Thoughts like these circulated through my mind as I first mounted and rode my (oversized) bike, frantically struggled to stop myself by dragging both legs on the ground, and crashed hard- dust flying up, bike literally on top of me, legs tangled in the gears- my guide looked at me like I was the worst thing that had ever happened to him.

I knew it was going to be one hell of a ride.

As I found out, the Yungas Trail is absolutely, indubitably, terrifying. Sheer drops and narrow trail, all equipped with spectacular views of rusty buses and bent cars at the bottom of the cliffs; all vehicles that had crashed in the past and had given birth to the infamous “Death Road” legacy.

We started high up in the mountains, so the agency had professional cold weather biking gear (jackets, face masks, pants, gloves) you could wear as you wished. As the ride went on, you could strip off layer after layer of clothing until arriving in the rainforest in a t-shirt and shorts, which, I thought, was a pretty cool concept.

The five hour ride, albeit downhill, was exhausting. First off, I was running on a couple hours of sleep and was hungover (to which I totally take the blame, however I wanted to make sure Sara had a good last night and didn’t miss her flight home). Secondly, I was scared the whole time I was going to go off the edge…emotionally draining, anyone?

Ultimately, I pushed myself really hard and never ended up falling off a cliff.

“The World’s Most Dangerous Road”…check!

In the end, the groups got through the five hour bike-ride in one piece. Nobody broke anything, no-one fell. The guides were ecstatic and were happy to wrap things up; we were 3 hours from La Paz and we were all looking forward to a hot shower and a cold beer. We had no idea what was waiting for us up ahead.

The mini-buses were driving on an upwards slope, slowly but surely, attempting to climb to the incredibly high elevation that La Paz sits at -13,300 ft. It is, after all, one of the highest cities in the world. To put it in a little perspective, the peak of Mt. Everest is at 29,000 ft. elevation.

After a couple of hours of riding on the bus, we were just an hour away from La Paz when it started to snow. Heavily. The buses were probably at an elevation around 12,000 or 13,000 ft at the time, creeping along a steep, narrow mountain road when we first started noticing the snow.

“It’ll stop…not a big deal.” our guide remarked. “ Don’t worry guys!”

Oh, how wrong he was.

The snow kept on falling, getting heavier and heavier as time went on. The bus suddenly stopped and the driver turned around and said, “Alright people. Let’s get out and try to push this thing!” Our bus had gotten stuck in the snow.

We got out and trying pushing the bus for about a half an hour with no success. After we realized we couldn’t do anything to help, everybody loaded back in and the driver gave us a decision: bundle up and hunker down inside the bus for the night, or walk for help.

At 13,000 ft. up, staying inside that bus for a night while it was snowing would have been really, really cold and awful. We probably would have been stuck in the bus all day the next day as well, so after taking that into account, we all decided the best decision was to put on quadruple layers and walk for help.

Luckily for us, Gravity held a huge amount of extra winter gear on their buses, so each of us put on 4 jackets, 3 pairs of pants, face masks, two pairs of gloves, and we even put plastic bags on our feet, between our socks and our shoes, to help prevent frostbite.

By this time, night had fallen and we had flashlights to help us walk in the dark. The guides were great; they stayed calm, professional, and organized us into a single file line connected by a single rope. Everybody held on to the rope while one guide stayed in front and another guide held up the back.

We walked for two hours in the dark and snow, at an extremely high altitude, on a narrow mountain road. It was kind of surreal; we really had no idea if we would be getting help anytime soon, and we were about an hour’s drive away from La Paz. Occasionally, a huge bus with snow chains on their tires would thunder by, but they were so packed with people already, only one or two of us at a time could catch a ride back to the city.

People started getting sick; the altitude was making it really hard on everyone to keep walking, and one guy almost fainted. The guides passed around coca leaves to chew on to help everyone deal with the high altitude, but we all knew that altitude sickness was serious and could even be fatal in a bad situation. Somebody needed to come for us, and it needed to be soon.

It turned out that one of the guides had a satellite phone and called Gravity’s owner, who promised he was doing everything he could and that help was on the way. After about 2 hours of walking in the dark, the Bolivian police finally showed up, arriving in these huge vehicles that could navigate through snow and ice. They were on a mission, I suppose a rescue mission, to find and retrieve us.

The few of us left gladly accepted a ride back to our hostel, Loki, and were greeted with cheers, free drinks, and hot food. Everybody had been getting updates about our status, and they were all very extremely relieved that we came back safely and in one piece.

What I took away from that crazy experience is this: Life is an adventure. Traveling the world can be an ordeal filled with dangers and uncertainties, but you shouldn’t let that stop you from taking risks, experiencing other cultures, and seeing what the world has to offer you. This mantra has kept me traveling ever since that first trip abroad to Bolivia, back in 2009, and I’ve never looked back since.