The driver of the minibus was reeling off a list of names. “El Trampolín de la Muerte”, “El Diablo”, “Adiós Mi Vida”, he said, smiling.
My Spanish isn’t great. But I knew what these words meant. They were what the locals called the 70km ribbon of rubble we were on, which snakes east from Pasto, high in the Andes some 500km south of Bogotá, through the páramo and cloud forest, over a couple of 2,800m passes, and down to steamy Mocoa in the Amazon basin.
It’s got everything you could want from a road with death in the name: just too narrow for the big trucks that use it to easily squeeze past each other, vertical drops into deep ravines guarded only by plastic tape strung between wooden stakes, raging rivers tumbling across it, landslides. And, naturally, shrines on every hairpin, candles burning brightly.