Well today was the day for the Death Road. It was extremely rainy and cloudy and very hard to steer and see and stuff. Jeff fell off his bike less than 2 minutes into it and broke his wrist. He is ok and is in the hospital. It was really unfortunate and it sucks, but I´m just really thankful that he fell onto the road and not off the cliff. He said there wasn´t much pain and it was just really numb. So we can praise God for that and for the fact that he´s still with us. He´s spending the night in the hospital and hopefully we´ll be on our way to our next destination the day after tomorrow.
So Josh and I continued down the Death Road without him. Dan Saldi was our tour guide and there were 10 other people on the tour with us. Josh and I would have gone to the hospital with Jeff but the bus took him and didn´t wait for us. So we just had to keep going. Later the bus came back and followed our group for the rest of the trip like it was supposed to. We started our descent at around 4800 meters and descended all the way to about 1200 meters. The trip was 64 km long. At the start it was raining and extremely frigid. We were all soaked to the bone. There were so many clouds that we really couldn´t take many photos. I decided to leave my big camera on the bus so I didn´t have that. I had my little point and shoot though and it got completely drenched. Amazingly it just kept on running and I got photos from it all day long. I didn´t really get too many cuz that road is dangerous enough without holding a camera, so I had to stop every now and then to get a shot. It is now all dried out and doesn´t seem to be any worse for the wear.
After about 2 hours of descending the rain let up and it got really nice and comfortable. We were completely dry by the end of the trip. We did go under a couple waterfalls which renewed our state of being soaked, and we also forged a couple rivers. All this of course on a 10 foot wide gravel road with hundreds or thousands of feet drop. It was great.
At the end of the trip we went to this hotel for lunch and a shower. There was also a pool that we could have swam in but it looked kinda yucky so I passed on that. All in all it was a good trip and it was great to have Dan as our guide. In case you don´t know Dan is currently a Junior at Taylor and he´s an MK who grew up here in Bolivia. Never hurts to have friends all around the world!
3 Responses to A Not So Minor Accident