As we headed south through Peru, we got less-comfortable with the unwelcoming (especially to Americans) aspects of Bolivia, which left Chile as the only other option if we wanted to continue further south. But having crossed the border, we still found ourselves at a dead-end. Yes, the road technically continues all the way to the far end of this long and narrow country, but the first ~1,000 miles pass through barren deserts, including the Atacama, the driest (non-polar) place in the world. People with more guts than us have shown that it’s possible to cross it on bicycle, but since we need to skip some part of Chile no matter what (we need to get to the Carretera Austral in Patagonia by the New Year), the desert was the most-obvious section to miss.

So we had booked a 31-hour bus ride, the longest in Chile, taking us from Arica to Valparaiso, a coastal city near Santiago, nearly halfway down the length of the country. My nervousness about getting our bikes on a bus (that had partially inspired us to just ride out of Peru from Cusco) was somewhat-assuaged by the perhaps more-rule-based bus companies operating in Chile vs. Peru, especially the company TurBus that has actively advertised bicycle transport on their social media, and even lists prices for it on their website.

TurBus has an online booking system that requires you to choose your seats, and our bus showed that it was expected to be less than 50% full, which not only made me more-comfortable about there being space in the baggage compartment for our bikes, it also allowed us to select the prime seats: front row on the upper level, giving us views straight out the windshield, like being able to sit in the cockpit on a passenger jet. The upper level on this particular route also had “salon cama” seating, which means only three seats across the width of the bus, and a bigger recline, than the “semi-cama” seating of the lower level (four across), which is all that is offered for many other companies/routes. That’s in fact a large part of why we ended up going to coastal Valparaiso vs. central Santiago, two major cities of Chile that are relatively close to each other: that’s just where a “good bus” happened to be going!

The pricing is airline-style, so we certainly paid extra both for the bigger seats and their prime position, but at US$74/person, it still felt like a much better deal than flying, at least if we were able to get our bikes on-board with minimal effort/cost (vs. boxing them, getting to/from the airport, etc.) And hey, just like when taking a long-distance Amtrak train in the US, it would cover a night of lodging for us “for free”.

The TurBus website says that bikes need to be “disassembled and packed”, whatever that means, but Rett asked an agent at the terminal during our scouting trip yesterday and he seemed to think little would be necessary. I know people travel with their bikes all the time in South America, and few/none pack them in boxes, but many do report having at least some issues getting them onboard, and as time has gone on, more and more busses are the double-deckers with much less luggage capacity (especially on a per-person basis). So I was still nervous and stressed. Before we even left our AirBNB, I removed our pedals, chains, and rear derailleurs (more for our bikes’ own protection than to follow any rules), and we walked them the mile to the station.

When our bus pulled into the station, we wheeled the bikes back to the baggage compartment and removed our panniers. None of the members of the 3-man crew seemed surprised or bothered to see our particular “luggage”, and were quite helpful and accommodating. The guy loading them into the baggage compartment asked if it was possible to remove the front wheels, so I did, while also loosening the handlebars so they could be turned. That made it fairly easy to load them on their sides, on top of each other, on a sort-of shelf at the very rear of the baggage compartment. Our front wheels slid on top, and them some of our panniers wedged in below to secure them. My impression was that we wouldn’t have needed to do any of the disassembly, but it made it easy to store them in a more-protected place. It also surely helped to be at the starting point of the route, rather than midway where they would need to be added on top of everyone else’s baggage.

For the two bikes and seven bags we were asked to pay (by one of the crew, once we were seated) $70,000CLP (~US$74). We carried three bags on board, and two of the “checked” bags are included for free, so while the “excess” fees were equal to one of our tickets, it actually was less than I was expecting based on the pricing chart on their website. With the majority of stressful unknowns now resolved into satisfactory “knowns”, we settled in for the day-and-a-half ride.

We departed at 11:15am, and the first several hours took us inland up some significant climbs, since no road runs along the coast for much of northern Chile. Stops came every few hours, and while we could pick up some food at the stations, we never felt like we had enough time to safely find a bathroom (and pay) to make a poop (the bus had a decent on-board bathroom, but only for urination). The seats were at least as comfortable as Amtrak’s coach seats, and we each got a decent amount of sleep (Rett more napping during the day, me more at night). Twice during our journey we had to make very-annoying stops for some sort of customs-inspection, where we needed to collect all our bags from the luggage compartment (and our carry-ons, though the second time we “forgot” them, whoops!) and send them through an airport-style scanner in a little building that the bus pulled up to. Luckily the crew said our bikes could remain stowed, but wrangling all of our heavy bags was still a big pain.

Valparaiso is “the San Francisco of Chile”: a port city of commerce and government, but since diminished as other cities have stolen some of its roles. It is also ridiculously hilly (making San Francisco feel like Iowa in comparison), and Rett had gotten excited about a cute AirBNB until I pointed out that it was up a near-inaccessible hill. But then I got excited about it, seeing it as a much better way to know and experience the city vs. a high-rise apartment (similar to our difficult-to-reach place in Cusco).

Thankfully our hostess was exceptionally helpful at offering information and assistance about the best way to get there with our bikes. A stairway up from the flat part of town would be the most-direct, but near-impossible with our bikes and bags. One of the city’s historic funiculars (cable railways) would be a possible and fun option, though with unknown challenges (would our bikes fit inside? How many stairs would there still be? How many trips?), so it was actually lucky that it was out-of-service and that choice was taken out of our hands. That left a steep road that we would be able to push the bikes up most of the way, but then still a set of a few dozen stairs we would need to go down, after unloading our bags and carrying everything separately.

We knew the road would be too steep to ride, but it was nearly too steep to even push the bikes up, surely exceeding 20% grade in places. There was a point where all Rett could do was hold her bike from sliding back downhill, while I pushed mine up to a slightly-stable place and ran back down to wrangle hers. Once we reached the stairs and began unloading our bags, a friendly young woman loitering there with her two male friends ignored our brushing-off of her offers of assistance, and grabbed multiple panniers at a time and made at least two trips down and back up with us (while her male friends just sat there on the steps the whole time!) What a nice welcome to Valparaiso!

Compared to Cusco, Rett was perhaps less-convinced that all the effort was worth it (it was totally worth it for me), but we soon added a fourth night onto our initial three-night booking to at least amortize the cost a bit more.

Days 2-4

We didn’t do a whole lot, but just “living life” allowed us to absorb the atmosphere of the city while recovering from our bus journey, getting the bikes back together, and planning ahead. Nowhere in Peru sells contact-lens solution for RGP lenses, so I was glad to finally acquire a new bottle of Bausch & Lomb Simplus that I had been carefully rationing for months (the first optician shop where we inquired didn’t have any, but he was happy to direct us to a place on the corner (past three other optician shops!) that sold it).