Drunken ride with a deadly drop...

We managed to get our room in Loki hostel and it did turn out to be alot of fun, it has its own bar which is pretty cheap and is full of travellers. We met up with Christian and Richard, the guys we were travelling with in Sucre, and decided to go out with them that night. This was probably not the best plan as later that day we booked to go on Death Road with a company called Xtreme, we paid less than half the amount of Gravity which is the advised company with all the safety equiptment, 60quid though and we paid 25! The night out was fun, the next morning was not! We had to get up at 6 and drive up to the starting point of 4700m, we were both feeling pretty sick and the 3 other girls from our hostel who went with us were pretty glad they didn´t go out too. They gave us jackets and trousers to put over our clothes, and we got gloves and helmets so it was all safe enough. The bikes were in ok condition, not brilliant though and the brakes were not what I had hoped for. We started off on a practice run down a tarmac road which was a hell of alot safer than Death Road itself except there were quite a few cars who came round the corners a bit too quickly. It was strange as there was snow at the top of the mountain, yet when we had finished the ride it was warm jungle. At the top of Death Road we asked if there were many cars, our guide said no, two minutes later a car came speeding past us and down the mountain! The road was a dirt track, stupidly bumpy with a 1000m drop to our left. At one point we rode under a waterfall which was pretty amazing except the road was alot more slippery there and the drop to our left was just as big! After about 10 minutes all of our hands were stiff from holding the brakes non stop and our bums were seriously bruised from all the bumping. We rode past alot of graves on the way down, one for a bus crash which had killed 70 people and alot from bikers high on adrenaline. There was a cross in memory of an English biker who had died on the road in May this year, they had put up a couple of wooden bars across the place where he had fallen, to be honest I don´t think they will stop anyone else doing the same thing there. We finished the ride at 1100m in blazing sunshine, the views down the whole of the road were amazing (when you were brave enough to take your eyes off the road) but by the end we were all pretty tired.When we reached the bottom of the road and were taken by minibus to a hotel in Coroico and allowed showers before an awesome buffet lunch. We then headed back up Death Road in the minibus to La Paz. After the night before me and Drew were feeling pretty terrible, mountain biking apparently doesn´t cure hangovers, so 6pm and we went straight to bed. We have spent the past two days doing not alot in La Paz, I´m still not bored of the markets and there is an awesome Arabic restaurant with really cheap food which we have been to pretty much everyday. The market food is also really cheap and good, you can get a ball of mash potato with meat and onions in the middle for about 9p so we havn´t been spending too much while we have been here. Tomorrow we are off to Copacabana, a town on the bank of lake Titicaca. There is an island that you can go and visit from there which sounds quite cool, its quite small so you can walk from one side to the other and apparently the views are amazing. After that... PERU