Felipe’s mi / AirBNB mph / ft. climbing
Home: 35.4 10.2 2254

Concepción would be the largest city we’ve been to since Valparasio, and while it’s technically a port city, our inland route to get there would mostly be on major highways. So we “slept in” until 6am, expecting that there wouldn’t be much scenery to stop to look at along the way.

Our more-inland route meant that we started with a big but reasonably-gradual climb of nearly 1000 feet, rather than the 200-to-400 foot up-and-downs that washboard the shoreline. Though then we still had plenty of up-and-downs on the “plateau”, before finally speeding down one big descent to the city.

The highways got increasingly-larger as we proceeded, starting with Ruta 126, two lanes with 4-foot shoulders. Then at Rafael, we took an on-ramp to Ruta 158, a more-modern highway, still just two lanes, but with awesome full-width shoulders to make the riding super easy. Then where 158 T’s into Ruta 152, we headed west on the major four-lane divided highway, still with the full-lane shoulders.

When we were taking a break in the shoulder of the middle highway, Ruta 156, a guy driving a roadside assistance truck stopped on the opposite shoulder. At first I assumed he was just going to ask if we needed any assistance, but he got out and began saying stuff to us in his fully Chilean Spanish that we couldn’t comprehend at all. Both Rett and I came away with a feeling that he was trying to tell us that bikes weren’t allowed on this highway, but it seems like “no bicicletas” would have been a simple way to communicate that, and he never said anything that clear. We hadn’t seen any explicit signs when we entered, and the heat maps show that we’re far from the first cyclists to ride here, so who knows? He ended up sending us on our way telling us something about staying safe in the shoulder, so maybe he was really just concerned for our safety? But for us it was some of the most-comfortable riding we’ve done in Chile, so we’re sure glad he didn’t drag us off of it!

Once we got onto the bigger Ruta 152, during a brief water break in the shoulder, I saw another roadside assistance truck (or maybe the same guy) pull up behind us in my rear-view mirror. Without turning around to indicate we knew he was there, we took off again. But it seemed like he was just slowly driving down the shoulder, monitoring for hazards or cleaning things up, because he kept coming in and out of my rear-view for miles, without actually trying to stop us, until we hit the big downhill and left him behind.

The final five miles into Concepción turned the dream-easy traffic-avoidance up until that point into a total nightmare. Ruta 150 is still a four-lane divided highway, but with a tiny and intermittent shoulder, often filled with sand or gravel or other junk, forcing us onto the white line while cars sped right by our elbows (it’s the only road connecting the satellite towns to the north with Concepción, so those lanes were full enough that cars wouldn’t shift to the inner lane when they passed us, as they do on less-busy highways).

Once in the city proper, we dove straight into a McDonald’s for lunch and to emotionally cool down. As we were eating, a teenage worker asked if we spoke Spanish, and when we said “just a little”, he used Google Translate on his phone to tell us that we should lock up our bikes (we had just parked them in the lot in front of the entrance, but I had a good view of them from our table). He also guided us to the tray-return area when we left, and the whole crew provided a level of service we’ve never experienced at McDonald’s before, with more care than we feel at even high-end restaurants! (the bathrooms were also individual stalls, with a common external sink area, so the improvements over a standard McDonald’s extended beyond the soft skills.)

We had made it into town early enough to visit some bike shops, that all closed around 2:30pm on this Saturday, and as we were walking our bikes over from McDonald’s, we heard a call from Sofia, the Canadian bike tourer we had met a few days ago! We knew that she would be in town, but certainly hadn’t expected to just run into her on the street of this big city! It made some sense though, since she had just dropped off her bike for repairs at one of the bike shops. For us, Rett just needed some new gloves, and none of the shops had big brands in stock, but a $10 Chinese pair should at least be better than her compressed and sticky current pair.

We met up later with Sofia to get dinner, and in true South American style, the first place we went to wasn’t open when they said they would be, so we wandered for a while until we found a sort-of sushi place where we all got “sushi burgers” and pisco sours. It was a lot of fun and good conversation, something we definitely suffer a shortage of on this continent where we don’t know the language.