Biking The Most Dangerous Road In The World - DEATH ROAD BOLIVIA

I'm Oscar. And I'm Dan. And today we are... A death row? Previously on Oscar and Dan. Not us meeting a girl who calls my grandma. And the altitude is no joke. This might just be the most unrecognizable 7-Eleven we've ever seen. Not necessarily something we enjoy looking at. Good morning! It's about 7 a.m in the morning and we are about to head on one of the adventures we were the most excited about before coming to Bolivia. And then when we came here, we got less excited when we heard how intense it is because today we are biking Death Road. And if you want to see what that means, you'll have to stay tuned. In the 1930s, Bolivia and neighboring Paraguay fought a bloody war called the Chaco War. Also, La Guerra de la Sede in Spanish. During the war, many Paraguayans were taken prisoner in Bolivia and were forced into labor. One of the prisoners' tasks was to build a road stretching from the town of Corrico in the rainforest to the country's capital, La Paz. Cutting through an incredibly mountainous terrain. So the reason why this road that we're going to be biking on is called Death Road is no coincidence. Because the fact is that it used to be known as the most dangerous road in the world. It is said, only partly jokingly, that the Paraguayan prisoners built the road to be as dangerous as possible to get revenge on the Bolivians. The narrowness of the road, its many sharp turns, and the difficult weather conditions with frequent thick fog contributed to making this the world's most treacherous road well into the 1990s. Until 1994, almost 300 people died every year driving on the road. That's nearly one person every single day for 60 years. Meaning that the road has potentially claimed up to 18,000 lives. Since then, many improvements have been made to several sections. And a new safer road has been built. This has offloaded most heavy traffic from Death Road, making it safer for tourists looking to experience the road not on four wheels, but on two. Today, we would do just that. Biking from the highest point on the road all the way down to the lowest. There's the bikes. Oh my god. All right, so we're starting the activity by going in the bus for about an hour. We're going up to a very, very high altitude. Essentially, the whole road is just going to be downhill. About 3,000 meters or more we're descending today on bikes. We are going to ride between five to six hours. Record, I think I went in three hours. Some guys from Switzerland, they're crazy. They asked me just to not stop and drinking a lot of beer. The first section is nice and easy. It's good to practice because the road is not in good shape. You know that the last two years during pandemics, the road was without maintenance. We made it to our starting point. That was a beautiful place. Well, okay, not quite as beautiful as Uyuni, but I think this is still incredible. It's 4,600 meters. The first 22 kilometers are apparently not too bad. They're on pavement. It feels nice to get some sort of warm up. I'm very pleasantly surprised by the temperature because it's probably like five plus degrees, not negative five degrees. So this is an improvement. Extra layers because apparently it's very dusty. So they're at least making sure we don't ruin our clothes. Which is good. So our main guy, Gustavo, is thankfully very experienced because when he started doing these tours, there were still tons of cars and like huge trucks on the road that were going on. Now they've actually built like a new highway so people don't need to go on this very treacherous road, which obviously is a good thing. These are very strong brakes. That's why you should brake only with one finger on the front. I like this new look of yours. Thanks. Let us know in the comments below whether this should be my new thing. Hi. What's up, dude? The thing I'm most nervous about is this. Spending a few hours on this. I think our butts are not going to be our best friends after this. Let's go. We're starting the first bit, which is supposed to be the easiest. Let's warm up. The bike ride on this part was absolutely incredible. What a liberating feeling it was to just swoosh down the mountainside, taking in these stunning views. So we stopped at our first stop and wow, already on that first like five minutes. How beautiful is the scenery? We have a bit more with pavement left and then after that, it's the real deal. It looks like a bike graveyard. So we ended up driving into the clouds and after a while, we got to the section where you have to take the car because it's uphill. But gradually as we drove, the weather got worse and worse. And now we are by Death Road. We're literally surrounded by clouds. I think the weather would only be worse if it was pouring rain, but otherwise it can't get much worse than this. Anyone who wears glasses, you know how great it is when it starts raining. So blind on Death Road? Oh, please don't. Don't even say that. Okay, time to dress up even more. Honcho time. Oh god, this is like my fifth layer. Where's my assistant Oscar? Yeah, exactly. We call these rocks the baby hair. Almost the same size of a baby hair. Like no one wants to hit a baby. You have two options. Avoid the rock on the left. The second option, avoid the rock on the right. It's very simple, guys, but you don't believe how many people crash because they look at the obstacles, they lock the brakes, they lose traction, and they crash. Okay, so our guide just explained how crazy this is actually going to be. Well, he told us loads of safety rules with examples of people who had died earlier. Not following them. Yeah, so this person died doing this, this person died doing this, and we're just like, okay, well, better keep track of all those rules. I think the worst thing is that the rule here is you have to stay on the left, which is the side of the cliff, because if you need to overtake someone, you need to do it on the right, which means you need to be pretty close to the edge the whole time. Off we go. As you can tell, the road got really rocky and bumpy, so recording the ride got increasingly challenging. After a while, the phones would just give up and refuse to continue recording the road, gravitating instead toward our concentrated facelessness. Along the way, our guides showed us lots of places where accidents had occurred and where huge landslides had temporarily destroyed the road. Another landslide. The road was closed all of last year because of this. There's a big cross halfway. That's the place where the biggest accident happened on the dead zone. 108 people died in one big track. Look at that. Basically, the whole road just has an edge like that. I think we're quite lucky the weather is this bad, so we can't really see how far down we're 70 minutes into Death Road. In some ways, it's not as scary as we expected, although it's very intense on the body because you're constantly like, like you're Nicki Minaj with the VMEs. Yeah, it's tough on the hands. It's tough on the butt. I can also feel my boobs shaking constantly. If it wasn't for the cliff, I would feel like I was biking in the UK because this is my image from growing up in the UK, this type of weather. You can't even see the rainforest, sort of. We have an ambulance here, always at the ready. There are quite a few accidents that happen like all the time still, although the mortality on the road has gone down a lot since a few years back. Okay, so apparently we're posing for this kind of picture now. And let's have a look down. Please excuse my helmet head of hair. But yeah, more and more layers are coming off as we're going further down into the valley. And it's so nice now that we got out of the clouds and we're further down and we can actually see the view. And we're at about 1500 meters right now. No, what? Bike. Bike it. No, just bike it. That's going to be harder to do. No, drive. Do that. Okay, this is, this is a very... Choices. What are you trying to do? We only have 500 meters left until we get through. After over six hours on Death Road, we were beyond exhausted and didn't record anything until we were leaving Bolivia the next day from Santa Cruz. All right, and just like that, it is time to leave Bolivia. We've had the most amazing time here and we can't wait to come back. We really can't, but it's also been so intense. And that's why we didn't record anything when we got back yesterday because we were literally dead. Yeah, it's cool to have done Death Road, but I would never do it again. That first bit, the first hour was amazing. The rest of it wasn't just not really worth the slack, but still an amazing time in Bolivia overall. And we got to leave on National Day, which makes it even more awesome. So until we see you in our 95th country, which you'll see soon, see you around the world.