I enjoy a little adventure as much as the next man. At the same time I consider myself relatively sensible. So when friends here in La Paz started telling us about an extreme adventure tour in bicycle down the subtlely named Death Road (Carretera de la Muerte) an hour outside of the city, I didn’t exactly jump at the opportunity. It seemed like a tourist gimmick, something Bolivians would never even consider while white tourists might plan their whole trip around it. Not to mention every tour agency in town (and there are hundreds, primarily on one street) sells the exact same trip with varying prices and quality of equipment. Caitlin wasn’t too thrilled about the prospect of an all-day downhill mountain biking tour starting in the mountains and ending in the jungle, passing through the “world’s most dangerous road”. The road received this prestigious title when it was revealed that more people died in car accidents on this road each year than anywhere else in the world. That is, until they built a new road a few years ago for car traffic and the old road became somewhat of a tourist novelty. Despite the now minimal car congestion, the road kept “death” in its name for good reason. We heard stories of tourists losing control of their bikes and flying over the edge of the steep cliffs or of plowing into passing trucks. Needless to say we were warned. So when recounting the following story about “almost” dying on the “death road”, one common reaction is, “well, what did you expect?” This, in spite of the fact that thousands of tourists do the trip every year without any problems and in spite of the fact that our experience occurred on the drive home. After the trip had ended. The “almost dying” story, in my mind, seems a bit like the “one that got away” fishing story. The climax is killed before the tale even begins. If you’re badly injured then that’s a horribly different story. That’s your climax. But if you walk away from near death with hardly a scratch, it can be confusing. “Wait, so you didn’t die?” “But you did not catch the fish?” People might feel like you wasted twenty minutes of their time telling a story with no ending. To avoid any of this confusion let me just say: we did not die.
Our hesitance to do the trip eventually gave way to our Bolivian friends insistence that we do it. Here the age old saying, “you get what you pay for” becomes relevant. We were not interested in paying a lot of money to do the trip. As far as we could tell, tour agencies offered the trip for anywhere from 30 to 60 dollars. Sixty dollars got you the world famous New Zealander-owned Gravity Tours, a name we couldn’t avoid hearing from gringos in La Paz while 30 bucks got you the same trip with a little less prestige and a lot more risk. At the time all I thought was “same trip half the price!” I’d have to be a sucker not to do it. Nonetheless we did a little research and settled on one of the 30 dollar agencies, a company that a friend of a friend had actually recommended. Still, being the cheapskates we are, before booking the trip we talked the agency into dropping the price if we skipped the otherwise included breakfast and lunch. 210 bolivianos per person. Not bad.
We showed up at the agency in the morning to find a huge 15 seater Dodge van waiting for us along with the manager/driver, two young guides, two Canadians, and a group of about eight young Irish men and women. The trip itself was a lot less noteworthy than what followed afterwards so I’ll make it easy and give some highlights in short declarative sentences.
–We had some hilarious banter with the Irish. The mountain bikes had disc brakes but were not well maintained. It was raining for the first half of the ride. We started at 12,000 feet in the mountains and ended in a jungle valley. The scenery was incredible. The road dropped off into sheer cliffs hundreds of feet down. One Irish kid almost went over the edge. Another’s brakes went out. I went really fast. Caitlin, not so much. It was all downhill. At the bottom we celebrated, next to a group from Gravity Tours. Great trip, half the price. In Coroico we went to a hotel. We took showers, ate lunch, and went swimming. It was hot.
It was at this point that the real “extreme” adventure began. We all crammed back into the van, still in swim trunks and flip flops, and began the 3 hour drive through the mountains back to La Paz. It started off innocently enough. Everyone was in high spirits and the Irish girls kept the group busy by telling geography riddles. We continued to joke and laugh through our first pit stop, a flat tire that the guides quickly changed on the side of the road. A half hour later we stopped for gas and soon after the problems started. The van had chugged along beautifully up to that point but suddenly, as the incline had increased and we had climbed higher into the mountains, its age started to show. The van was no doubt from the eighties but appeared well maintained. The van sputtered to a halt on the shoulder of the road and the driver and the guides did their best mechanic impersonation, trying to find the problem. Finding nothing, we started along again, sputtering and lurching, but still moving uphill. To me, it sounded like a problem with the clutch, like the driver just couldn’t find the right gear. We continued to joke in the back about how long it would take to get back to La Paz or if we ever would. We continued like this for maybe twenty minutes until the driver decided to try something else. These old vans have an access panel that you can take off from the inside and access the engine. It’s located right about where the radio is in a normal car, between the steering wheel and the glove compartment, beneath the dashboard. The guides took the panel off to see if they could see the problem. To us tourists in the back this was hysterical. Classic South American auto repair. While it struck the gringos as unusual at best, that our van was puttering along with an open panel revealing the engine, the Bolivians were unfazed. But they also didn’t find the problem.
