So unfortunately we didn't have time to go down to the salt flats in Uyuni because we had to get to La Paz for the start of our G.A.P tour. Of course everyone we met had been and banged on about how amazing they are, so I was a little gutted but there wasn't much we could do I mean time is time and everywhere we've been on the trip, we've always lacked that little bit extra to do that on more thing. Anyway so we got to La Paz at like 5 in the morning but couldn't check into the hostel (Loki hostel, the main one of course!) till 2, so we had to mooch about for 7 hours on the internet and in town which sucked. La Paz is a typical bustling South American city of busy gridlocked streets and too many people. Of course it's no Rio or Buenos Aires in that it's dirtier and a bit more run down, but it had all the usual in a multitude of restaurants and huge market places for us to buy more crap. But the main backpacking thing to do there is a bike tour of the world's most dangerous road. Now this road basically connects the Bolivian part of the Amazon to the capital via mountainous jungle and is really narrow and steep with a lot of sharp vertical drops. So it doesn´t sound too appealing to do on a bike, but we signed up with the most expensive tour group Gravity because it had the best bikes and the best safety records, as well as the only company to have equipment to rescue you if you fell off. In fact our tour leader had to pull a guy who went with one of the less reliable companies out of the jungle just a week before after he flew of one of the cliff faces. He died though unfortunately, apparently he was was a little overconfident in his abilities, one of the main reasons people die on the road, as well as being monged off their face on drugs. Apparently some of the people who had died that year had tested positive for weed, coke and crack?!?! I mean why the hell would you bother? ¨I'm going to cruise down the world's most dangerous road on bike, I know, I'll hit me up some crack to get me in the mood.¨ Idiots. Anyway the morning of the tour, my stomach was a little giddy, but I took some immodium to keep it under wraps and was fine during the ride. Now I have to say as scary as it was it was immensely enjoyable. At first you cruise down roads with barriers to get a feel for it and build up confidence before you hit the rocky paths with the sheer vertical drops into the jungle abyss. I felt pretty confident so was cannoning it down pretty fast and it was an unbelievable rush. It was easily one of the best activities i´ve done on the trip, hooning it down left and right around the mountains nearly bailing a few times with certain death always mere inches away. It was awesome! The only downside was that every time we got to a checkpoint, we had to wait absolutely ages for the slow people at the back to catch up, constantly sporting the most despairing look on their faces with there hands firmly clasped on the brakes at all times. I mean if you know you´re not going to enjoy this kind of stuff why bother? Anyway after a long and luckily event-free ride, everyone finally made it to the animal sanctuary at the bottom where they give you lunch. There´s loads of monkeys just mooching about the place and mingling with everyone which was pretty cool. But it was at that point that I took a turn for the worst. I felt like someone was stabbing me in the stomach and I could barely move, let alone enjoy all the seemingly delicious food that a lot of the fortune I spent on the tour must have gone into. The long and laborious bus ride back was definitely some of the worst hours of my entire life. My insides were wrenching and churning as if they were being ripped apart slowly, and the pain was incomprehensively horrendous it was beyond ridiculous. I was keeled over in my seat clutching my belly for dear life whilst grinding my teeth into powder and telling myself I wasn´t going to die. Forget all the overnight buses and all that crap, that was the worst journey ever, I thought it would never end. When I finally got back to the hostel, Ben ditched me for dinner and I called for the doctor. He came and had a look at me and listened to my stomach and said that my intestines were spasming (who knew they could do that?) and that I needed to go the hospital immediately. Now I didn´t want to be that guy, but I had to ask if I could go to a private hospital and not a public one. I know what a stuck up twat, but in my state I didn´t give a s***, and it turns out they send tourists to the private hospital anyway. So there I was in the hospital with an intestinal infection in an actually fairly nice room with a bathroom and a TV, with a drip pumping me with all kinds of stuff, I gave up asking what it was after a while. I have to say as bad a state as I was in, I felt much better the next day and probably the worst thing about it all was the boredom in the room. So it wasn´t too bad in there for a few days and the nurses were really friendly, speaking Spanish really helped. I was even asked to go down the corridor with my drip in hand, like you see old people do in hospital TV series, to translate for another tourist (who later the nurse told me had overdosed, which I´m pretty sure she´s not supposed to tell me, but she took a bit of a liking to me, even giving me her number to call her when I got out, of course I didn´t, but who picks up at hospital? a legend thats who haha). In the mean time I´m not sure what Ben was doing, but apparently he did go out one night and hung around with strange locals in the street till 5 in the morning?!?! So the mind boggles what he gets up to when I´m incapacitated. Anyway eventually I was back to my old self and got out of the hospital just in time for the G.A.P tour. Funnily enough my test results revealed a few other interesting things, basically that I had been eating really poorly on the trip, surprise surprise, and had imbalances and deficiencies of loads of things and I was given a strict diet by the doctor that the whole ordeal kind of convinced me into following. So apart from the actual biking, not the best stay in La Paz, but this sort of thing was bound to happen at some stage with my dietary habits so far. Well I´ll enjoy it while I can because when I go home it will be a different story. I hope forever.