MOTORCYCLE TRAVEL IN Bolivia

Riding Death Road by motorcycle means dropping 3,500 meters of elevation in just 64 kilometers, from the frozen La Cumbre pass down into the subtropical jungle around Coroico — probably the most brutal single-stretch elevation drop you can ride anywhere in South America.

It was built in the 1930s by Paraguayan prisoners captured during the Chaco War, originally meant as military access into the Amazon. In 1995 the Inter-American Development Bank officially branded it "the world's most dangerous road," with historical estimates of 200 to 300 deaths a year before a new paved route opened in 2006 and absorbed almost all cargo and passenger traffic.

To this day it's the only road in Bolivia where you drive on the left — a rule that dates back to when truck drivers needed to see the cliff edge from their own window. With heavy traffic diverted to the new road, what's left is a corridor almost exclusive to adventure motorcyclists and cyclists, wrapped in cloud forest.

Riding the Ruta de las Lagunas by motorcycle means crossing, at an average altitude of nearly 4,000 meters, one of the rawest and most remote regions on the planet — riders worldwide (Mad or Nomad, ADVMoto, and Itchy Boots, who documented riding it solo) all describe it as one of the toughest, most isolated off-road routes there is.

The entire ride falls inside the Eduardo Avaroa Andean Fauna National Reserve and strings together landscapes that feel like another planet: Laguna Colorada, stained red by algae and sediment and home to thousands of flamingos, including the rare James's flamingo; the Sol de Mañana geysers; and the Salvador Dalí Desert, named for how the rock formations themselves recall the painter's landscapes.

It ends at Laguna Verde, an intense green from dissolved arsenic in the water, at the foot of Licancabur volcano — the exact point where Bolivia becomes Chile and the Bolivian Altiplano gives way to the Atacama desert.

Crossing the Salar de Uyuni by motorcycle means riding across the world's largest salt desert: 10,582 km² of white crust at 3,656 meters of altitude, 2 to 10 meters thick under your wheels. In the dry season, daily thermal expansion and contraction draws the pattern of near-perfect hexagons that's become the iconic image of the place.

Right at the edge of Uyuni sits the train cemetery, locomotives rusting since the 1940s and abandoned when the mining activity in Potosí and Oruro that brought them here collapsed — a rusted industrial contrast right before you ride into the salt flat's infinite white.

For any motorcycle traveler, salt is the silent enemy: it's extremely corrosive to chains, rims and metal parts, so washing the bike down with fresh water the moment you leave the flat isn't optional — it's the difference between a healthy bike and one that starts rusting from the inside within days.

Riding the Che Guevara route by motorcycle means retracing, in reverse, the final stretch of the manhunt that ended Ernesto "Che" Guevara's life: 63 km of mountain curves between Vallegrande and La Higuera, the village where he was executed on October 9, 1967, a day after being captured wounded nearby at the Quebrada del Yuro.

The La Higuera schoolhouse where he spent his last night still stands and now works as a small site museum; his body was taken to Vallegrande and displayed in the laundry room of the Nuestra Señora de Malta hospital, buried in secret, and only repatriated to Cuba in 1997 after his remains were found.

It's, without question, the route with the most historical weight in this entire Bolivian Top 10 — a ride that any motorcycle traveler interested in 20th-century Latin American history ends up doing sooner or later, over the same ground that the whole Valles Cruceños region still calls the "Ruta del Che."

Riding into Copacabana by motorcycle along the shore of Titicaca has one unavoidable stop halfway there: the Strait of Tiquina, a channel barely 800 meters wide separating the two halves of the world's highest navigable lake, at 3,812 meters above sea level.

Since no bridge was ever built, motorcycles and passengers cross on small boats while cars and buses ride separate wooden ferries — a crossing of just a few minutes that remains, to this day, the only way across the strait by land.

On the other side, the road hugs the lake all the way to Copacabana, with Tiwanaku as an easy detour for anyone who wants to add Bolivia's best-preserved pre-Inca ruins before ending the day facing the water, in the highest city in the world on the shore of a navigable lake.

Riding into Torotoro by motorcycle means entering a national park that packs in, without exaggeration, world-class dinosaur tracks: around 2,000 footprints roughly 130 million years old, from sauropods and theropods, stamped directly into the rock that the access road itself crosses.

Underground sits the Umajalanta cave, Bolivia's deepest and longest, running 7 km with a depth of 144 meters, just 8 km from the village — a total contrast with Torotoro's open canyon, visible cutting through the plateau right from the village lookout.

Declared a national park in 1989, it's still far less visited than the Uyuni salt flat, so the rider who makes it out here finds nearly empty mountain roads and a village that still feels genuinely isolated, despite being only 140 km from Bolivia's fourth-largest city.

Riding up toward Huayna Potosí by motorcycle means taking on one of the least documented routes on the whole continent — Mad or Nomad, the specialized site that actually rode it, calls it "one of the best rides in South America" while at the same time admitting it's barely recorded or photographed anywhere.

The track climbs on 100% gravel, loose sand and deeply rutted sections up to nearly 5,000 meters of altitude, at the foot of the 6,088-meter peak that crowns the Cordillera Real — with no village, no fuel station and no phone signal the entire way.

Riders who've done it recommend splitting it over two days, with a night at the Tuni lodge halfway, because between the extreme altitude and a section of track that simply doesn't show up on Google Maps, it's not a route to improvise or push through in one go.

Riding La Siberia by motorcycle means taking the old highway between Cochabamba and Santa Cruz instead of the new expressway — a deliberate detour along the Epizana-to-Comarapa stretch that Bolivian truckers themselves nicknamed "La Siberia" for the cold and fog that settle over the road at altitude, before it starts dropping toward the lower valleys.

The route ends in Samaipata, home to El Fuerte, a UNESCO World Heritage archaeological site that blends three distinct cultures —Chané, Inca and Spanish— all carved into a single giant rock that crowns the town.

It's the old highway that riders looking for real mountain curves choose today over the flat, featureless new expressway: cloud cover, fog and the dense green of the Chapare yungas fading behind you as the road drops east toward the Santa Cruz lowlands.

Descending from the Yungas to the Amazon by motorcycle on Route 3 means crossing nearly every ecological zone Bolivia has in a single long day: you leave La Paz at 3,600 meters, climb even higher at the La Cumbre pass, then drop without stopping through the Yungas cloud forest down to the 200-meter lowlands of the Beni.

Caranavi, at 976 meters and 168 km from La Paz, marks the point where the landscape stops being Andean and becomes fully Amazonian — from there the road runs through Palos Blancos and Yucumo before reaching Rurrenabaque, the gateway to Madidi National Park, one of the most biodiverse protected areas ever recorded on the planet.

It's the route riders choose once they've already crossed the Andes and want their first real contact with the Bolivian Amazon without flying: from snowcapped peak to warm jungle river in under 450 kilometers.

Riding toward Sajama by motorcycle means covering Route 4 with Bolivia's highest peak in front of you for dozens of kilometers — Sajama volcano tops out at 6,542 meters and dominates the entire Oruro Altiplano long before you actually reach it.

The highway skirts the volcano's southeastern flank barely 18.6 km from the Chilean border at Tambo Quemado, and a 12 km detour leads to Sajama village, inside the national park of the same name.

At the foot of the peak sit natural hot springs above 4,200 meters, inside the very first national park Bolivia ever declared, back in 1939 — while you ride, it's common to pass herds of vicuñas grazing right at the edge of the pavement, unbothered by the engine.