44.8 mi / 9.0 mph / 2953 ft. climbing
Home: Catty’s AirBNB

The cute brown box we slept in was a rare AirBNB for us without a kitchen, but last night we assembled our no-cook Greek Salad, since the grocery store had feta cheese (and olives in bags, but I had to pit them manually, a task more difficult than I’d assumed). Then this morning it was easy to boil water for breakfast outside on our stove in the cool 5am darkness (oatmeal for me, and coffee for us both, while Rett just had yogurt with chia seeds).

We had to get moving early because we had a long day with a lot of climbing ahead of us, and this third day out of Valparaiso would again be routing us to hotter land inward from the coast, before returning us to the cooling waters on day four (mirroring the pattern of days one and two).

The problem is that we got rolling at what felt like the peak of Santo Domingo’s rush-hour. And Ruta 66 is not the same as the famed desert highway in the US. Here in Chile, it crosses the Maipo River near its mouth, and you would need to head more than 30 miles upstream to find the next bridge, so all of the traffic heading north or south along the coast is funneled onto this road. And the bike lane I had been expecting inexplicably did not appear until we had pedaled a mile uphill, teetering in a narrow, reflector-filled shoulder with a steady line of cars and trucks passing uncomfortably close to our elbows.

The bike lane provided some peace, but for barely more than a mile, at which point it ended as abruptly as it began (with no ramp to the road, connection to a sidewalk, or anything! Just blue-painted concrete dumping us into rough dirt). So the nightmare continued, with Chilean drivers not living up to the bicycle-friendly reputation we’ve heard. We didn’t have anyone yelling at us, or intentionally trying to “teach us a lesson”, but certainly dozens of drivers squeezed by with far less than the legally-required 1.5m of space.

Worse, we witnessed the second tire-smoking near-rear-ending in as many days. Nothing to do with us, but it indicated an inattentiveness by drivers that we never saw once in our five months in more-obviously-chaotic Peru traffic. It was further support for what I had come to believe in Peru: despite all the horn-honking and aggressive passing, the vast majority of drivers in Peru are literal professionals; driving is their job. Here in much-wealthier Chile, most drivers are amateurs, using their personal vehicle to get to their actual job, and thus there is a much higher variance in driver skill.

The further we got from the towns (and perhaps the further from rush hour), the lighter the traffic became, but we were still glad when an under-construction closed-off parallel road appeared (a project to turn the narrow highway into two divided sections). But then we saw some construction workers ahead, chickened out, and turned around to get back on the side with cars and trucks. When some other construction workers saw us departing and gave us cheery waves, it made me wish we had been bolder, since the workers ahead almost surely would have let us pass through.

After the construction zone we finally got a decent shoulder, but of course traffic had become minimal by then anyway. At least it meant that the final few hundred feet of our 1000-foot climb out of Santo Domingo was our first bit of relaxed riding.

As bad as Route 66 had been initially, by the time we were due to turn off of it, I wish we could have stayed. Because no-shoulder roads would be our route for the rest of the day. But thankfully traffic remained minimal, so we never again felt the stress of those first 30 minutes. We got to enjoy a 1000-foot descent, but then multiple climbs of 200-to-500 feet as we pushed south across the east-west river valleys.

Even though traffic was fine, we chose the slightly-longer and slightly-hillier route for the last 10 miles into Litueche because we figured it would be even quieter, and the dilapidated wood-plank bridge we crossed in the first 100 yards certainly helped to confirm that theory. Coming in the back door to Litueche also had the benefit of sending us past the bigger grocery store, and outside a perhaps-drunk old man exhorted us to visit the beach when found out we were going to Pichilemu tomorrow. This was funny because a friendly worker picking up garbage in the park in Rapel had asked if we’d visited the beach in Santo Domingo (no), and was then relieved when she learned we’d have another chance at Pichilemu. The locals here really don’t want us to miss out on the beaches!

Maybe it’s because they’re such a relief to people in these much-hotter “inland” communities, even though Litueche is only 15 miles from the coast. But our AirBNB (up a one-block hill so steep that it was a challenge to park our bikes on the slope and get the bags off) had the first air-conditioner we’ve seen in South America, and we used it! Despite the day’s heat, we were lucky to be here now rather than three days earlier, when temperatures were 15 degrees warmer!