Ever traveled somewhere just to stay in lodging that made you go “Wow!” as soon as you saw it? I have, charmed by the architecture or the amenities or the once-in-a-lifetime chance to experience a night in a treehouse or a castle or a location I recognized from a movie. With that in mind, Airbnb has a category called OMG, featuring what it calls “unique abodes”—and indeed, there are dozens to choose from that will make you marvel. I picked out nine from around the world that are weird, wonderful, and might make your next trip one of the most adventurous yet.

1. Sleep in a Tower Above the Sea, Panama

You’ll have amazing views of the Caribbean from this four-story structure, located in the tropical Panamanian archipelago of Bocas del Toro. Explore area mangroves, surf the nearby Carneros point break, birdwatch—you’ve got the ideal hideout—for the more than five dozen native species, or just gaze downward into waters frequented by fish, stingrays, and dolphins. Head inland to catch a glimpse of anteaters, sloths, monkeys, and bats. A dinghy will transport you the short distance offshore to this unique tower, which sleeps up to five people. Plan to visit during the drier months, typically January through May and September through October, and pack quick-dry clothing for any surprise showers.

2. Snuggle Up in a Snow Igloo, Finland

Immerse yourself in the landscape of Lapland with a stay at this igloo, located adjacent to a lake and PyhĂ€-Luosto National Park, and created winter after winter by the family that rents it out. You and up to three others will have your own bed—but come prepared for the cold, with your own sleeping bag and adequate thermal wear, because below-zero temperatures are the norm here much of the year. (Although a nearby shared, heated house for visitors to use is available with a kitchen, toilets, and a shower.) The flip side of feeling the chill is getting to admire the northern lights, not to mention nearby cross-country trails, a downhill ski resort, and owners who work as adventure outfitters and can arrange activities in the surrounding area, including fat biking, snowshoeing, horseback riding, and ice fishing.

3. Get Grounded in This Earth Conker, Wales

It’s a metal soccer ball, a space orb, a copper conker, as Brits call it (that’s a buckeye to you and me). However you think of it, this innovative outpost offers simple pleasures amid the moors of central Wales. When the weather is wet—something that happens on the regular—you’ll need four-wheel drive to navigate the terrain. But if off-grid is what you’re after, and a routine of daily walks in the woods, past grazing sheep, and down to the small nearby town and its pub, followed by a campfire and a homemade pizza, and maybe a bath in the outdoor tub, then this remote, for up to two people will aid what ails you.

4. Play Out the Apocalypse in This Bunker, New Mexico

Step back in time, and below ground, with an overnight visit at this historic bunker outside Roswell. The site is one of hundreds around the nation built to defend the U.S. from what were perceived as serious foreign threats during the Cold War. Unfamiliar with that period and its weapons? The owners offer a full tour of the grounds, which include a 186-foot-deep missile silo and a launch-control center, the upper level now renovated to serve as lodging for two, with kitchen essentials, a grill, and shared green space above ground. Spend your evening paging through old instruction manuals and emergency operation procedures or perusing related memorabilia—one guest compared it to staying in a museum, with time to explore and gawk at points of interest like an escape hatch and blast doors—and step outdoors come nightfall to enjoy the immense starry skies, or bring your binocs to birdwatch for owls.

5. Live in a Yellow Submarine, New Zealand

Now you can sing the Beatles’ song in a place nearly perfect for the lyrics. You won’t be underwater, but the coast is a quick 30-minute drive away. Instead, this cheery North Island sub is surrounded by a sea of green: forested farmland 100 miles north of Wellington. From its Beatles-themed bathroom and porthole windows to the bunk-bed quarters for four and more dials and levers than you’ll know what to do with, these creative confines have charmed many an overnight guest.

6. Hang Out in the Belly of a Snake, Mexico

Likely one of the most popular picks on Airbnb, this half-serpent, half-bird, designed to resemble its eponymous Aztec god, is typically booked out months in advance. One look at its imaginative and organic design will explain why: its shape, detailed mosaic tilework and ceramic details, colored-glass windows, an open-air shared deck in the snake’s mouth, and thoughtful landscaping (both inside and out) make this a mythical, one-of-a-kind experience, as many visitors have attested. Located within a 40-acre gated community west of Mexico City, Quetzalcoatl’s Nest consists of ten residences—you’ll be staying in one in the belly of the beast, which can sleep up to six people. Getting there requires a car or an Uber, but the property’s expansive natural surrounds, open spaces, and native wildlife will tempt you to just hang out on-site.

7. Float Your Campsite, the Netherlands

Motor your platform raft around a lake and canals until you’ve found just the right spot to moor for the night. You and a partner can fish, swim, birdwatch, and enjoy as much of a hermetic natural getaway as you like, far from any and all annoying campers, with this raft setup. What’s provided: a tent, a small camping kitchen and a makeshift table and chairs, a portable toilet, and a buoyant pallet with an attached outboard engine. The rest is up to you. Just 30 miles north of Amsterdam, this region is an ideal respite for a quiet weekend, with opportunities to explore nearby windmills, tulip fields, and the dunes of Bergen aan Zee, ten miles west on the North Sea coast.

8. Embrace a Box with a View on the Riviera, Italy

Such simplistic quarters are not what you’d expect to find on the Italian Riviera. But we can’t all afford to stay in a pastel-colored palazzo overlooking the sea. Small and bare-bones, this is. But how much time will you stay holed up in your StarsBox, when the beach is just minutes away by foot and you’ve got an adjacent (albeit shared) swimming pool, hot tub, and sauna at your disposal? We’d argue that, if anything, these digs will prompt you to make the most of your outdoor time. After all, you didn’t come to this part of the Mediterranean to stay indoors.

9. Commune with Animals at a Biosphere, Bolivia

Just outside one of ”țŽÇ±ôŸ±±čŸ±Čč’s most populated cities, Cochabamba, is a beetle-shaped structure set in an agricultural area and backed by the Andes mountains. The owners provide breakfast and then leave to you go about your day—you can hike the foothills, hop the bus into town, or organize a day trip to explore nearby Tunari National Park. But La Biosfera, with its clean, white, modern design and laid-back vibe, tends to keep guests lingering around the property. Wake up to birdsong, do some yoga by the lake, and wander the grassy grounds to encounter free-roaming llamas, peacocks, geese, and other domesticated animals. Shop the local market and then wind things down by the fire pit. Or bring friends for a trip that combines relaxation with high-altitude trekking. That’s how we’d do it.

Tasha Zemke has traveled extensively around the U.S. and the world and has outgrown her desire to camp on a thin blow-up mattress. Airbnbs have become her accommodation of choice, and she spends hours looking for those with notable architecture.ÌęShe recently stayed at a shotgun-style home in New Orleans, where the city’s famous chicory coffee was stocked in the pantry, the nation’s oldest continually functioning streetcar was steps from the front door, and a favorite local shave-ice stand was two blocks away.

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Anyone who harbors fantasies about life on MarsÌęshould visit Kachi Lodge, a surreal colony of luxury domed pods. They’re set in ”țŽÇ±ôŸ±±čŸ±Čč’sÌęUyuni salt flats, the largest on earth, which stretch for more than 4,050 square miles near the nexus of Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. At the base of the 17,000-plus-foot Tunupa volcano, the six suites and central dining and lounge dome were designed by Amazing Escapes, a Swiss company that specializes in once-in-a-lifetime outings—think sleepovers at Khmer temples in Cambodia and James Bond–themed parties in Thailand. Bolivia, long known for its soaring Andean peaks, is experiencing a cultural and culinary renaissance.

At Kachi, Amazing Escapes dialed it up to eleven, partnering with legendary La Paz restaurant Gustu to provide Bolivian-inspired meals (like llama tartare), using a self-sufficient water system powered by the sun, and displaying work by avant-garde artist GastĂłn Ugalde. Inside, the domes have hemp cushions and are softly lit by lanterns. șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, excursions include mountain-biking and hiking the slopes of Tunupa. During the wet season, the lake bed fills with water, and guests can paddleboard across the flats. Meanwhile the Bolivian altiplano, one of the world’s highest plateaus, harbors fascinating archaeological history: visit the pre-Columbian site of Alcaya, or peer in on mummies in a cave above the village of Coquesa. Once you turn in, the Red Planet and southern constellations wink at you in the night sky.

Access: Book with Ìęfor the 45-minute flight down from La Paz to Uyuni. Kachi will send transport for the 60-mile drive to the lodge. Domes start at $1,980 for a two-night-­minimum stay, all-inclusive.

Weather: The dry season runs from May to November, the wet season from December to April. September generally offers blue skies and bright sun, with daytime temperatures in the low sixties. The lodge is open year-round.

Detour: Attend one of the country’s many festivals. During November’s Fiesta de las Ñatitas (“little pug-nosed ones”), some 20,000 people descend on La Paz’s main cemetery, where they parade skulls they believe will bestow blessings.

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I would argue that what makes British adventurer interesting is not the big things he’s done (like spending four years cycling around the world or rowing across the Atlantic), but how he’s learned to evolve and do smaller things—like walking around the M25 (the 117-mile freeway circling London), or trying to eat at a London restaurant from a country representing each letter of the alphabet, A to Z.

Or,Ìęre-tracingÌęLaurie Lee’s early-20thÌęcentury journey from England to Spain on foot, funding the trip only by busking with a violin—which he didn’t really know how to play. That’s the subject of his new book, , available in the U.S. on July 25.

