Harald´s run

Last week was Harald´s run! He ran more than 45 kilometers (28 miles), gaining 2,200 meters (7,260 feet) in altitude! He started at 5:30 a.m. in the plaza of Coroico, a town in the yungas of Bolivia, and he ran to the top of "the world´s most dangerous road."

The yungas are subtropical valleys of steep, forested slopes squeezed between the Cordillera and the Amazon lowlands. The village of Coroico is at 5,808 feet. Harald started by running 7 km downhill over wet cobblestones in the rain to Yolosa, the low point at 3,911 feet.

From there, he ran uphill on the old road from Coroico to La Paz. The road was built by Paraguayan prisoners of war, 50 years ago during the Chaco war. They built it by hand, with no dynamite, on steep mountain sides that plunge straight down many meters to the valley floor below.

The road is known as thw world´s most dangerous road, or the road of death. It is a dirt road, only one lane wide in many places. Noone knows how many buses and trucks and cars have plunged to the jungle floor below, because their remains are irretrievable in the terrain, and the fast-growing jungle plants quickly cover their path to destruction. But the many crosses lining the road give us some idea.

Harald hired, as support for his run, a man named Octavio who works for an adventure tour company. Octavio, in his 30s, has been driving the road of death since he was 18 years old. He started by driving a minibus full of passengers. Now he drives a Landrover as support for bicyclists who descend the road.

As far as anyone can tell us, nobody has ever tried to run up the road of death before, and Octavio was excited to act as Harald´s support in this endeavor. In fact, some of Octavio´s colleagues were jealous of his role.

As Harald ran, Octavio and Gary and I followed behind in the Landrover, refilling Harald´s water bottles and passing him bananas, grown fresh in the region.

As we rounded curve after narrow curve, looking down over the steep precipices, Octavio told us story after story of people who had died on the road. One of the deaths occurred while Octavio was driving a support vehicle for a group of cyclists going down the road. Two young Israeli men in the group were messing around, kicking and slapping each other as they sped down the road. One lost control and plunged over an edge. It took many hours to retrieve his body.

In another place, an Italian cyclist, startled by a truck honking its horn to warn oncoming traffic that it was rounding a curve only one lane wide, plunged to his death.

A bus driver, trying to make room for an oncoming truck, miscalculated and the bus, full of passengers, tumbled to the valley floor. Most of the bodies could not be retrieved. The spot is marked by one large cross and a group of smaller crosses.

In the 1950s a Bolivian dictator had five political prisoners thrown, alive, from a precipice along the road, called el balcón.

In another spot, a drunken truck driver lost control of his vehicle and plunged to his death, along with a load of lumber. Octavio tells me that all of the truck drivers keep coca leaves, cigarettes and alcohol on hand. The alcohol gives them a bit of energy for their long hours of driving, as long as they don´t drink too much. Octavio doesn´t seem to understand my shock upon hearing this.

Meanwhile, every day many groups of cyclists speed down the road, and apparently most of them make it to the bottom alive. I now appreciate the truth of their T-shirts, which say, "I survived the Carretera de la Muerte (death road)."

The Carretera de la Muerte has become a lot safer during the past year, as a new road to Coroico finally opened. Now, few vehicles use the old road, aside from the cyclists and their support vehicles. On our way up, we saw several people walking, two road maintenance crews, one large dual axel freight truck, one bus, three private vehicles that appeared to contain tourists, and four groups of cyclists with their support vehicles.

Harald was tired early on, maybe because of the muggy yunga climate at low altitude. Octavio served him some coca tea, which helped him with his energy. Harald ran, and crossed two rivers that flow over the road, and ran, and ran through a series of waterfalls, and ran, and reached the fog as he gained altitude, ran, and drank more coca tea. In one place he ran through the debris of an avalanche that had fallen over the road the night before. Earlier in the morning, truck drivers had cleared a path wide enough for a vehicle to pass. In all Harald ran until, after 7 hours and 21 minutes, he reached the end of the old road at a town (or series of stalls on the road) called Unduavi.

In total, Harald ran 28 miles and gained 7,260 feet in altitude. His high point, just before Unduavi, was at 3,600 meters, or 11,880 feet. Harald had wanted to reach La Cumbre pass, at 4,660 meters or 15,378 feet, surrounded by towering snowcapped peaks, but he will have to save that part of the run for another day.

Harald, who regularly trains anyway, trained for this run for six months, running up to 115 km every week, and during his visit to Bolivia he ran regularly at altitudes above 11,000 feet. He said that he had prepared well for the altitude but that he underestimated the difficulty of the changing climate during the run.

It was a wonderful experience to be a part of Harald´s run. Upon arriving back in La Paz, Harald was interviewed by a national Bolivian TV station and his story appeared on two news channels along with a picture of Harald and Gary and Octavio, and many of the other pictures that I took during the run.

Our friend Christian, another of our UWC classmates who is from Denmark but lives in Brazil with his wife Camila, also our classmate, also traveled to Coroico with us in order to support Harald on the run. However, Christian was experiencing his own run, a.k.a. tourist diarrhea, and wasn´t able to join us. Christian provided great support for Harald before the run in any case, as did Bertha.

Photos of Harald´s run are on our flickr site.

Before the run, we stayed at the Hotel Esmeralda in Coroico. We had a hotel suite that was the most beautiful we´ve ever seen! It had two floors. The bedroom upstairs had a whole wall of windows that open over a beautiful view of the valley and mountains and the town of Coroico. When we arrived, we could hear, through the open windows, a band practicing for carnaval.

The downstairs of our suite had a bathroom with a great, hot shower, a living room with a couch, and a beautiful balcony with a breakfast nook and hammock overlooking the same beautiful view. I think it would be wonderful to meet a group of family or friends at this hotel sometime (hint hint).