42.1 mi / 9.4 mph / 2658 ft. climbing
Home: Cabañas Maria Gracia

Pichilemu hadn’t seemed big enough to support my theory of big-city long-weekenders being responsible for all the aggressive drivers that had sped past us on our way into town. But on our way out heading south, the road stayed down near the beach for several miles, and the whole way was lined with vacation rentals (or perhaps 2nd-homes?) So my theory re-gained some support. Now early on a Saturday morning, there was almost no traffic at all; it seems like our early starts to beat wind and/or heat also help to beat lazy-weekenders. Seven miles in the road left the coast and climbed nearly 1000 feet, but with the quieter road made it much easier than our climb on the way into Pichilemu had been.

At the next transverse valley, we ride straight west for a 1-mile stretch, which makes us glad that’s the only section where we need to ride into the wind coming directly off the ocean. We’re even more glad for the Shaws’ detailed write-up of their ride through here three weeks earlier. They described an absolutely brutal push out of this valley up a gravel road that ascends 800 feet in 1.2 miles, an average grade of 13%, with sections certainly much steeper. It’s sort of the obvious direct path to take, and there is a good chance that’s where I would have routed us if I hadn’t read about their struggle.

But instead, their pain became our gain, and I took us back inland, where we could ride around the base of the backside of the hill that they went up and over. The reason they didn’t take this detour (and why I still had my doubts about it) was because it added 7 miles, doubling the distance of the direct route. On its face, that’s an insane inefficiency that goes against my religion. But, we would never exceed 200 feet above sea-level, so we would never need to crank our heart-rates past max-exertion level like we would to shove our super-heavy bikes straight up. Ever since we got to South America, I’ve been telling Rett that the hills make “pedaling time” a much better metric of a long day than “miles”, and it was time to teach myself that lesson.

Our detour didn’t completely avoid gravel, however. But the four miles were relatively flat, and our first experience on Chilean gravel showed that it’s significantly better on average than Peruvian gravel. It wasn’t all the near-perfect, concrete-smooth surface that we got for a stretch near the beginning, and in fact devolved into some pretty rough sections, but the worse thing was the cars that were suddenly blazing down it. For some reason they were going nearly twice as fast as they had been driving down the paved road we just turned off, I guess because the gravel road was far wider? And I suppose that’s also the negative side of “good” gravel: it doesn’t have the vehicle-slowing/repelling qualities that bad gravel has!

In the end, it took us 2h40m of wall-time (including a relaxed lunch) to do the detour, while it took the Shaws five minutes longer to do the direct route. So timewise it was roughly a wash, but we almost surely exerted ourselves less. So thank you Jenny and Curtis, hopefully someday we can get ahead of you and let our pain be your gain for once!

That five-minute difference might have actually been important though, because we reached the grocery store at 1:59pm, and Google Maps said its afternoon closure started at 2pm! We played dumb, and no one quite seemed to be closing up or rushing us out, so it’s possible Google Maps was just wrong, but we shopped so quickly that I forgot to get the onion that was on our list.

There was a nice-sounding National Forest campground just outside of Llico, but with the long day behind and long days ahead, we’re again exchanging money for the ability to move more-quickly through this country. So we ended up in a too-nice 3-bedroom cabin (one of six identical), and while the US$85 was easily our most-expensive accommodation in South America so far, Rett contacting the owners directly through WhatsApp at least saved us $20 over the AirBNB rate.