I first heard of Alastair back in 2011, when National Geographic named him one of its for his “microadventures,” the quick escapes he popularized from his London home, and that are much more within the reach of most working folks. (He later turned the idea into a book, .)Ìę

I wanted to sit down and interview Alastair because he’s had to evolve a couple times in his career, starting as a kid who knew nothing about adventure and then pedaled 46,000 miles around the world, and then becoming a guy who trekked across Iceland and rowed across the Atlantic. Then he turned that into a career as an author, keynote speaker, and filmmaker. And he got married, had kids, and had to figure out not only how to fit adventure into a “normal” life, but how to be happy doing that.

On Growing Up

I grew up in the Yorkshire Dales, which is a national park in the north of England. It’s a beautiful part of the north of England, and I had a nice rural childhood of riding my bike and climbing trees and playing in rivers and being out until sunset and all those other clichĂ©s, which I found incredibly boring at the time but now look back on with great nostalgia.

I didn’t really do anything very interesting in my entire life, at all, and certainly nothing adventurous until I was 18, when I finished high school and a friend and I decided to spend a year in Africa teaching in a little rural school. I always think of that as being the end of my childhood and the beginning of my actual life. June 16 is the day I finished my high school exams. I still celebrate that in my head every year as the beginning of my life.

We were teaching a bit of everything. We were in a really rural, poor school in the middle of absolutely nowhere in northern South Africa. We were only 18, but we had a lot of fun, and that’s completely opened up my eyes to this whole new wild, exciting world that existed beyond rural northern England. That’s when IÌęgot hooked on wanting to travel and to see more countries in the world.

From there I went to university in Edinburgh and Oxford. While I was at university, I got quite into physical challenges. To earn money, I joined the Army. Britain has this weird part-time weekend Army, like theÌęArmy Reserve, so I joined that purely because I got paid to run around the hills and they had good parties and cheap beer.ÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌę

I always hated anything we had to do with a gun, but I liked the parts where you had to go run. Doing that really opened my eyes to the fact that I was actually quite good at endurance stuff and suffering and having a miserable time. I’ve never been good at anything in my life, so to suddenly be quite good at being miserable, I started to love that feeling.

By the time I finished university, I decided I wanted to somehow combine my fascination with trying to explore and travel the world, like a lot of young people do, with wanting to have a really miserableÌętime to prove to the world how tough I was, and to prove to myself how tough I was, I suppose. That’sÌęwhat led to me deciding to cycle around the world for a few years.

On the Genesis of the Idea of șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű

I started reading adventure books when I was 18,Ìęjust before my big exams. They’re called A-levels, key exams you do to determine what university you go to. They’re basically the biggest exams in your life, and obviously it’s quite boring studying for them. I discovered two books in the school library, , by Ranulph Fiennes, and , by Benedict Allen.

I read these twoÌęand thought, “Wow, that is the way to properly live a life.”ÌęUntil I was 18, I’d had no inclination of the world of expeditions at all. Through my university yearsÌęI read Kon-Tiki and all the climbing books and all the books you’d expect to read and got completely obsessed with travel writing and expeditions. It was actually wanting to be a writer that made me go and cycle around the world. I wanted to be a travel writer, therefore I had to have something to write about.

On His Propensity for Suffering

I think it mostly just came about from being miserable—at school, not being picked for all the teams that I wanted to be picked for, not hanging out with the cool kids who I wanted to hang out with, just generally feeling slightly on the margins of life. I don’t want to paint a huge sob story because my life was fine, but as a teenager small things seemed big. Even before I was a teenager, I always just felt that I was on the margins and a bit anonymous and never really shone at anything, wasn’t really good at anything.

I think I just had a massive chip on my shoulder, really, and just wanted to try and stand out a bit, I suppose. I think that is probably the driving factor for then just becoming incredibly stubborn. If you’re lying in a cold, wet ditch on some stupid army game pretending that the imaginary enemy is going to come and kill you and you know you’re just pretending and you’re getting paid hardly anything, I was always the person who could lie in the ditch the longest because I just stubbornly refused to get out of the muddy ditch.

There’s nothing very noble or intelligent or anything, but I think that’sÌęthe basis of the next 20 years of my life.

On Not Quitting

Rowing across the Atlantic Ocean was probably the only thing I’ve ever done in lifeÌęwhere there was literally no option of quitting. Once you’re out in the middle of the ocean, you’re just out there. Nothing at all could’ve gotten me off that boat, and it was just impossible to quit.

At first, I found that very frightening, and then I found it hugely liberating, this realization that, “Wow, I can’t quit, I can’t get off this boat.”ÌęAll of those thought processes now become irrelevant, so, “Oh, I might as well just get on with it.”ÌęIt was interesting how much of a shadow normally hangs over the things that I do, which I only noticed once that went away, because it was impossible.

On my cycle trip, I actually had a couple of very conscious strategies to deal with wanting to quit, because a lot of the time I was really quite close to quitting. I had a couple of rules.

The first rule was, I was not allowed to give up at nighttime or when I was cold, wet, scared, or hungry. I could only give up after a good night’s sleep on a sunny, warm morning after a large breakfast. That was, I think, a really important check and balance thing to stop that gut feeling of, “Oh, I just want to go home.”

Then the second clause in my contract with myself was, if I still wanted to give up, that was fine, but I could only give up if I thought of something better to go do with my life. I didn’t want to be shackled to this stupid bike ride for four years. If I had a better option, if some more exciting project came up, I always wanted to feel that I was free to go do that better thing. However, I couldn’t just quit until I thought of a better thing, because that was just a bit pathetic. With those two safety catch things, that’s what helped me overcome the regular urge to want to quit.

On the People Who Unexpectedly Changed His Life

The whole plan of that bike trip was, “Go do a big adventure, get it out of my system, and then go and become Mr. Humphreys, high school science teacher.”ÌęThat was the life plan.

For the first year, cycling down Africa, I was doing it to prove myself to other people like all the teachers who didn’t pick me for the high school cricket team. Then the second year, which was basically cycling through South America, I was doing that to prove whatever to myself.

By the end of the second year, the end of South America, I felt at peace. I thought, “I’ve now cycled a long way, I’ve cycled for two years. That’s a good effort. I can go home with my head held high.” To get from Colombia to Panama there’s the DariĂ©n Gap, the jungle, there’s no road. You have to take a little boat route, so I decided that when I got to the end of Colombia I was going to give up, come home, and that was the end of the trip, and that was fine. I completely decided upon that.

I got to Cartagena, Colombia, and I needed to take a photo of my bike by the sea, and the easiest place to get access to the sea was at the sailing club. I cycled in there, I walked my bike down to the end of the jetty to take my end of continent photograph, did that, and started walking down the jetty in order to go to a travel agent and book my flight home and get on with life.

Walking back down that jetty, some American guy on a little yacht shouted out to me, “Hey, are you looking for a lift to Panama?” which is exactly where I needed to go next. Well, I just had to say, “Yeah, I guess I am,”Ìęso I hitched a lift with him. Then, for the next two years, I thought, “Jeez, I can’t give up now,”Ìęso that’s an interesting pivotal moment in my life.

Some American guy owned the yacht, and then he had these two reprobate friends who moved it around in the off-season, and they drank an astonishing amount of alcohol.

One of them lived in a trailer park somewhere in California, and the other lived in Seattle. We sailed together out of Colombia through some big storms. Their response to storms was just to really drink a lot, and it was quite an interesting experience with them. One of them sends me an email probably about every three years atÌę2 a.m. Seattle time, probably when he’s just drunk a massive amount of gin and dived back through the depths of my website again to remember our glory days together.

On How Culture Shock Disappears at 10 MPH

It really struck me cycling around the world how often I felt culture shock. It was so rare on the trip as to actually really stand out when it did happen, whereas if you jump on an airplane to anywhere, well, it’s weird. Flying anywhere, you get through a terminal, you walk past the ATMs and the Starbucks and the guys with the iPads picking up taxi people and you could be anywhere in the world, but eventually at some point culture shock hits you hard when you travel by plane and you suddenly realize you’re somewhere very different.

Cycling, for example, one of the culture shocks in my trip was taking the ferry from England to France, which is only two hours, because that suddenly was a change in language. From France until South Africa, it was pretty much land the whole way, just creeping across continents. The land changed at 10 miles an hour, so you just don’t really notice it changing. The language occasionally changedÌęat borders, but the landscape you were moving through and the general wealth of a place and the cultures of it was such a slow-moving change that I really felt comfortable pretty much everywhere I went. The few exceptions to that in the world were very jarring because they were so rare.

A real joy of traveling across countries by bicycle is that you move so slowly that you can feel like you actually belong, which is an illusion, of course, but it’s quite a pleasant one to feel that you’re part of the place you’re going through, rather than just being a voyeuristic observer as I zoom into a place by taxi from an airport.

On Seeing the World

I’m a human, and cycling all the way around the world at 10 mph made it really just feel like one world with some random little arbitrary borders and some strange foods along the way. By and large now, I’d be entirely happy to be dumped at random in any country in the world. As long as I could find somewhere to sleep tonight, I’d wake up tomorrow morning excited and curious to go have a look around.

My general feeling now from going to so many countries of rich and poor and all sorts of flavors is just how normal most people’s lives are. There’s the superficial weirdness and differentness, but very, very quickly you just realize the flow of life,Ìępeople waking up and they eat breakfast and they take their kids to school and they go to work. Maybe they’ve got a pig on the back of the bicycle or maybe they’re in a shiny car with an iPhone, but they’re just going to work.

Anywhere I’ve ever been in the world, people have always given me water when I’ve asked for water. No one ever makes you pay for water. No one ever says no to that. Just these little consistenciesÌęthat made me feel very much just like I, and this sounds like the most ridiculous hippie thing, but I’ve really started to feel that I just live in the world rather than I’m an English guy.ÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌę

On America and the Middle East

I cycled around the world in a pretty volatile political era of the George Bush years and 9/11 and Iraq and all that sort of stuff. In those years particularly, it very much felt like America versus the Middle East. I cycled through the Middle East and I loved it, and then I cycled through America and I loved it.

