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Hola todos!Kate and I are in Coroico at the moment, a few hours from La Paz in the Northern Yungas! Home to coca, coffee and honey. We rode down the World´s Most Dangerous Road to get here, on amazing full suspension mountain bikes, Kate´s was fittingly named Idiota! It was incredible; 5 hours of biking, first on lightening fast steep winding tarmac, then on to the Most Dangerous Road itself which is a narrow, steep, gravel track with sheer rock faces to one side and up to a 600 foot drop to the other. Amazing scenery rushing past but if you looked for too long you could end up over the edge or into the wall! Because I´m a big boy and not averse to going very fast down hills, I started at the back with Kash on the first section of road on the tarmac, and slowly (or is that very, very, very quickly!!) moved to the front. This meant that people let me go off at the front for the whole trip because my terminal velocity was faster than theirs. It was crazy, I was going SO fast and having to overtake lorries and trucks zooming round the outside of them. The feeling of leaning in and swerving round corners was just like a good snowboarding run. . .…Then we got on to the gravel road and the World´s Most Dangerous part. It was pretty hairy and I was still at the front just behind the guide. Amazing to be going so fast next to such incredible drops and you really have to concentrate as there are loads of really slippy pieces of bedrock sticking out, huge boulders from landslides and cambers that lead you to the edge.Kate had an amazing day too, but the one section that I did with her at the back was a little bit painful and she said I shouldn´t put pressure on her to go faster than she wanted. She kept making little sad faces at me from the back when we stopped at the checkpoints though, she was pretty worried I was going to kill myself too, and she gave me the People´s Eyebrow when the guide talked about getting too cocky! I also kept daydreaming when the guides talked about which corners to look out for on the next section and when I asked Kash once which corner I needed to slow down on she replied "ALL OF THEM!!". She´s a worrier. . .Had a really weird night the night we got here though. We were recommended a hostel by this weird South African dude who ran the animal shelter where we had lunch after the ride. He said it would be run by a Swiss guy and that we could expect great rooms, hot showers, amazing food, Swiss chocolates. . .when we got there (down a very dark old road miles from the main plaza) we basically found a guy´s house, complete with wife, wife´s sister and husband and LOADS of kids!! Yes the guy WAS Swiss, and had married a Bolivian woman. Anyway, the room looked like an old children´s bedroom, was full of bugs (I hate MOSQUITOS!!) and we didn´t see any food, or Swiss choccies (except for some old Lindt in a jar, but that was later!).We were in our room playing cards and we heard the two families putting the kids to bed, then everything went very quiet. . .UNTIL. . .we heard the horrible shrill of a child crying. It got worse and worse and we wondering why somebody hadn´t been to sort it out. I opened our door and everything was dark. The parents, both sets, had just gone out!! They had left their kids alone in a house, with the doors open and with two complete (but admittedy very nice looking) strangers!! The boy´s crying continued and got worse, but we could hardly go up to his room and see what the matter was!! Eventually though we heard him come out of his room, come down the steep stone steps to the patio outside our room, go past our room, and then out of the open door into the night, crying all the way!! It was at this point that I decided enough´s enough, and leapt up and out to find him in the pitch black garden! Incredible, I couldn´t believe what was happening. I had to grab our torch from the room before finding him in the garden. He was about 2 years old. I managed to talk him into the house and stop him crying in my best softly softly spanish but he wasn´t saying anything (we later learned that he can´t talk yet. . .at all. . .he´s 2!!). He was just wandering around the house in the dark so I was turning lights on for him and trying to find the house phone so we could try and call the parents. There wasn´t one though, and after about an hour, the little guy looked really cold and about to fall asleep on his feet, so Kate got a blanket (or more accurately one of my hoodies) and wrapped him in it. He proceeded to dribble all over it (thank you Kate!) and started crying again. So Super Kate scooped him up and took him up to his room (finding two other kids sleeping in there!) calmed him down, and got him back to sleep. I was just thinking what a crazy situation it was and how I couldn´t have taken him up there. Imagine if his parents had come home and found a strange man in their room with their 3 young children!! Crazy, but they had put us in that position!After Kate had put him to sleep and come down, the parents eventually came back at which point we went mental at them. They said it wasn´t our place to say anything and then went on to say that it´s just the culture, they just could not accept that it is wrong to leave your children like that. . .even in light of what happened. They treated us to peaches like "he never wakes up". ..well he clearly does. . . and "it´s perfectly safe, we don´t have murderers and rapists in Bolivia"! The mum actually admitted that she doesn´t like the way her friends do the same thing but LOCK the children in the room. She was such a spaz. "How can you understand, you don´t have kids! You´ll do the same when you do". . .actually, it´s ILLEGAL in NORMAL countries. Can you believe that?! Insane. Obviously we refused to pay for the room. Kate told them she would get more babysitting for an hour than the room costs for the night! Anyway, the following day we found a nice new hostel with fantastic views of the jungle valleys surrounding us, and chilled. We had to, as yet again we were stuck in a town due to blockades! Good job too as we were both pretty ill last night, feeling a bit better this morning, but obviously I was convinced that I had Malaria! Back to La Paz we go today for a quick stop-over, and maybe a prison visit (I´ll tell you about that one next time if we can pull it off!), then on to Copacabana, our last Bolivian destination on Lake Titicaca before we hit Peru (we´re really looking forward to leaving Bolivia!). I know it´s another long one, but I did proof read this time so screw you all! Plus, there´s only another 4 weeks of our trip so suck it up!Love to all,Nick & Kash xxxP.S. Lubes, I miss your messages, ignore my dad´s comments, he likes to offend, but you should know he´s only messing! And by writing this on our blog you are sure to receive more abuse from him, sorry, he´s slightly senile! Kash xP.P.S. Jan, get your ass on facebook chess, it will keep you entertained on your long nights in Kiev when we are missing you in the States (in between chilling by the pool, and going to sunnydaes! etc, haha!).
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