We flagged down another van with a bike rack charging up the hill to see if they could help us. The other driver checked it out but seemed uncertain as to what was actually the problem. He gave us a water bottle full of gas and suggested we try putting it directly into the engine. This, I inferred afterwards because I didn’t actually hear the conversation. Half the group was outside stretching their legs while the other half sat in the van. We were high in the mountains now and as the sun got lower so did the temperature. Shorts and flip flops now seemed pretty silly. Before leaving, the two Canadians hopped in the other van because they had a bus to catch and were afraid of missing it in our dead van. This is significant for two reasons: one, they were sitting in the first row of seats in the van; and two, their backpacks were blocking the sliding door. It was at this moment that we realized that the sliding door had some sort of child safety mechanism and it was impossible to open from the inside, something we all noted but secretly prayed would not become an issue.
Our driver put the panel back on and we continued for maybe 5 minutes without problems before the lurching and sputtering started up again. The guides decided to take back off the panel, and we all just shook our heads in the back. The situation was becoming less comical and more irritating. We could actually see sparks in the engine from our seats in the back. The guides started pouring gas directly into the engine, hoping it just needed to catch. The gas wasn’t helping. We pulled to the side once again and while the guides worked with the engine, the two Irish girls waited outside. They were clearly upset and let everyone know that they felt unsafe. After a few minutes, the driver assured them that the van was fixed and yelled at them to get back in. Reluctantly, the girls went back to their seats.
It was at this point I remember thinking to myself, “what if something does happen?” None of the windows opened more than just a crack at the bottom. Even though the door wouldn’t open from the inside, it really was the only way out. I envisioned myself jumping over seats and out the window. I convinced myself I could do it. Caitlin and I were seated in the second-to-last row. We all sat in silence in the van. The sun had just gone down and it was dark. Everyone just wanted to be back in La Paz, not watching our guides pour gasoline directly into the van engine from the passenger seat of this death trap. Had we really paid money for this?, I remember wondering.
And then it happened. The van was lurching again and the driver pulled over to the shoulder yet another time. He turned off the ignition and instantaneously, with the “whoosh” sound a gas stove makes when it is finally lit, a fire ball shot out of the open engine panel and completely engulfed the van. I remember hearing screaming, the van felt like an echo chamber for the screams and yells of 13 people. But the rest is a little hazy. They say that adrenaline takes over in a situation like that but I never realized just how out of body, out of your own control that would feel. Time stopped. We could have been hours, minutes, seconds trapped in the van. And then I blinked and I was outside, shivering, watching the van in flames. From what I can piece together with the help of Caitlin and the Irish, the van was on fire for a few minutes (it didn’t explode but we were all sure it would) and everyone escaped in about thirty seconds, maybe a minute. After the initial “Backdraft”-esque fire bomb I have a clear image in my mind of the two guides and driver on fire, trying to put themselves out. I remember because I remember thinking “why don’t they get out? What is taking so long?” I watched the fire creep closer and closer to the back of the van, ducking behind a seat as I waited for someone to get the door open. When they finally did, I managed to leap through the fire and stumble out the side door. I was fully expecting to catch on fire so it was a complete surprise to find that only my hair was burned and I had no need to roll on the ground. It never occurred to me to consider getting out another way. I think when I fantasized minutes before the fire my escape I convinced myself the door was the only way. Thus, I was confused and in disbelief to see Caitlin and others appear from the opposite side of the van as we all ran from the flames, expecting to see an explosion.
Caitlin escaped in an entirely different, more exciting and much more painful way. After the fire bomb she leapt into the last row of seats, right into the lap of an Irish guy named Rob. He later reported that she yelled, “I’m going to die!” and started banging on the back window with her fists, trying to break the glass. Rob must have been thinking more clearly and, seeing the futility in Caitlin’s punching, he flipped onto his back and started kicking the window. Despite wearing flip flops, he managed to kick out the glass after three tries, a point his buddies later teased him about (c’mon man, it took you 3 tries!), and he then followed his legs out the window. Caitlin immediately followed him and did a headfirst superman dive out after. She hit the ground hard and must have absorbed most of the broken glass because the other two guys who followed her out the window hardly had a scratch, including one without shoes.
