44.0 mi / 8.1 mph / 2684 ft. climbing
Home: La Cabaña Devina AirBNB

We woke to our first clear day in what feels like a week, and since our continuing ability to stick near the cold Pacific should protect us from the sun’s heat, we could simply enjoy the effects of better light for the day’s improved scenery (or was the scenery improved by the higher-contrast lighting?)

Our Thanksgiving day off led me to discover an unexpected psychological effect that slightly mitigates the stress of our unusually-sustained effort of the last couple weeks: the rarity of the off-day means that it now feels as lengthy and restorative as three days would normally feel for us. Or maybe that’s just what I’m trying to tell myself, since this would likely be our longest day of our last ten, and it would be impossible if we started it from a place of exhaustion.

We were feeling strong and confident enough in our abilities that we decided to make an early-morning stop for a rare bit of non-bike sightseeing. The “Iglesia de Piedra” (“Stone Church”) is a cathedral-sized rock on the beach, conveniently just a tenth-of-a-mile down an access road, and then another tenth across the sand. At 8:30am on a Friday morning, we had the sanctuary entirely to ourselves.

At Cobquecura, we had a choice, one that I’d mostly left in Rett’s hands after describing the options. This is where the Shaws had left the coast and headed inland, largely because the steep up-and-downs of the coastal hills were wearing on them. Our concern was more the inland heat wearing on Rett, so even if we followed them east up the 1800 foot hill toward Quirihue, we would then turn back south to Coelemu to stay near the water for two more days. But the other option was to continue south on a coast-hugging gravel road, and then east up the broad Itata River valley to Coelemu. Rett chose small hills on gravel (of unknown quality) over the paved big hill.

The under-construction sections of gravel ended up being more of a blessing than a curse, and then we got an even bigger gift: a 3-mile section of asphalt that the maps, satellite-, and 15-month-old StreetView still showed as gravel (I have since updated OpenStreetMap). However, the additional pavement (and better-quality gravel) than I had expected was countered by a quantity and steepness of hills that I hadn’t been expecting, so overall the ride remained quite challenging. Thankfully the newly-paved section included many of the steepest up-and-down hills, and it would have taken us at least twice as long to complete it in gravel mode, since we’d both need to walk up some of the inclines, and then would need to squeeze the brakes on the way down, rather than letting it rip like we could on the smooth new asphalt.

Just before we turned left up the Itata River, I insisted that we stop for lunch, perching our chairs on a ridge above the beach (and in the wind-shade of a dense twisted pine tree). Because this would already be our last view of the Pacific Ocean for quite a while. I spent the whole meal scanning the water, and while plenty of birds flew above it and below us (some nearly-stalled by our healthy tailwind when they flew north), I failed to see any aquatic wildlife, which means we’ll have traversed the whole way from Valparaiso to Concepcion along the Chilean coast without seeing a single seal, sea lion, or whale. Sure, we spent only a fraction of this “coast ride” with the water in view, but in most other coastal places we would have seen something over a similar stretch.

On the 12-mile section up the Itata River, many of the hills shown on the RideWithGPS profile turned out to be “fake”, with the road sticking close enough to the river to avoid riding up the valley wall like the map expected. It’s a bonus I sort of expected (now riding along the grain of the elevation contours, rather than across it), but definitely wasn’t counting on, and even the lower-grade hills were still tiring.

Our final choice came at a potential “shortcut”, a bridgeless crossing of a tributary of the Itata, where we would likely have to push through sand and water, vs. a 3-miles-longer paved loop to a proper bridge. Rett again chose the more-adventurous option, and it was definitely the right choice since the crossing turned out to be completely-dry at the moment! So no removing and replacing shoes and socks, and barely any pushing was needed through the sandy river bottom.

We’d had trouble finding a place to stay in Coelemu, though that trouble worked to our advantage, because we got an instant $25 AirBNB credit after one of the places we tried to book turned out to be miles outside the center of town (where it had been marked). But still, the place we ended up booking hadn’t communicated with us at all (it was another place that existed long before AirBNB so they also seemed to be inexpert/uninterested in its use). Going door-to-door around town looking for a place to stay was definitely not what either of us wanted to do after pedaling for 5h30m, so we were relieved when a woman appeared who had been expecting us, and showed us into a cabin better-equipped than the photos/listing indicated. Unfortunately its south-end-of-town location meant that it was a long trek back to the grocery store that we now knew we could take advantage of, so I went on my own with my bike, to give Rett’s body the maximum amount of relaxation before we start all over again tomorrow.