The thing that struck me time and again riding through America was how much it reminded me of the Middle East. In so many ways, it felt, the people and the hospitality and the tribal insularity, it all felt so similar. I found that really interesting, the ostensibly different places actually felt very similar to me.

I’m such a romantic sucker for America. It’s one of my very favorite places in the world, and I’m continually having to defend it to people who bash America.

On His Creative Career

My pie chart of my income for about the first tenÌęyears or so of which I was making my living out of adventure was pretty constant: 90 percent speaking, 10 percent books and magazine articles. Over those 10 years, the total of the pie chart increased, but the percentage never really changed. Then about four or five years ago, there was a new slice of the pie which was brand work, being a brand partner, making films for or with brands, which I suppose all fits under the hat of being an influencer.

Working with brands has become now probably about a third of it, maybe even a bit more of what I do now. I used to do millions of talks at schools to little kids, which paid my life for the early years. It felt very worthwhile, but it took up huge amounts of my time.

These days, quite a lot of schools are reading my book, , and when they get in touch with me I tend to either do a Skype interview with them or record them a little video for YouTube to try and participate in their reading.

On His Speaking Career

I like to talk about my most recent adventure and I like to talk about the breadth of my experiences for my own self-respect and sanity, but I’ve come to learn that audiences only want to hear about me cycling around the world, when I walked around London, and the Microadventure stuff, and then playing the violin in Spain, people like hearing that. I think they’ve become the three hits in my life. I’m at peace with that now, I accept that.

I’ve been now giving talks about cycling around the world for way, way, way longer than I was actually cycling around the world. There have been considerable periods of time when I’ve been doing my talks when I just felt like a total fraud, and I’ve really hated myself that I’m just still talking about that same thing I did so long ago. It really made me feel I needed to do another adventure. I needed to have another story. I needed to know what’s next just for my own self-respect, really.

On the Impact of His șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Stories

My very first book, , is about a young guy going for his first big adventure. I get regular emails from people who are now in some far-flung corner of the world because they’ve read that book and gone off and cycled around the world. I always feel quite a sense of pressure from that, but I hope it matches up to their expectations. And the Microadventures book has been really good. I hear regularly from people who it’s helped.ÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌę

With email, people are very willing, it seems, to send quite honest, cathartic emails to me, this random strange guy. I get emails about people’s depression and divorces and affairs and all sorts of stuff, and how that in some way or another going to sleep on a hill has helped with that side of things, which is really nice because adventure, essentially, is such a ridiculously selfish first-world type thing to do. Whenever I feel that I’m actually doing something a little bit useful and helping someone else, that makes me feel a bit better.

I did a talk about a month ago. It wasÌęat a dinner, and I finished my talk and sat down. Some lady walked over to me and said, “I just emailed my boss and I’ve quit.”ÌęShe did it right then in the room.

The boss was also in the room. I hope that was the right outcome for everyone. I think companies want me to be inspiring people. They don’t want me to be getting people to quit.

On Filmmaking

I bought a Canon 5D Mark II in 2009 having never filmed a single thing in my life and actually never had the slightest interest in doing it. Then I saw a little thing on the internet about that camera, I just thought, “Wow, this is amazing,”Ìęso I took a punt on that. I remember it cost ÂŁ1,600 (about $2,000). The fact that I remember it shows how astronomically expensive it was for my life at the time.

I’d never filmed anything, never had any interest in it, and I never really watched films myself. It was a completely new thing. Basically, then, for five or six years, I was just Googling how to make films and doing it as I went and making literally zero money from it, literally no money. I was doing it purely because I really loved it.ÌęI find filming stuff when I’m out there really enhances the experience for me. I really, really enjoy charging around with a camera and a tripod. Then when I’m at my computer trying to edit, I find that captivates me more than anything else I do. The whole day just zooms by in a blur, and then my head feels it’s going to explode. I go deeper into that than anything else I do, so I just love filming and editing stuff. That came about long before anyone gave me any money to do anything with film, so it’s purely just something I really enjoy.

Pretty much everything I do—writing, speaking—is solitary. I’m just on my own. Often when I do a film, it’s with somebody else. That’s the only time I get to work with other people, and I love that because it’s a chance to workÌęwith people who are much better than me at different parts of the process.ÌęI absolutely love that. I don’t get enough of that in my life.

On the Transition to Real Life

Like a lot of people, I found becoming a parent the hardest thing that I’ve ever done. I found it particularly hard because I’d spent the last 10-15 years living this carefree, wild, vagabond, incredibly selfish life traveling around the world, and that was not in any way good preparation for becoming a selfless stay-at-home person prioritizing other people’s needs. ÌęÌę

By that point, my job was adventure, and adventure requires you going away for long periods of time doing stuff that is dangerous. Neither of those things were compatible with being a respectable, sensible dad. When we had kids, I essentially stopped doing big expeditions.

With the loss of my hobby, my job, I felt my whole identity disappeared, and I felt completely empty, really. I also, because I was trying to make a living as an adventurer, IÌęfelt a total fraud.ÌęI was still talking about adventures and I was still talking about cycling around the world and stuff, and yet I wasn’t doing anything adventurous myself. I found it a really hard process, and I felt that way for years. I never talked about any of this stuff publicly at all, partly because I just felt that my private life is quite different to my adventure online life, but also partly just because I just felt such a fraud and such a loss of my own individual identity.

It’s been a gradual resolution. I’ve been a dad for nearly tenÌęyears, andÌęnow I’m at a point whereby I accept that my days of spending four months going to the South Pole are over. I accept that I’m, to most people, Mr. Microadventure, rather than Mr. Tough Guy South Pole șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűr. Not only do I accept that, I’m now really pleased and happy that that is the way it’s turned out.

I feel now I’m getting a much better balance at trying to squeeze adventure in around the margins of family life, and that’s much smaller. Microadventures, sleeping on hills, climbing trees, swimming in rivers, squeezing that stuff in around the hours of taking my kids to school and picking them up. Between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. Monday to Friday, I’m Tough Guy șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Al in my shed, and all the rest of the week I’m Dad/taxi driver.

It took meÌęa while to get there, because for quite a few years I wanted to just still prove to the world that I was tougher than anyone else, and going to sleep on a small hill in suburbia didn’t seem to achieve that goal. Through accident as much as design, my career is now in a much healthier and more creative and more original position than it would’ve been had I been able to choose the route and map it all out when I was age 25.

On His Shed

I spent all of my royalties advance from my Microadventures book, my biggest ever, on a little wooden shed. It’s about 10-foot square. All the walls are papered with the maps that I used when I was making the Microadventures book. Gradually over time, it’s just become covered in maps of the world. I’ve got a great map of the rude place names of Great Britain, a big world map, a Bruce Springsteen record cover, a picture of Shackleton, loads and loads of books, a massive poster of myself, and a chili plant.

I love it. It’s become somewhere that I just come and I feel like I escape into just the stuff that I love, books and writing and travel and adventure. Then when I’m done with it, I walk away and get on with life.

For a few years, I was trying to work in my house, in every room in the house, spare bedroom, kitchen. There’s all the usual annoying things of working at home, but I got the shed because of two things: One is I’m a complete workaholic, so I find it very hard to stop working. The second was I had young kids running around being annoying, and I was finding it really hard to either do a good job working or do a good job being a dad. Putting a shed in the garden was a real physical separation of work life, home-life, husband, and dad. That has been the greatest success of the whole thing.

On Microadventures vs. Macroadventures

The Mircoadventures thing has opened up so many opportunities.ÌęI’ve earned more money from Microadventures than I ever have from rowing across an ocean. It’s much more interesting as well, and it feels like it’s got more imaginative, creative potential. It’s great. I’m really delighted with how it’s turned out.Ìę

Sometimes these things that you don’t really set out to do by design work out well. Whenever I’ve done something in order to try and earn money or get famous (and I’ve tried both at times)Ìęfirstly, they never make me happy, they just make me feel like a dick.ÌęAnd secondly, they’ve never worked.

The occasions when I just felt, “Aw, screw the world, screw everything else, just do what I want to do,”Ìęlike choosing to go cycle around the world rather than getting a proper professional job, choosing to do Microadventures rather than still doing big stuff, and then going to walk through Spain for four weeks rather than doing something tough—those three things, I think, have probably led to the most interesting stories that I’ve ever had, and from the interesting stories also comes more money eventually.

On Evolving His Career

I think, when you’re on a long bike ride, you don’t really notice you’ve gone very far, and then a few weeks later you stop, turn around, realize you’ve cycled halfway across the continent. I think that’s similar with the creative side of what I do. It evolves from initially talking in elementary schools and then trying to become a blogger and then learning how to make little films, and then Instagram now, starting to try and tell short stories on that, and starting a newsletter. I’ve just started ,Ìęit’s one of these automated series ones, which is very different to anything I’ve ever done before.

I think I try to just evolve my ideas and the things that feel creatively exciting. That’s generally how I end up choosing my next book,Ìęjust trying to find something that’s new and a little bit fresh and exciting.

Advice

The one thing that I bang on about to myself continuously is how hard it is to begin things. Trying to overcome the hurdle of beginning, so not being put off by beginning but just making yourself do itÌęand then realizing that you'veÌędone the hardest part.Ìę

Then the thing that I found useful for myself is to try to learn to measure the progress in my life rather than chasing success. For example, the time this sank into me was when I was cycling through Bolivia. I’d been going for about two years and I was trying to get to Alaska, and Alaska is so far from Bolivia. I was really depressed in Bolivia. “Oh, man, I’m never going to get to Alaska.”

