A drive down Bolivia's infamous "Death Road" takes travellers into a world where two resources have provoked fascination, misunderstanding and controversy for centuries: coca and gold.
By Brendan Sainsbury 11 May 2021
Outside the window the frigid tundra stretched away to meet the horizon; vast, treeless and unnerving. I was the sole passenger on North America s most northerly bus service, the Dalton Highway Express, as it bumped its way along Alaska s notorious haul road towards the ominously named settlement of Deadhorse near the Arctic Ocean. The only other traveller, a laconic Canadian, had disembarked several hours previously at a desolate truck stop called Coldfoot. Since then, the driver and I had been motoring north past the road s last campground, its last outhouse and its last tree (a forlorn looking spruce with a do not cut sign). It was as if I was experiencing an extreme form of social distancing before Covid-19 made it de rigueur.