By some divine intervention a group of Canadian evangelical missionaries were on a motorcycle tour and happened to be right behind us on the road. 3 motorcycles, 1 SUV, 5 guys who spoke perfect English, and they took immediate action. It was surreal. One second, fire. Another second, running from an impending explosion. And the next, a group of motorcyclists speaking English with American accents taking out medical kits and examining Caitlin’s wounds with the headlights of their motorcycles, on a deserted Bolivian road in the Andes. It turned out two of the missionaries were trained EMTs and they worked like professional doctors, immediately wrapping Caitlin in a blanket, rubbing her shoulders, asking her questions and meticulously removing glass from her hands, side, feet and legs. They cleaned her wounds and set to work on Rob. He discovered that in breaking the window he had sliced his thigh pretty badly on the glass. Considering what had happened, the injuries weren’t bad. Only from jumping out the window barefoot.
The driver and the guides seemed to be in shock. The strange only got stranger. An ambulance passed by (amazing response time for the U.S., no less Bolivia!), slowed down to check out the burning van. . . .and then continued up the road. No one could believe it. We were all standing in the freezing cold in shorts and sandals watching our ride to the hospital fade in the distance. The fire in the van eventually went out on its own, without an explosion. Everyone managed to save their backpacks and clothes. The missionaries determined that both Rob and Caitlin needed to go immediately to the hospital for stitches. The group dissolved. Most people hitched rides but the missionaries offered to give Caitlin and me a ride to the hospital. We all agreed with our van driver to meet at the hospital in La Paz. The missionaries broke every negative stereotype of evangelicals we have in the U.S. They were young, liberal, smart, funny (a motorcycle gang, for God’s sake). Essentially everything I thought evangelicals weren’t. They left us in a cab in La Paz and vowed to stay in touch (they did). No one else from our group showed up at the hospital. Caitlin got twelve stitches in her hand, foot and side and I could hear her screaming and crying from the waiting room. The ER admitted her immediately, treated her right away, gave her painkillers, cleaned and stitched her up, and in the end we paid 10 dollars, not including the prescriptions.
Over the next couple of days, we pieced together the events of the night and went to check on our new Irish friends and the folks from the agency. Rob, it turned out, had not gone to the hospital because he had decided to go back to his hostal and get really drunk instead. When I saw him the next evening he still hadn’t been to the ER and was afraid his cut was starting to heal. Sure enough, doctors had to reopen the wound before they stitched it up. I discovered that Jay, an enormous Irishman who was sitting in the front row had used the access panel as a shield from the fire. He knew the door wouldn’t open from the inside so he headbutted the window and opened it enough so that he could reach his hand out and open it from the outside. The two Irish girls had anticipated the fire and jumped out with their bags packed and ready to go. One girl had a burn on her arm from the melted ceiling and the other had holes in her rain jacket. One Irish guy leapt from the second row all the way to the back and jumped out the window while another managed to get out the door from all the way in the back. He later joked (he was from Northern Ireland) that he was so used to car bombs that when the van didn’t blow he didn’t know what to do. Everyone was upset and blamed the driver/manager for the accident.
I went back to the agency the next day to see if I could get an apology and our medical bills reimbursed. The girl working was more shaken up than I was and said that the driver and one guide were still in the hospital. This would later turn out to be a lie. She paid the one medical bill and said I should come back and talk with the manager about what to do next. The next day she gave the Irish group 3000 bolivanos between 5 of them and they signed a form saying they wouldn’t pursue the matter legally. They were all leaving town so to them it didn’t matter. Our situation was a little different in that Caitlin couldn’t walk. At all. The accident would put her on crutches for the next three weeks and the situation only got more complicated. The agency refused to pay our expenses (the manager eventually claimed that there were only chispas (sparks) no fire and we were forced to get a lawyer. Being thrust into the middle of the Bolivian legal system was almost worse than the accident. But this is another story entirely. (To be continued)
In the words of Irish Rob, “This gives a whole new meaning to ‘get the hell out of Dodge’!”
-Jake
