The Most Dangerous Roads in the World

I was psyched when this link showed up in my del.icio.us inbox today. The guys at Dark Roasted Blend present us with “The Most Dangerous Roads in the World:” I recommend checking out the whole collection. I had an experience on an Alaska road that rivals the scenes you’ll see from Russia’s Yakutsk Highway.  But visually, Bolivia’s “Road of Death” (on the right) takes the cake. Here’s an excerpt:

North Yungas Road is hands-down the most dangerous in the world for motorists. If the previous road is just impassable, this one clearly endangers your life. It runs in the Bolivian Andes, 70 km from La Paz to Coroico, and plunges down almost 3,600 meters in an orgy of extremely narrow hairpin curves and 800-meter abyss near-misses. A fatal accident happens there every couple of weeks, 100-200 people perish there every year. In 1995 the Inter-American Development Bank named the La Paz-to-Coroico route “the world’s most dangerous road.”

Among the route there are many visible reminders of accidents, wreckages of lorries and trucks lie scattered around at the bottom… 

One update on the Road of Death: a wider, paved bypass opened in 2006, and almost all the La Paz to Coroico traffic moved onto it. The old road still carries the name and a steady stream of mountain bikers and hikers, but it is no longer the daily lorry route that produced those casualty numbers.