I was on the Salar de Uyuni, this huge salt plain, and I walked about 200 meters away from my tent, in aÌęreally foul mood, and I just stopped. I turned around and I looked away from my tent back the way I’d come, and it was a real clear moment for thinking, “Wow, I’ve actually come a really long way. To get from England to Bolivia, that’s two years of riding. I’m doing all right here.”

Since then, I’ve tried to make myself look back and congratulate myself on how far I’ve come rather than just beating myself up that I haven’t yet reached the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The post Alastair Humphreys on Traveling the World at 10 MPH appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

“Weird” is an ill-defined term. Does it mean uncanny? Gross? Extraordinary? Supernatural? Here at șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, it means all of the above. Our editors came together to find some of our weirdest stories from the archive. The result: a collection that ranges from spooky middle-of-the-night bigfoot hunts to an investigation into mysterious shrunken heads.

“The Fist of God”

I don’t know that this is weird so much as it was a startling read. The story centers around a brutal and ancient—but celebrated—fight culture in Bolivia called tinku. People die. But the juxtaposition between the coinciding festival’s religious holiness and the visceral beating is what made it so curious. And the fact that our writer was a woman willing to wander into the madness made the piece even bolder. Eventually, she isÌęchallenged to a brawl—but you’ll have to read about it to see how it ends.

—Tasha Zemke, copy editor

“Tracking the Elusive Western Shoe Tree”

Author Bryan di Salvatore won’t reveal how you can repeat his adventure—at least not the way he did it. But in “Tracking the Elusive Western Shoe Tree,”Ìęhe road-trips from Missoula, Montana, through Idaho, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, and UtahÌęin search of those trees mysteriously adorned with old shoes, all the while adding his own contributions to them. Along the way, he discovers some truths about the American West, “a forthright and humorous land.”

—Mary Turner, deputy editor

“Little Men” and “The Weird, Wild Business of Shrunken Heads”

“Little Men” is great weird classic story by Caroline Alexander fromÌęApril 1994. She explored the mysterious origins of two shrunken men who were on display at the Museum of the American Indian in New York. Research led her to a by-then-deceased doctor from Ecuador named Gustav Struve. Alexander found his son (now deceased) in Quito. He told her, “Papa used to make the mummies.” Mary Roach revisited and updated the whole thing in “The Weird, Wild Business of Shrunken Heads.”

—Alex Heard, editorial director

“Why Does It Feel Good to Poop?” and “How to Poop Anywhere șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű”

We have a checkered past featuring way too many stories on poop.

—Jenny Earnest, audience development director

“They Call Me Groover Boy”

To Jenny Earnest’s point above, I wasn’t quite sure if this collection really needed another story about poop. But Kevin Fedarko tells an eye-opening, hilarious, and at some points nerve-racking story about the experience of manning the poop dory on the Colorado River in Grand Canyon. I wish I could have watched my own facial expressions shift from disgust to fear to laughter as I read it.

—Samantha Yadron, editorial production fellow

“The Bears Who Came to Town and Would Not Go Away”

You sort of expect a town to become infested by insects or rodents—or hipsters, if there’s a festival going on. But a plague of bears?ÌęWhat a delightfully awful thing to befall a small Russian hamlet, which Sarah A. Topol beautifully recounts like a modern folktale.

—Aleta Burchyski, associate managing editor

“Strange Foods, Stranger Times”

Recounting a memorable dining experience in China, șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű co-founder and editor-at-large Tim Cahill considers the curious machismo associated with adventurous eating. “She stirred the mixture, but the green gall, which didn’t emulsify well, swirled slowly around the pitcher in various viscous amoeboid shapes, rather like a lava lamp,”Ìęhe writes. “That, apparently, was what it was supposed to look like.” ButÌęas Jerry Hopkins writes in his book Strange Foods, “What is repulsive in one part of the world, in another is simply lunch.”

—Ali Van Houten, editorial fellow

“A Night with a Bigfoot Investigation Society”

Stories about people chasing Bigfoot are no longer weird. Maybe in the 1970s, but by now they’re mostly clichĂ©. What’s weird is a story that makes me feel slightly envious of people chasing Bigfoot, and I’m so glad for it.

—Taylor Gee, editorial fellow

The post The Weirdest Stories We’ve Ever Told appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

In 1923, John Hill wrote TheÌęDorado, a book documenting hisÌępursuit of the golden dorado, an elusive fish deep in ”țŽÇ±ôŸ±±čŸ±Čč’s jungle. Fly guide and filmmakers Ìęflew, paddled, and hiked into the dorado’s remote habitat in this film of the same name.

The post April Vokey Chases A Forgotten Sport Fish appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

This year, pledge to take a trip that gives back to the community you’re visiting in a meaningful way. Whether it’s donating your time doing trail work or beach cleanups or saving endangered species, you’ll feel like your trip has a greater purpose. Plus, planning volunteer vacations can save you money—many come with discounted rates on lodging and food, insight from local guides, and a tax-deductible chance to explore the less-touristy side of whatever country you’re visiting.

Build a High-Altitude Home

Bolivia

partners with nonprofit organizations around the world to help you donate a day of community service on your next international trip in areas like community health, wildlife conservation, and environmental initiatives. Have a stellar vacation planned in Thailand or South Africa? There’s probably a way to spend one day giving back. , spend six hours helping build a house for a local family outside La Paz, where you’ll lay bricks, dig a foundation, or paint walls for those in need. Free.

Help a Glacier

Alaska

This with REI șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs and Conservation Volunteers International Program starts with a service project in Juneau. There, you’ll help with vegetation management and erosion control near the Mendenhall Glacier. Next, you’ll head out via ferry through the deepest fjord in North America before arriving in Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, where you’ll help restore the historic 33-mile Chilkoot Trail. The trip includes lodging at bed and breakfasts, all meals, and bike rentals, just in case you want to take a spin after your trail work is done. There’s ample time to explore the local area. You can also enjoy a ride on the scenic White Pass and Yukon Route Railway. From $2,995.

Repair Fire and Flood Damage

California

The massive wildfires that ravaged the California coastline made headlines around the world. Now you can do your part to help restore these afflicted areas. The American Hiking Society leads all over the country, including an upcoming weeklong trip to , scheduled for April 2018, where you’ll restore trails damaged by recent wildfires and flooding in Los Padres National Forest. You’ll hike up to six miles a day and camp in tents at night. From $300.

Become a Citizen Scientist

Australia

You don’t have to be a climate scientist to join researchers on this Earthwatch Institute trip to , off the Queensland coast and within the Great Barrier Reef. On this nine-day trip, you’ll study how rising temperatures and frequent droughts affect the local ecosystem by conducting surveys of native plant and animal species as you hike along the coast. The trip includes three meals a day and accommodations at a field station on neighboring Keswick Island. From $2,975.

Restore Scenic Trails

North Carolina

Led by the Sierra Club and the U.S. Forest Service, this is a weeklong trip to to develop, maintain, and restore local trails. In the past, crews have rebuilt a 2.5-mile section of the Appalachian Trail and constructed a wheelchair-accessible fishing path. You’ll stay at a historic lodge surrounded by old-growth trees, where you’ll be treated to breakfast, dinner, and one day off from trail work to head out on your own. From $1,035.

Save Endangered Turtles

Costa Rica

Spend two weeks working with local biologists on a with the Bamboo Project on the beaches of Costa Rica. You’ll start the trip with a walking tour of the city of San Jose, then move to a remote spot on either the Caribbean or Pacific coast, where you’ll patrol the beaches for endangered turtles, move nests to hatcheries, count eggs, and do community outreach to educate locals on the plight of the leatherback and olive ridley sea turtles, all while staying with a local host family. $1,350.

Remove Invasive Plant Species

Maui

Spend a half-day volunteering with the and you’ll get a ride to the top of Haleakala, a 10,023-foot-high dormant volcano and the highest point on Maui. In Haleakala National Park, you’ll work with Park Service staff and a trained naturalist to remove invasive plants, then be set free to hike and explore on your own. Volunteer days are scheduled twice a month and include a picnic lunch. Free.

The post The Best Way to Vacation in 2018: Volunteering appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

When photographer Ìę, heÌęwas struck by the diversity of culture and wildlife. His filmÌęComing BackÌęexplores just how the countryÌęhad such an impact on him.

The post A Photographer’s Journey Through Bolivia appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

By the time it crashed, Eastern Air Lines Flight 980 would have been just about ready to land.ÌęBeverage carts stowed, seat backs upright, tray tables locked. The 29 people on board would have just heard the engines change pitch and felt the nose dip slightly, seat belts tugging at their stomachs.

One imagines a focused cockpit. Pilot ­Larry Campbell was responsible for the safety of everyone on the flight, and this was just his second landing in the Bolivian city of La Paz. Copilot Ken Rhodes was a straightforward military man. No foolishness, especially when descending through a mountain valley in bad weather. Sitting behind both, flight engineer Mark Bird was a retired fighter jock. In the Air Force, he was known for buzzing the tower and other hijinks, but he’d joined Miami-based Eastern only a few months before, and during a tricky approach in the middle of a thunderstorm would not have been the moment to chime in.

On January 1, 1985, the mostly empty Boeing 727 was headed from Asunción, Paraguay, to Miami, with stopovers in Bolivia and Ecuador. Landing in La Paz was always difficult. Ground controllers there had no radar—and what navigational equipment they did have was spotty—so they relied on the cockpit crew to track their own position.

