The high Andes road down the Los Yungas valley from the Bolivian capital, La Paz, loses 3,000 meters altitude in just 80 km.
You begin amid snow, breathing air so thin it makes you dizzy, and descend through llama flocks, mournful pipe music and bleached grasses down to temperate forests, then, lower still, a riot of fertile sub-tropical jungle.
Condors at the top. Parrots at the bottom. Evidence of mayhem in between. Countless crosses and bunches of plastic flowers commemorate places where a road user has, in the grisly local parlance, taken the shortcut. This road is also (to the best of our knowledge), the only one from which a government has been forced at gunpoint to jump.