Driving can feel like an adventure sport sometimes. From under-qualified newly minted drivers to elderly motorists who haven’t yet been prevailed upon to surrender their license, it sometimes seem like everyone is out to get you.
Meanwhile, road rage cases pile up in the media. It’s getting to the point where pulling over for an ambulance is becoming a severe imposition on our patience.
With all this in mind, it’s nice to know that there are roads elsewhere on this earth that feature even worse driving conditions. We don’t kid. Here are some prime examples of what Robert Frost once referred to as “the road less traveled”. Except that these ones are traveled, and you stand an increased chance to lose your life on one them.
10. North Yungas Road
North Yungas Road, located deep in the Amazon region of Bolivia, has earned the charming nickname of “Death Road”. Chances are, there’s something to that. In only 40 miles, this narrow, twisting path manages to rack up a record of fatalities per year that secures its claim to fame as the world’s most dangerous path. Indeed, some 300 souls have met their maker whilst traveling the Yungas Road.
9. Luxor-al-Hurghada Road
Perhaps the most ancient and noble of all the terrible roads on our list of shame is the Luxor-al-Hurghada Road, located smack in the heart of the illustrious Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Roads in these parts have been precariously maintained, populated by bandits, and prone to unforeseen pitfalls and washouts for the better part of 5,000 years. If you think your brand new Range Rover will fare better than a Roman chariot, then book your flight and press your luck!
8. The Road To Yakutsk
Yakutsk is a remote city in one of the remotest regions of Siberia, in remote Russia. And it’s statistically one of the very coldest places on Earth. How does -45 degrees Fahrenheit in January grab you?. Now, imagine what driving conditions are like. Actually, you needn’t bother, since the road into Yakutsk is only navigable some two months of the year. On a side note, the vodka is first rate, when it isn’t doubling as fuel for snow plows.
7. Highway 1
Mexico’s Highway 1 is appropriately named, for a whole host of reasons. The most obvious one is that it is the primary thoroughfare that winds all through the nation, from the American border down to the jungles of Belize. It’s also number one for drug cartel activity, car theft, and associated acts of gratuitous mayhem. To top it all off, half of it winds it way through ravines without so much as a rail to keep cars from careening off the path.
6. The A44
In case anyone thought this list was specifically picking on remote areas that hardly a soul has ever actually driven in the first place, here’s the A44 in merry old England. For reasons perhaps known only to Old King Cole himself, this seemingly well maintained stretch of highway that runs from Oxford to Aberystwyth (and, no, we didn’t type that on a cell phone without a stylus) is responsible for so many head on collisions that government authorities have had to declare it a bona fide Hazardous Area.
5. Barton Highway
G’day, mate! Fancy a Foster’s, a shrimp on the barbie, and a head on collision somewhere down the most dangerous road on the Australian continent? If hedging your bets on a massive cranial contusion versus a quick, clean death in a twelve car pile up is your idea of the sporting life, this is the road trip for you. Crikey!
4. Patiopoulo-Perdikaki Road
Fresh from the wilds of nowhere in particular, we move to the Balkans for our next candidate. The Patiopoulo-Perdikaki Road in Greece is so dangerous that parts of it paving have reportedly been allowed to flake off and return to nature so as to lower the yearly death toll in the region. However, it is only fair to add that more than one Nazi trooper met his death via ambush in these remote mountainous regions during World War Two, possibly to escape the incessant bouzouki music.
3. Route 431
Route 431 in good old Alabama, the very heart of Dixie, is fondly known by locals as the “Highway To Hell”. Part of the reason it has earned such a jolly nickname has to do with the dozens of memorial crosses that have been erected up and down its length in memory of the people that have met their death here. Mostly, though, it has to do with the fact that following this highway all the way to its conclusion will leave you squarely in the middle of (gulp) Alabama.
2. Sichuan-Tibet Highway
As its very name suggests, the Sichuan-Tibet Highway is yet another merry avenue of badly paved misadventure in the great nation of China. It runs through the predictably remote border region between China proper and the contested area of Tibet. All the Buddhist calm in the world might not be enough to spare your favorite pair of trousers from imminent soiling when you travel this highway that spirals down queasily through strip mined cliffs, precipitous gorges, and the odd rock slide.
1. Guoliang Tunnel Road
Hewing narrow, crowded roads out of the side of a mountain is never the best bet for future highway safety. However, the Guoliang Tunnel Road, located in Hunan Province in China has taken the concepts of “precarious”, “just because you can doesn’t mean you should”, and “might cave in at any moment” to a fresh new level of morbid exhilaration. The tunnel is only a mile long, but its location smack dab in the monsoon region makes it a dicey proposition even at the best of times.
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