Why Couldn't Investigators Reach the Crash Site?

We explore the science of altitude on the expanded audio version of the story.

At 13,325 feet, El Alto International, which serves La Paz, is the highest international airport in the world. The air is so thin that planes land at 200 miles per hour because they would fall out of the sky at the usual 140. Air brakes find less purchase here, so the runway is more than twice the normal length. The airport is so high that, as the plane dropped toward La Paz, the pilots would have worn oxygen masks until they reached the gate, per FAA regulations. Passengers would have felt the altitude’s effects as the cabin depressurized: increased heart rate, deeper breaths, fuzzy thoughts.

The last anyone heard from the jet was at 8:38 P.M. Eastern time. According to ground controllers, the flight was about 30 miles from the airport and cruising on track at roughly 20,000 feet. It was cleared to descend to 18,000 feet when it plowed straight into a mountain.

Mount Illimani, a 21,122-foot mass of rocks and glaciers rising from the eastern edge of ”țŽÇ±ôŸ±±čŸ±Čč’s Altiplano region, towers over La Paz. The Andean mountain is so textured by ridgelines, high peaks, and shadows that, viewed from the city, it seems to move and change shape throughout the day.

Flight 980 hit nose first on the back side of Illimani, just below the summit. It probably cartwheeled forward, the fuselage bursting and splattering across the mountain like a dry snowball hitting a tree. Nearby villagers said it shook the whole valley. The airport’s radio registered only a single click.

It took a full day to locate the wreckage. Once the Bolivian air force saw it on the peak, it mobilized a team to get to the crash site, but a storm had dumped several feet of snow, and avalanches turned them back. The Bolivian team was soon followed by representatives of the U.S. embassy in La Paz and those from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Airline Pilots ­Association (ALPA), the two organizations responsible for investigating crashes by U.S. airlines. But none of them were acclimatized enough to do any climbing. The agencies asked to borrow a high-altitude helicopter from Peru, but Bolivia wouldn’t allow it inside the country.

“The Bolivian government did not want the world to know that the Peru­vians had a better heli­copter than they did,” says Bud Leppard, chairman of the ALPA Accident Analysis Board, who ­departed for La Paz immediately after hearing about the crash. Eventually permission was granted, and Leppard devised a plan to reach the crash site by jumping off the helicopter as it flew above the ground at 21,000 feet, then skiing down to the plane. Better judgment prevailed when he realized that the chopper couldn’t hover at that altitude.

Sikorsky Aircraft shipped an experimental high-altitude helicopter to Bolivia that could drop Leppard off at the crash site, but the mechanics sent to reassemble it were so altitude-sick upon landing in La Paz that several days passed before they could do any work. When they did get it flying, bad weather at the summit kept everyone in the chopper.

One Bolivian climber, Bernardo Guarachi, apparently made it up to the wreckage on foot two days after the crash but then said almost nothing about his findings. When the Bolivian government filed an official—but inconclusive—crash report a year later, Guarachi wasn’t named in it. It was unclear who’d sent him in the first place.

Two months after the crash, in March 1985, a private expedition of Bolivian alpinists commissioned by Ray Valdes, an Eastern flight engineer who would have been on board if he hadn’t swapped shifts, successfully navigated the treacherous mix of rock and ice. The small team encountered wreckage and luggage, but they couldn’t locate the plane’s black box. Stranger than that, no one found any bodies at the crash site. Or blood.

Another private expedition went up in July 1985, followed by NTSB investigators in October, but neither was able to spend more than a single day at the crash site.

In all, at least five expeditions have climbed Illimani in search of the wreckage over the past 30 years. None of them found any bodies or flight recorders, nor could anybody establish what brought down the plane. Officially, it was designated a “controlled flight into terrain,” which means it couldn’t be blamed on a bird strike or an engine malfunction or hijackers. The NTSB ultimately filed its own report to supplement the Bolivian one, but it came to the same flat conclusion: the plane was destroyed because it ran into a mountain.

As time passed, however, details emerged that invited speculation among South American journalists, the fam­ilies of the victims, and anyone else still following the story. The flight crashed because of an equipment malfunction; no, the crew was new to the route and flying in bad weather; no, the Paraguayan mafia blew it up because the country’s richest man was on board; no, Eastern Air Lines was running drugs; no, it was an attempted political assassination—someone took down the flight to get at the U.S. ambassador to Paraguay, Arthur Davis, who was supposed to be aboard but changed his plans at the last minute.

The thing is, even the more outlandish theories had some ring of truth. Five members of Paraguay’s prominent Matalón family, who built an empire selling home appliances, were on the flight. The wife of the U.S. ambassador to Paraguay—Marian ­Davis, who had continued on without her husband—died in the crash. In 1986, a criminal indictment against 22 Eastern baggage handlers revealed that, for three years, the airline had indeed been used to deliver weekly shipments of 300 pounds of cocaine from South America to Miami. (Eastern declared bankruptcy in 1989 and dissolved in 1991.)

So the mystery deepened. Theories festered and grew. Where were the flight recorders? Where were the bodies?

One of the more comprehensive explanations came from George Jehn, a former Eastern pilot who published a 2014 book about the crash called . In it he theorizes that a bomb went off, depressurized the plane, and sucked all the bodies out of the cabin. Then he speculates that either Eastern or the NTSB hired Bernardo Guarachi to get rid of the flight recorders as a way of halting further inquiry into the crash, for fear that a full investigation would have revealed that the airline was running drugs for President Ronald Reagan. It’s a convoluted plot, too far-fetched to take seriously, but seductive as hell to those looking to explain the inexplicable.

“Not one body, not one body part, no bloodstains. Why not?” Jehn said when we spoke in May. “It’s the single greatest aviation mystery of the 20th century.”

But the case of Flight 980 is about as cold as they come. Any remaining clues have been locked in the ice of a Boli­vian glacier for decades. Trying to solve it would combine the dangers of high-altitude mountaineering with the long odds of treasure hunting—a losing hand almost every time. So here’s another question worth asking: What sort of foolhardy seeker suddenly takes an interest in a 30-year-old plane crash?

Dan Futrell is an affable, loud, heart-on-his-sleeve kind of guy. Impulsive. Persistent. In college he was the Gonzaga bulldog mascot at basketball games, dancing and making costumed mischief during time-outs. After graduating in 2005, he served two tours in Iraq. He completed Army Ranger School but decided to move on to civilian life. Now 33, he manages people and spreadsheets for an Internet company in Boston, where he lives.

To say that he misses the physical challenge of soldiering is an understatement, but that’s his preface when you ask him what kicked off his interest in the crash. Since leaving the Army, he’s made a habit of regularly scheduling sufferfests—he once took aim at all seven peaks in New England named after presidents and bagged them in one day. A little more than a year ago, he stumbled across a Wikipedia list of unrecovered flight recorders. Next to Eastern Air Lines Flight 980, the article listed “inaccessible terrain” as the reason the flight recorders had never been found.

“Challenge accepted,” he wrote on his blog.

Isaac Stoner, Dan’s roommate, was the first to hear his let’s-go-find-it sales pitch. Though they’ve known each other only two years, they act and argue like brothers. But where Dan has dark hair, weary eyes, and an expressive face with many angles, Isaac has the blond hair and classically handsome features of a small-market news anchor. Dan is spontaneous and emotional; Isaac is calm and analytical. After the Army, Dan attended grad school at Harvard; Isaac worked in biotech and then went to MIT.

Finding the box sounded pretty good to Isaac. And it took priority over their other screwball ideas, like running a marathon in a suit or attempting to set the world record in the pieathlon, a 3.14-mile race in which you eat a whole pie.

Most people still tracking this plane crash have deeply personal, often tragic reasons to care about it but very little capacity for travel and risk. Dan and Isaac had no reason but the adventure. They had no sponsorships, benefactors, or Kickstarter funding—just a crazy plan, a bit of money in the bank, and two weeks’ vacation.

The first step was to divvy up the responsibilities. Dan was in charge of learning about the crash and its history, figuring out where to start searching, and blogging about the trip. Isaac researched the altitude, weather, skills they’d need to learn, and contingencies if things didn’t go smoothly—in short, he was tasked with keeping them alive.

They embarked on a five-month training plan that consisted of running stairs at the Harvard football stadium and sleeping in a Hypoxico altitude-simulation tent. Four weeks before wheels up, a friend of a friend sent me a link to their blog and relayed that they’d be happy to have me along. Two days later, I was on the phone ordering my own altitude tent.

Our primary search area was not the crash site itself, but a roughly one-square-mile patch of glacial moraine 3,000 feet ­below it. Flight 980 hit a saddle on the south side of Illimani, near the top, and for the past 31 years plane parts have been sliding down the mountain in icefalls, plunging over a cliff, and then slowly grinding downhill toward a glacier at the bottom.

The Bolivian summer and fall of 2016 (the Northern Hemisphere’s winter and spring) had been warm and rainy, and we were told that the glacier had melted far up the mountain. The moraine—and the wreckage—was more exposed than ever. We planned to spend four days searching the debris field at about 16,000 feet, then another searching the original crash site at 19,600 feet.

Which is how we find ourselves standing amid a heap of rental gear in a climbing shop in La Paz, three days after leaving the U.S. Off to one side, I’m nauseous and dizzy from climbing a single flight of stairs. We’re at 13,000 feet, but to me it feels like the summit of Everest. Isaac says it looks like I got hit by a large bus. He says he got hit by a smaller one.

