An alternative Inca Trail… in Bolivia
Venturing high into the Bolivian mountains, Wanderlust reader Daniel Davies-Llewellyn traces an ancient route through thick forest and remote villages
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The taxi’s engine hummed in the cold mountain air. I stood and wondered if I’d be OK with the altitude; not for the first time that day, my heart started to race.
The driver had pulled over to let me relieve myself and I was now seriously doubting what we’d let ourselves in for. A dark lake lay below me, reflecting my mood, its surface rippled by the keen winds whipping off the high peaks to the north.
We were already at 4,000m and still had a way to go to the trailhead at La Cumbre, almost 1,000m higher up the road. I jumped back in the passenger seat of the ageing car we’d hailed back in La Paz and we started to climb the last few kilometres to the pass.
We’d opted to kill two birds with one stone and hike down from the heights of the Cordillera Real to Coroico, experiencing one of Bolivia’s most beautiful treks along paved pre-Columbian Inca roads while avoiding a section of highway popularly know as ‘the world’s most dangerous road’.
It had won this accolade on account of its regular fatal accidents, usually involving buses going off the edge and plummeting several thousand feet to the valley floor. There was, of course, the option of tearing down said road on a bike but the idea of missing out on the superlative scenery as it whipped by in a blur surrounded by a bunch of adrenalin junkies didn’t sound appealing, so my girlfriend and I had chosen the trek.
At the pass the taxi pulled away, made a U-turn and began its descent back down to the capital. We were alone with not a living thing in sight. Barren brown treeless slopes punctuated with shrinking patches of snow and ice surrounded us, while billowing cloud blown up from the lowlands swirled and danced.
