[imagesource:here]

On the “Camino de la Muerte”, or Death Road, you’ll see more roadside shrines than safety barriers as you twist down the roughly 65 kilometres of crumbling mountainside.

That’s because every year, dozens of vehicles and passers-by tumble into the deadly abyss that runs alongside the dusty and narrow road.

Around 300 people a year are estimated to plunge to their deaths as they attempt to navigate what the Inter-American Development Bank described as “the world’s most dangerous road”.

Image: Discovery

The treacherous stretch lies between the Andean city of La Paz and the small town of Coroico, providing a connection to the Amazon rainforest region in northern Bolivia.

The road was built out of necessity by Paraguayan prisoners of war after the catastrophic Chaco War (1932-35), reports BBC Travel, and has since led to many a death.

Image: Hotcars

If you find yourself on the road, you might have to wriggle past some areas that are only three metres wide, navigate a series of sharp turns and blind corners, bypass mini waterfalls, and manoeuvre so as not to fall down the near-vertical 1 000-metre drops as you mop up sweat and rub dust from your eyes.

Somehow, despite the road’s macabre reputation, it has become something of a tourist attraction, bringing in a steady stream of cyclists and daredevils eager to challenge their immortality.

The road also lends further intrigue, as beyond it is a world where two resources have been the centre of controversy for centuries: coca and gold.

Coca contains the psychoactive alkaloid, cocaine, but in its raw state provides the cultural backbone of the area as it is considered a sacred plant by many Bolivians.

Here is a snap of some coca leaves being dried in Cruz Loma village near Coroico:

Image: Mathess/Getty Images

Hotcars has more about the road one should really travel less:

This scary piece of road is definitely not for the faint-hearted. It’s a rough old dirt-track that carves its way through the Andes mountains, in a remote jungle location where extreme weather conditions are the norm.

In a YouTube video uploaded to the Free Documentary channel, viewers witness Omar, a local truck driver, negotiate the deadly stretch of road in his Volvo truck, while he transports a 25-ton load of timber from a remote rainforest area to the city.

We’ll plop that documentary video here for your consideration:

[sources:bbc&hotcars]