World´s Scariest Road!

This is actually a picture of The World´s Most Dangerous Road (also found in Bolivia) but you pretty much get the idea..

The road from Tarija toVilla Montes is by far the most terrifying road I have ever been on. I´ve heard it was a horrible road, but I didn´t realize quite how bad. I think the majority of people try to sleep through it so they don´t really know how bad it is or maybe they´re just a lot more badass than me and don´t whine about it so much. But I had the pleasure of being awake most of the time and a window seat with a nice view of the potential for disaster. The nine hour trip snakes through a huge sub- Andean mountain range. The road is unpaved and the majority of it is one way. Barely big enough for a car let alone a monstrous flota (bus). And did I mention this was a night trip? Which I think may actually be an advantage because you can see the headlights of oncoming vehicles from far away. I have never been so freaked by a road in my life! The first three or so hours was scary, but the road seemed to be wide enough with at least a few feet between the flota tires and the edge of the cliff with sporadic turnouts to let oncoming trucks squeeze by. I got car sick with all the turns and whatnot and I´m pretty sure I heard someone puke somewhere in the bus through my earphones. But that´s about as bad as it got. My friend actually got puked on by some kid on this same road, but that´s another story... Sometime after Entre Rios (which they are sending a new volunteer... poor thing. I don´t think I´d ever leave my site for fear of the road if I was her!) I open my eyes and catch the image of a camion(truck) a couple hundred of feet in front of us going around a bend. The lights from the truck illuminate the profile of the mountain. And then I realize just how bad this road is. We´re not talking about a gentle 45 degree slope, it´s more like 80. With a drop of who know´s how many hundreds of feet. All I know is it´s so far down you can not see the bottom. It looks like a cliff with a tiny road cut into it and a miniature truck driving by. It looks fake. It´s so steep there aren´t even trees growing on it. It´s just rock. That´s when I start to freak out. Are we really doing this!?! Then I look out the window to see how close to the edge we are and, no joke, I can´t even see the ground underneath us. Just a black abyss... That´s how close to the edge we are. Then I look to the other side of the bus. We are right up against the rocks on the other side of the road. Nope...no room there. And then every nightmare scenario passes through my head. What if another truck comes up the road!?! There´s no way a truck could pass us. If we try to back up... we´ll back up right over the cliff! And then I notice all the crosses along the road which up until that point I had been trying to ignore... two here, three there... a disturbingly common sight. At one point on the road there are so many I think it´s a cemetery for a second. Then I realize we´re still in the middle of nowhere and again they´re by the side of the cliff... oh that must have been a flota... great. This guy in front of me turned around and he must have seen in my face how freaked out I was because he tried to reassure me that there wasn´t much left to go. It was one of those rare times when you think to yourself wow... Í really could die...There´s probably a significant probability of death driving this road. The only reassurances were that the driver did not appear to be drunk (which believe it or not is a really big problem here, they recently started random breathalyzer tests for flota drivers) and he probably drives this road every night... so at least he knows it well. Well... all in all I lived to tell the tale and I will never take that road again!! They should really make it easier for people to travel through northern Argentina to the other side of the Tarija department. There is a new Trans- Chaco road in the process of construction that should make travel a lot safer, but who knows when that will be completed. Bolivia is kind of notorious for it´s roads. It actually has the distinction of having The World´s Most Dangerous Road. Sorry... this entry is kind of morbid I know. But hey thats´s part of living in Bolivia - the treacherous roads! I´ll do my best to avoid them from here on out.