World’s Scariest Roads story :: August 05, 2008

One example is in China’s Taihang Mountains, pictured below. This road, built in 1972 when villagers in a remote area of the Taihang Mountains chiseled a 3/4-mile-long tunnel through a mountain, is today a route just 15 feet high and 12 feet wide—a tight squeeze for vehicles twisting past the tunnel’s 30 “windows,” which provide views off the precipice and to an abyss below.

Mark Jenkins, a staff writer with National Geographic, in an interview cited the Karakorum Highway and the Stilwell Road, an infamous World War II supply line from India into Burma now closed to the outside world. But in 1996, while researching a book, Jenkins went unauthorized into Burma’s totalitarian regime on the road, trekking for two nights before facing a military arrest at gun point. “It’s not a road I recommend,” Jenkins said.

Another interviewee, Lee Klancher of St. Paul, Minn., broke his leg when he crashed his motorcycle on a weeklong expedition in the wilds of Bolivia. “We were 200 miles from anything resembling civilization,” Klancher said of the misadventure.

Read on to see the full list, my picks for the “World’s Scariest Roads”. . .

Click here: http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/worlds-scariest-roads