Well, maybe it was more bad luck and stupidity, but the Death Road played its part! The plan was to do a five-day jungle backcountry cycling tour from La Paz, starting with the (in)famous Camino de la Muerte. While in Sucre and La Paz, I had searched high and low (four bike shops and a few other sports stores) to find a couple of tubes to replace two of the three I had at the time. I was on eight punctures in total after the joy ride in Sucre, and had even patched a patch, and one of the tubes had a slow leak I couldn’t find, so…I was due.

(Three-for-one deal!)

Shitty thing is, no one had the size I needed, so when a shop finally had the right size but with a different valve, I didn’t care, nor did I (foreshadowing) bother to think if the valve and my rims were compatible.

Anyway, I rolled out of La Paz feeling good with two new tubes and three remaining patches, or an allotment of five potential mishaps. Surely my luck wouldn’t be that rotten!

After basically pushing my bike up the 35% slopes out of La Paz, and again up the 20% slopes above 4000m, I reached the summit (side note: at 4660ish meters, or 15,300ish feet, this may be the highest point I ever reach on land).

(Lower section was 20%, upper section was about 10%, no matter what your eyes tell you from the photo. As I was pushing my bike up one of the steeper sections, a cholita asked me if I’d give her a ride to the top. She was sassy!)

There began a glorious 63km descent, including 30 or so on the much hyped Death Road, so named because when it was open to traffic, something like 200-300 people died each year from accidents in which they tumbled off the road and plummeted thousands of meters to the bottom of the canyon.

The asphalted descent was marvelous, 60-70 kph, no brakes, stunning scenery, leading to the turn off to the more adventurous descent. And that’s where my luck ran out. I didn’t get more than five minutes down the Death Road before my front tire went completely flat. I walked to a small settlement, propped my bike against some sign posts, tried pumping to find the leak to no avail, got one of the new tubes out, and quickly realized that the valve didn’t fit through the hole in the rim. So I tried finding the leak again, but the slits were so big, air leaked straight out. So I was thinking I was pretty hosed. Kilometers from the highway, in a settlement of 10 people, and with absolutely no way to get anywhere (other than my feet) where I could solve the problem.

Then along comes a truck, naturally not in the direction I need, but he stops at my beckoning and we get to chatting about my predicament. We start negotiating a price for him to take me back up to the highway before he decides he’s not convinced I know what I’m talking about and he starts investigating the tube himself. Turns out, he was able to find the cause, a pinch-flat (the rim slams into a rock and slices/pinches the tube at both contact points) with slits about a centimeter long each. I have patches but am unconvinced they’ll hold, particularly with another 25km of rocky descending, but we patch, things look okay, so the dude takes off. The universe didn’t see fit to let me have this small victory untarnished; as I grappled with my bike and gear, I put my hand on the ground, only to draw it up and see a shade of brown on my thumb which instantly induced a gag reflex. A brown not found in inanimate nature, a shade that mud is somehow incapable of achieving. I looked for a place to clean my hand, best I could do was some tree leaves. Gross.

Anyway. Miraculously, the patches held, though I was ill at ease and descended in a semi-state of cautious paranoia, rather than with the semi-reckless abandon I would have preferred. And it was awesome.

Here’s a poorly-edited, sped up version of parts of the descent to give you a taste. Lovely, but really not dangerous.

The 100 person village I stayed in didn’t have a bike shop, so I decided I’d ride to the next big town the following morning and if I couldn’t get new tubes, I’d go back to La Paz, not wanting to be stranded even further away from civilization (or tour agencies catering to the Death Road hype). Turns out, even that wasn’t gonna happen. The patches had indeed failed, by some miracle not while I was riding, but regardless, I couldn’t ride any further. After being told that all of the taxi drivers were busy laying brick, I found a spot to sit and waited for opportunities to hitchhike, a pack of strays keeping me company while playing a game of “who can pee on the idiot’s gear the longest before he notices.” Awesome. Thankfully they seemed mostly to be peed out, so their best attempt only yielded a few drops on the anyway waterproof bags.

After a couple hours, a guy in a truck came by, and, not being an asshole, offered to take me to the nearest mini village on the highway for free. Once there, I quickly found a bus headed back to La Paz, so set my bags down nearby and started to help the driver hoist my bike onto the roof. While he was tying it down, I took my panniers around the side and loaded them on the seat, leaving only a couple small bags left on the ground near the bus. Which a nearby car then proceeded to run over, mortally wounding my Kindle (which is pretty devastating, particularly as I had started a delightful new book in the two hours I was waiting for a ride) and nearly doing the same to the bag itself, with nary a word of apology or a moment’s wait before continuing on his merry way. Insult to injury.

That’s why I’m back in La Paz now, sad both about the jungle trip I will no longer be doing and about my dead Kindle, but happy that I have restocked with proper tubes and patches. I’ll now cycle a few days to get to Lake Titicaca instead. Won’t be so much a change of pace from the previous altiplano riding, but the lake itself should be spectacular, and at least I got to do the Death Road. Shit happens, move on, no sense crying over spilt milk, etc. Onwards!