Meanwhile, our climbing guide, Robert Rauch, has fallen asleep in his camping chair. Fifty-nine years old, born in Germany but living in Bolivia for the past 20 years, Robert has pioneered more than a hundred routes in the country, including three on Illi­mani’s south side. His house has an entire room devoted to equipment for different kinds of pull-ups. He does not own a couch. Dan calls him “the most interesting guide
in the world.”

Rauch had taken an interest in the crash as well. He’d traveled through the debris field while scouting routes on Illimani and thought that a concerted, methodical search of the area might turn up the recorders and bodies. “The whole area will lie in front of us like a Google map,” he’d written in an e-mail.

A few minutes later, our expedition’s cook, Jose Lazo, shows up. He’s Aymara—one of ”țŽÇ±ôŸ±±čŸ±Čč’s indigenous peoples—and he and Robert are soon telling stories about the time Jose was chased by a bear, the time Robert was chased by a condor, the time an angry mob chased the two of them out of Jose’s village and they fled 300 miles in seven days, crossing jungles and alligator-infested rivers to get back to La Paz. Dan calls him “the most interesting cook in the world.”

Back in the store, Isaac is trying to convince Dan to rent warmer snow pants; Dan is rolling his eyes. Robert is down to his skivvies, having dropped trou in the middle of the shop to rub his sore left knee with an herbal balm he bought on the street.

I’m still feeling queasy, resting on a box of something or other, when a climber with a man bun sits next to me and says that a week of wind sprints before we start will help me adapt to the altitude.

“When do you leave?” he asks.

“Tomorrow morning.”

To get to Mount Illimani, we tie our bags to the roof of a rented Land Cruiser and tell the driver to head south from La Paz, following the Irpavi River all the way down to 3,000 feet, where the air feels soupy and rich and our pulses finally find the low side of 70. I feel remarkably better. Then we cross the river and drive to 12,000.

At least it’s a rest day. Our only responsibility is riding in a car and then unloading our overstuffed backpacks and duffel bags at Mesa Khala, an abandoned tungsten mine at 15,400 feet that’s a 45-minute hike from the lower debris field. As we drive up the other side of the steep valley, past an active uranium mine, we round a corner and see 50 yards of impassable rock blocking the road.

“What if we just drive faster?” Dan says.

We’re still two miles and about 3,000 vertical feet below our base camp at Mesa Khala, and we’re going to have to hike it. So much for the rest day.

Dan and Robert walk to the uranium mine and return ten minutes later.

“Cinco porters-o,” Dan tells us, exhausting his knowledge of Spanish. “They’ll carry our shit-o. Up the mountain-o.”

This is great news, except we packed like we were driving all the way to base camp, so even five porters won’t be enough. “This is how Livingstone traveled,” Isaac says, surveying the explosion of gear as we hastily jettison nonessential items—candy, notebooks, an extra stove, more candy—to send back in the 4×4.

The ascent doesn’t kill us, but it tries. Jose sets the route, and it turns out that Aymara-style climbing consists of walking straight up the fall line. By the halfway point, I’m resting every few steps.

Four hours later, we’ve covered the two miles to Mesa Khala. Setting up camp among the ruins, we find plane parts that locals must have brought to the mine from the debris field. Scrutinizing and discussing each one in detail, we’re transfixed, as if this random piece of aluminum tubing or that tiny drive shaft or the mechanism from an inflatable life vest might shed light on what brought down the aircraft.

The next morning, we hike to the steep glacial moraine that marks the edge of the debris field and find more parts on the ridge. It’s exciting. This is exactly what Dan and Isaac spent five months imagining a Bolivian mystery adventure would be like—scattered clues leading to a search area laid out in front of them like a Google map.

In fact, it was only recently that this trip went from being a simple treasure hunt to something heavier, a story about tangible grief and unexplainable loss. Only recently did they meet Stacey Greer.

Greer has a few very specific memories of her dad, flight engineer Mark Bird. Talking on his radio. Eskimo kisses. The two of them snuggling in his recliner. She was three years old when the plane crashed.

“My mom didn’t really talk about it a lot,” Greer told me when I called her at her home in Fort Benning, Georgia, a few weeks before we left for Bolivia. “She just said that he had been in a plane crash. As a kid, your imagination runs wild. You always ask yourself, Why couldn’t he just jump out of the plane? Crazy stuff like that.”

She didn’t fully understand what had happened until she watched the video of his ­memorial service as a teenager.

“It was just my dad’s flight helmet and a picture of him. It clicked,” she said. “There was no casket. There was no body.”

In the past few years, Greer, now 34, has started questioning the official narrative that the crash site was too difficult and dangerous to reach. She read George Jehn’s book and contacted him by e-mail; he sent her a link to Dan and Isaac’s blog. A former Army nurse who met her husband in Iraq, she forged a quick connection with Dan, who was also in the Army and raised by a single parent.

But where Dan carefully avoids any mention of conspiracy, favoring a more straightforward interpretation of the crash, Greer seems to have embraced the idea.

“It’s the only plane crash that has never been properly investigated by the NTSB,” she said. “And then a few years later, Eastern goes under.”

In total, Flight 980 carried 19 passengers and ten crew. Eight were Americans, five of whom worked for Eastern, and seven were Paraguayans, five of whom were part of the MatalĂłn family. There were also nine Korean passengers and five Chilean flight attendants.

With seating for 189 passengers, the crash could have been far more deadly, and Greer ­never heard from any of the other families. To her it felt like everything was immediately swept under the rug. The missing bodies aren’t so much a mystery as a sign that the general public stopped caring.

“People need closure,” she said. “Imagine one of your family members on the mountain for years, and their body has been frozen over and over and over again.”

Robert finds the first body part. It’s a ­femur, roughly 14 inches long and so dry that it’s almost mummified. You can see skin, muscle, and fat still attached.

“That’s pretty gruesome,” Dan says. “It just sheared right off in the crash.”

Encased in ice for more than a quarter-century, the bone likely spent several years sliding down the mountain from the crash site, several seconds falling over a 3,000-foot cliff, and—judging by the milky white marrow still visible inside the bone and its location at the base of a rapidly melting glacier—perhaps only months in the sun before being found by us. It’s 1 P.M. on our first day of searching.

“Shall we say some words?” Isaac asks.

Sure, but no one can really think of anything.

“Shall we bury it?” Dan says.

They dig a small grave, stacking rocks as a marker. Not long after, we find another bone—probably a tibia. Then, a few feet away, cervical vertebrae with frayed nerves still visible down the spinal column.

As we search, the temperature swings wildly between T-shirt weather in the sun and down-jacket weather in the shade. ­Every hour or so, a massive block of ice—possibly carrying more plane parts—drops off the saddle and roars toward us before disintegrating into a sugary white cloud.

Our plan was to walk a precise and thorough grid. But the search area is longer and thinner than we anticipated, a lifeless alpine moraine filled with boulder gardens and ice fields, walled off on three sides by vertical rock. Sixty-foot-tall glacier fragments and ten-foot-deep canyons force us off our pattern. So instead we spend the morning scrambling between pieces of wreckage on our own, congregating whenever anyone finds something interesting.

This happens quite a bit. There are plane parts everywhere. First we discover pieces of fuselage and a jet engine, then wiring and toggle switches and seat belts and children’s shoes. Then Robert finds a black plastic box.

“That’s a black box,” Isaac says when Robert holds it up. “Not the black box.”

We see an astonishing number of contraband crocodile and snakeskins, which were probably being smuggled to Miami to be made into black-market goods like shoes and handbags.

Dan gets on the radio to tell us that he found a roll of magnetic tape. “This is either from one of the black boxes,” he says, “or it has a great 1985 movie on it.”

Isaac and Dan also both find a few chunks of orange metal, which is exciting because—despite the name—flight recorders are painted international orange to help investigators locate them. But the pieces seem too trashed to have come from supposedly indestructible boxes.

Most planes carry two flight recorders: the cockpit voice recorder, which documents conversation among the pilots and the engineer, and the flight-data recorder, which notes the status of the plane’s mechanical systems several times per second.

Current specifications require that a flight record­er’s metal case be capable of withstanding temperatures of 2,000 degrees, underwater depths of 20,000 feet, and impacts up to 3,400 times the force of gravity. To hit these marks, the outer shell is made from a blend of titanium and steel. It also must have an underwater locator beacon that emits a ping for 30 days.

These standards weren’t so rigorous and uniform in 1985, and we couldn’t nail down which type of recorders were on Flight 980, in part because the airline has been shuttered for 27 years. Most of Eastern’s planes used a model of flight recorder manufactured by Fairchild that recorded via magnetic tape. But not all of them. So aside from the color, we aren’t really sure what the black box will look like.

Dan is adamant that the orange metal pieces are part of the flight recorders—but they’re aluminum, not titanium or steel. The metal must be a piece of something else on the plane; the tape could just be a home video, stashed in luggage. It feels like our discoveries have only prompted more questions: What happened on all those other expeditions? Why didn’t they find any body parts? And could you believe all those snakeskins?

In La Paz, the theories surrounding Flight 980 have less to do with missing bodies and cover-ups and more with the dubious rumor that Enrique Matalón—then the richest man in Paraguay—supposedly carried $20 million on board in a duffel bag.

In 2006, a Bolivian climbing guideÌęnamed Roberto Gomez got wind that plane parts were turning up in the glacier below the crash site. If the wreckage was turning up, he thought there might also be a bag of money. Gomez and his team spent three days searching the glacier.

“The strangest thing we found was lizard skins,” Gomez says when we meet in his ­office in La Paz. “But it was a really sad scene, because we found a lot of children’s clothes, and many pictures.”

As Gomez tells his story, it’s clear that the Bolivian and American versions of this mystery diverge fairly quickly. The only place they overlap is at the beginning, when Bernardo Guarachi made it to the crash site and then clammed up about what he saw there.

