Trust Me

I've been thinking a lot about trust the last few weeks. It has occurred to me that traveling requires a person to trust strangers more often than usual. This first popped into my head as I was hurtling down the side of a mountain on a bicycle...

The first thing I decided to do upon arriving in Bolivia was The World's Most Dangerous Road. Now, to be fair, everybody does it. There are multiple tour companies all with similar packages that run every day of the week. I had a recommendation from some folks I had met in Peru. I went with Xtreme Downhill, which apparently prides itself on its safety record. But it's still The World's Most Dangerous Road, so I was thinking, okay, how dangerous is dangerous? Most of you know I have accrued a fair amount of bicycle experience of late, but that was on a road bike. This was a mountain bike with about five inches of front fork travel and big knobby tires and I hadn't been on a bike like that in almost fifteen years.

So, we got out of the van at 4,700 metres above sea level and I lost my breath tying my shoes; 4,700 metres is really, really high for a regular human. Two guides, six Brazilians, and yours truly had some coffee, ate some bread, and got on our bikes to start the descent to 1,120 metres. Let me be clear: that's 3,580 metres completely downhill. So, starting above the tree line at a gravel parking lot covered with a thin skim of snow, it takes four hours to get to a sub-tropical jungle and the patiently waiting buffet lunch and swimming pool.

The thing is, for about five minutes right at the start of the day, I'm thinking, what if the forks snap off? What if the brakes fail? I haven't checked out the mechanics on this bike, what if the handlebars come off and I can't steer and plummet to my death right at the same spot as the Israeli girl who died on this road in 2001? But you can't think like that. You have to trust that someone is checking the bike and paying attention to everything that could go wrong. Or you have to not care if you die. So I put it out of my head. And man is that road awesome. Not even dangerous. One guy in our group bailed and hurt his shoulder but I felt comfortable the whole time. Recommended. Especially for only about $50 for the whole day, including three meals and van transportation.

But trust extends to more mundane daily activities as well; sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. I trusted that the food I was getting in Potosi was clean and free of pathogens. Then I trusted that the Imodium I was buying from the pharmacy was actually Imodium and not just sugar pills. And tomorrow I'm going to have to trust the driver when he says the toilet is only five minutes away, when clearly we're hundreds of miles from anything in the middle of the Bolivian salt flats. And I'm fine with that. Because if you can't trust that things are going to work out, you start to become a suspicious old coot and you never have any fun. Don't be a coot.