In his book, George Jehn has a lot of questions for Guarachi. “Was he paid? If so, who paid him?” he writes. “What was his specific mission? What did he discover? Did he take pictures? Did he see or recover the ­recorders? Why didn’t the NTSB demand answers to these important questions?”

Oddly, though, Jehn never actually attempted to find Guarachi, even though he’s a fairly prominent climbing guide in Bolivia and is open to being interviewed when I contact him.

Born in Bolivia but raised in Chile, Guarachi returned to La Paz to look for work when he was 19. After being taken in by a more experienced guide in Bolivia, he went to Germany for formal training as a mountaineer and came home looking to make his name. He introduced himself at various organizations and said he was available if they ever needed help in the mountains.

He tells me that a man named Royce Fichte from the U.S. embassy contacted him after a Bolivian plane spotted the wreckage of Flight 980 the day after the crash. They met at the airport on short notice—Guarachi didn’t even have time to grab a camera—and took a helicopter toward the mountain. By the time they arrived at Puente Roto, a base camp on the west side, there were already teams assembling from the Red Cross and the Bolivian military.

The team stayed there that night, and the next day Guarachi and two assistants climbed to the crash site while Fichte stayed behind. Partway up, someone on the ­radio told them to turn around—he wasn’t sure who it was—but Guarachi insisted and ­finally got permission to keep going. After climbing to the saddle beyond the summit, he could tell they were getting close from the overpowering smell of jet fuel, but he couldn’t see the plane. It was only during a tiny break in the weather that he caught a glimpse and hiked over.

There was wreckage scattered everywhere. The team found open suitcases, papers from the cockpit, crocodile skins, and shoes. FichteÌęhad described where the flight recorders should be, but everything was a mess.

“When you went to the crash site, did you see body parts?” I ask him.

“No bodies,” he says. “Not even a finger. But there was blood. The plane hit the mountain dead-on. Everything disintegrated.”

They slept at the crash site and the next day got word that they would be resupplied from the air and possibly joined by another investigator, who would drop out of a high-altitude helicopter on skis—probably Bud Leppard. But during test runs, the maneuvers were deemed too dangerous, and the supplies never came. Guarachi and his team had to descend.

On the way back down, they saw footprints at their previous camp. They had been followed, but whoever it was didn’t continue to the crash site. They just stopped at the camp and left.

“I don’t think their intention was to rescue us or see what happened to the plane,” Guarachi says. “They were monitoring us.”

At base camp, Guarachi’s team was detained by the Bolivian military, separated, and taken to three different tents.

“They searched us all,” Guarachi says. “My backpack, even our clothing. They got us naked.”

He told them that all he’d found were plane parts and snakeskins. They were taken by helicopter to the airport and interro­gated again. The official Bolivian crash report states that there were no bodies or blood, but Guarachi says that’s because he was too scared to talk about what he saw.

“One of the men threatened me,” Guarachi says. “He said, ‘Careful telling anyone about this. I will ruin you.’ ”

We start higher on the search field the next day, marching with purpose toward the glacier. Yesterday it felt like the plane parts were in better shape the higher we climbed, so we start by searching the melting ice ­itself. Soon we’re finding wheels, pistons, switches, hydraulics, another engine, life jackets, an oxygen tank, cables, alligator skins, and tangled clusters of wires.

Dan and Robert find a piece of metal lodged in ice, chip it out, and then decide not to do that again—there’s not enough oxygen up here to swing a pickax around. By midmorning we’re all thoroughly exhausted, and the novelty of new plane parts has worn off. Back at camp, it felt sort of miraculousÌęto discover wreckage on a mountain, like each piece deserved our attention. But here, in the newly melted ice, there’s an almost comical number of parts.

“I think something happened here,” Isaac deadpans.

“Maybe a plane crash of some kind?” Dan responds.

You can hardly sit and rest without finding something aviation-related in the rocks at your feet. Jose and Robert find a pilot’s jacket half buried in the glacier and start digging it out. Twenty minutes later, I find the cabin’s altimeter.

On the way back to our packs for lunch, Isaac spots a lump of green cloth tied off with thick white yarn and begins to unwrap it.

“I hope it’s not a body part,” Isaac says, embracing the gallows humor that has become a mainstay of the trip. “No body, no body, no body
”

I point out that it’s more likely to be cocaine.

“Cocaine!” Isaac says, comically hopeful. “Cocaine, cocaine, cocaine!”

It isn’t cocaine. It’s a brick of papers in a ziplock bag. And a 1985 Baltimore Orioles schedule. And a plastic toy. And some crayons. And pages from a diary?
Oh. No way. This belongs to Judith Kelly.

In July 1985, Judith Kelly made the to the crash site. Her husband, William Kelly, had been director of the Peace Corps in Paraguay and was on Flight 980, headed back to the U.S. When the NTSB’s immediate response was stymied by weather and logistics, Kelly began preparing for her own trip.

She devoted three months to getting in shape, took a mountaineering course in Alaska, and then went to Bolivia. Kelly declined to be interviewed for this article, but she told her story to George Jehn. In his book, Jehn describes how she met with NTSB investigator Jack Young, who died in 2005. Young reportedly told her to move on and put the loss behind her.

“Perhaps you could say that to someone with a broken arm or leg,” she told Jehn. “But not a broken heart.”

Kelly took a few weeks to ­acclimatize in Bolivia before hiring Bernardo Guarachi to take her up the mountain. They arrived at the wreckage on July 5, and Kelly spent a day reading letters she had written to her husband since the crash. She had also col­lected letters from the family of other victims. When she was done, she wrapped the package and buried it in the snow, where it began the same slow descent as the plane parts.

Back home, Kelly lobbied Eastern to conduct a more thorough investigation. She’d reached the crash site without any problems, she argued, so there was no reason not to send another team. When that failed, she appeared on the Today show and said the same thing.

A few days later, the NTSB announced an expedition, which embarked in October 1985, after the Bolivian winter, with logistical support from the Bolivian Red Cross. According to a report by lead investigator Gregory Feith, the mission was nearly its own disaster. It describes how, on the first night, porters delivered their supplies to the wrong base camp. When the two parties did connect, they found that the porters had brought tents for only four of the seven people and no stoves or fuel.

“We were able to melt enough snow to make one pot of cold noodle soup that allowed each of us one cup,” Feith wrote.

One investigator developed signs of pulmonary edema—a life-threatening accumulation of fluid in the lungs—and had to descend the next morning; another developed altitude sickness at the crash site. Feith’s team spent a day digging through deep snow around the plane and located the portion of the tail where the flight recorders should have been but weren’t.

It would be decades before anyone went looking for them again.

After finding so much—wreckage, body parts, Judith Kelly’s memorial—Isaac starts to think that the flight recorders have to be here somewhere.

“A couple days ago, I would have told you—I think I did tell you—that I don’t ­really care about finding the black box,” he says. “But I find myself becoming more and more obsessed.”

The next day, Dan is low-energy, but Isaac’s on fire, scrambling around the debris field trying to cover it all. We crawl through glacier ice melted into curious spires. We hop over crevasses and peer into glacial caves, because we’ve exhausted all the safest places to search.

“Have you found it yet?” Dan and Isaac ask each other every few minutes.

“No, but I’m about to,” the other invariably responds.

At one point, Dan finds a human neck with what looks like a dog tag embedded in the flesh. But when he digs the metal out, it turns out to be just another piece of aluminum. “I was hoping I could get an ID,” Dan says. “But this unlucky guy just took some plane metal straight to the neck.”

By midday we’re beat. Isaac walks 150 yards to his gear and barely makes it back to the group; Dan sits down next to an engine. I can’t stand without feeling like I’ve stepped onto a merry-go-round. We give up. Jose and Robert head back to camp to start dinner; Dan and Isaac say they just want to search a little longer.

But instead of searching, they start digging up a metal beam angled out of the ground. When I ask them why, Isaac says, “I don’t know, I just started digging.”

Just as we’re beginning to accept that we’ve failed, that we still don’t know ­whetherÌęthe flight recorders were stolen or destroyed or maybe still covered in ice, that we’ve given up and will have nothing to tell Stacey Greer and George Jehn and all the other people who are still following the crash… Just as we’re coming to terms with all that, something amazing ­happens: Isaac finds the cockpit voice recorder.

It’s on the ground, ten steps from where we ate lunch, a chunk of smashed metal sitting orange side down in the rocks. Isaac picks it up. Dan comes over to examine it.

There’s a wiring harness on one end, with a group of cables leading inside, labeled CKPT VO RCDR. It’s bright orange, crushed almost beyond recognition. Like many recorders manufactured before the mid-eighties, its outer shell is made of aluminum.

“This is it, this is the black box,” Isaac says.

We’ve been finding pieces of it—of both flight recorders—the entire time.

When we get back to La Paz, Dan and Isaac call Stacey Greer. “Why didn’t anyone find it before?” she says. “It just feels like there areÌęso many unanswered questions.”

Indeed. Why didn’t anyone find the flight recorders on the first, second, or third expeditions? Who threatened Bernardo Guarachi and why? Who was smuggling reptile skins to Miami? What brought the plane down in the first place?

Flying home, we thought we still might have a shot at answering the last one. We had that roll of magnetic tape Dan found on the first day of searching. And based on nothing more than photos we could find online, it looked pretty similar to what would have been inside a flight recorder.

Before we found anything, the plan had been to turn all notable materials over to the U.S. embassy in La Paz. But with orange ­metal in hand, giving them to a ­bureaucrat seemed like a good way to get them locked away forever.

When Dan and Isaac got home, they told a friend who had worked at the FAA about what they’d found, and he said, “I just hope you didn’t bring it home.”

By taking the flight recorders and tape back to the U.S., they discovered, they had violated Annex 13 of the Convention on International Civil Aviation, a document that lays out the rules for international air travel. It says that wherever a plane crashes, that country is in charge of the investigation. Moving evidence to a different nation could be seen as undermining that authority.

The NTSB told Dan and Isaac that the Bolivian government would have to request the agency’s assis­tance before it could get involved, and it’s the only agency with equipment to analyze the tape.

Unfortunately, relations between Bolivia and the U.S. are pretty frosty. In 2008, Bolivian president Evo Morales accused both the U.S. ambassador to Bolivia and the Drug Enforcement Administration of plotting a coup and expelled them from the country. Then, in 2013, Morales’s personal plane was forced to land in Austria because of a ­rumor that Edward Snowden was on board. Morales was so mad he threatened to close the U.S. embassy.

I tried reaching out to retired crash investigators at Boeing and to various aviation museums, hoping that someone might help us figure out whether the tape was from the black box, but no one would touch it until the legal situation was resolved. Meanwhile, we couldn’t get any answers out of La Paz or the Bolivian embassy in Washington. From June to September of 2016, we made phone calls that weren’t returned, sent e-mails that weren’t acknowledged, and mailed certified letters that went unanswered.

“This surprises me not one iota,” George Jehn wrote in an e-mail when I sent him an update. “It’s like that crash is toxic. Nobody wants to go near it.”

Conspiracies breed in the spaces between solid facts, and unless the NTSB decides to further strain diplomatic ties with Bolivia or gets permission to look at the tape and finds usable information—and both scenarios seem pretty unlikely—there will always be gaps in the story of Flight 980. But when you’re solving mysteries, the simplest explanation tends to be the right one. After we got back from Bolivia, we knew that Guarachi didn’t steal the flight recorders and that a bomb didn’t suck all the bodies from the plane before it hit the mountain. As we reevaluated the facts about the flight, a plausible story began to emerge.

The descent into La Paz, for example, was even more difficult than we first realized. In addition to the lack of radar at the airport, language problems sometimes plagued communication between flight crews and controllers on the ground.ÌęWhen Eastern purchased the routes to South America, itÌęissued a memo warning pilots to ­exercise a “dose of pilot type skepticism” when in contact with the tower. There was little training on how to do this, however. Before going into La Paz, the captain was required only to watch a ­video about the landing. Then,Ìęon his first trip, a check pilot—­someone who had flown the route before—would ride in the cockpit.

Flight 980 crashed on what would have been pilot Larry Campbell’s second landing in La Paz. Check captain Joseph Loseth was aboard but had been seated in first class.

What’s more, the navigation technology at Campbell’s disposal was rudimentary. Nine months after the crash, Don McClure, the chairman of the ALPA’s accident-­investigation board, was part of a separate inquiry into the overall safety of flying in South America. His report details a number of shortcomings, particularly with an onboard navigation system called Omega. He noted that on flights between Paraguay and Bolivia, the system steered aircraft four miles off course in the direction of Mount Illimani—though this alone wouldn’t have caused Flight 980’s impact.

Meanwhile, the aircraft’s other navigation system, called VOR for very high frequency omnidirectional range, relied on localized radio transmitters that told pilots only where the beacons were, not where the plane was.

“All the navigation facilities on this route are so weak and unreliable that there is no good way to cross-check the Omega,” McClure wrote. Even if the pilots suspected that they were off course, it would have been impossible to verify.

Maybe none of this would have mattered if there wasn’t also a storm southeast of the airport. Maybe a more experienced crew would have gone south around that storm instead of north, toward Illimani. (Or maybe not—other airlines had maps of the valley with terrain hazards labeled prominently, but Eastern didn’t.) We can speculate that the storm, combined with lackluster navigation equipment, inexperience, and bad luck, led Flight 980 straight into the side of Illimani, but it’s still conjecture. Instead of case closed, it’s case slightly less open.

Or maybe that’s missing the real point. In July, Stacey Greer was in Boston for a week of classes and met up with Dan to talk about the expedition and look at pictures of the debris field. He also brought a couple of small plane parts and gave them to her.

“This is my dad, right here,” Stacey said as Dan clunked the pieces down on the table. “This is the closest thing I have to the last time I saw him.”

When her young kids called at bedtime, she had them talk with “the man who found Grandpa’s plane.” Then she and Dan called her mom, Mark Bird’s widow.

“Do you have any idea what happened?” she asked.

“We have lots of ideas,” Dan said. “The problem is we’re no better than anyone else at picking the right one.”

But now that there’s evidence of the bodies and , and any notions of mysterious journeys to the summit have been dispelled, the questions we’re left with seem much less nefarious.

Did a storm push the flight off course, or was it a problem with the navigation systems? Did the cockpit crew spot the mountain and try to make a frantic emergency turn? Or were they calmly pulling on the oxygen masks that they would have worn all the way to the gate? Were they sitting in nervous silence as lightning flashed around them and weather beat at the cockpit? Or was Mark Bird wishing everyone a happy new year and telling a joke? If his voice is on the magnetic tape sitting in Dan and Isaac’s kitchen, will anyone ever hear it?

Peter Frick-Wright () is the host of the șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Podcast. He wrote about the jogging ban in Burundi last April.

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Looking at a map of South America, Bolivia is the little landlocked shape roughly in the center—the heart of the continent. With the soaring wild peaks of the Andes quickly plummeting into the jungle’s steamy insides, Bolivia is one of the most geographically and biologically diverse countries on the planet. Often only known for its connection to cocaine and as the resting place of Butch Cassidy and Che Guevara, Bolivia is, in fact, a traveler’s hotspot. This country is at once an eye-opening, jaw-dropping, baffling and beautiful destination; an incredible place to explore and a highlight on the .

Bordering Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile and Peru, this complex country, with a history of struggle and strife, is the poorest and most isolated in South America. The predominantly indigenous population is still closely tied to their ancient past: chewing the revered (and harmless) coca leaf, wearing colorful textiles and peculiar bowler hats, and worshipping the earth Goddess, .

From the high, wintry down to the sweaty lowlands, Bolivia offers amazing and exciting experiences for serious adventurers and semi-soft travelers alike. It’s cheap, mostly safe, and endlessly interesting. La Paz, ”țŽÇ±ôŸ±±čŸ±Čč’s cultural capital is a sea of rooftops clutching the sides of a vast valley plunging from the clouds. It’s one of the highest cities in the world at approximately 3,650m above sea level. The monstrous mountain, Illimani, watches from nearby, observing the city’s unhurried and erratic pulse, as if standing guard while time unwinds for its residents. A dose of La Paz, its smells, sights, sounds and steep streets, is best taken with a good measure of time—to acclimatise to the altitude and to allow for the eccentricity of the city that touches to the sky to take hold.

Bolivia, known as the Tibet of the Americas, is an incredible, world-class downhill biking destination, and this three-day jaunt, starting from way up high just outside La Paz, takes in the best of the best. An epic cycle journey set in the magical mountains of South America, this route is not for those with a fear of heights. There aren’t too many places on the planet where cyclists can climb into the saddle at a literally breathtaking (and freezing) 4,750m mountain pass and rarely need to touch the pedals until hours later at a balmy 1,100m on the edges of the Amazonian basin. But it’s all possible on the Yungas Loop.

DAY ONE
Day one begins from the eye-watering, hand-freezing heights of La Cumbre (4,750m) to Chuspipata (2,100m). The first section is 22km of downhill delights on a sealed and wonderfully winding road amid a dramatic backdrop of massive mountains. From here this back-to-basics expedition plummets down, down, down, in the shadow of the giant Andean peaks, into what the Inter-American bank once dubbed the world’s most dangerous road—a rather grim title for what is an incredible, fun-filled ride. This section finishes up in Yolosa (1,100m), where it’s best to take a taxi or bus up the hill to the sunny town of (1,700m)—a good place to stay for the night.

DAY TWO
Day two is a tough cross-country excursion through the coffee, coca and banana growing region of Bolivia, traversing rarely used roads and encountering life in Bolivia as it has passed for many hundreds of years. It’s hard not to smile riding in these parts, passing through what feels like an authentic slice of Bolivian life. The day ends with a very challenging ascent to Chulumani (1,580m) where a bed and hot meal awaits—a welcome respite for sore legs and hungry stomachs.

DAY THREE
After a well-earned rest in Chulumani, day three is an up and down affair that makes its winding way next to a spectacular raging river gushing with icy Andean water. After a day by the roaring river, the ride culminates at the oddly out-of-place el Castillo (“The Castle”), a surreal and apparently haunted castle situated at 1,952m. offers food and accommodations and it’s worth spending the night here in this strange location. From El Castillo, buses regularly make the journey back up into the clouds of La Paz.

DESCRIPTION
From the clouds to the lowlands, a three-day journey with lots of downhill action.

ROUTE LENGTH & DURATION
Approximately 209km (130 miles) over three to four days.

WHEN TO GO
May-September. Avoid December-March due to rain.

SPECIAL CONSIDERATIONS
Take a reliable, sturdy mountain bike and clothing for snow and sun. Be aware that altitude sickness is a serious concern and that this ride can go from snow to sunshine very quickly.

TOUR OPERATORS
This ride is best taken with a tour group and support vehicle. is by far the best, most experienced and most reputable operator.

PERMITS/RESTRICTIONS
Entrance fee.

ACCOMODATIONS
There is guesthouse accommodation in each town: in La Paz, Sol y Luna in Coroico and El Castillo in Chulumani.

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