40.5 mi / 10.3 mph / 1717 ft. climbing
Home: Ale’s AirBNB

The brand new divided highway connecting Coihue and Angol (Ruta 180) very visibly communicates that bicycles are not allowed, which suggests an unfortunate trend toward USA-ism in Chilean transportation (later this day we would see that Ruta 5, the Pan-American Highway and Chile’s central artery, explicitly allows pedestrians, and thus presumably bikes as well). But quite unlike an American Interstate Highway, they compensated for the unusual prohibition by building an entire off-highway bike path to keep cyclists accommodated! We began the day on a short bit of frontage road, and then were lucky that the first opportunity (er, requirement!) to switch to the west-side bike path came via a grade-level underpass (they’ve also built a number of pedestrian/bike overpasses to enable side-switching, but it was nice that we didn’t have to do the inefficient twisting around their long ramps to go up and over).

After 9 miles on the bike path, we reached the outskirts of Angol. We owe thanks to Google (and OpenStreetMap?) mappers for correctly designating a complex sequence of brand-new frontage roads and ramps that allowed us to make a short-cutting turn to the southeast toward Collipulli without passing through Angol’s main crossroads. The roads were added/reconfigured as a part of the new highway construction, and do not yet appear in either Satellite or StreetView, so I couldn’t verify if they were wrong-way one-direction ramps, but the mapping software let me route that way, and it turned out to be correct!

The heatmaps for road from Angol to Collipulli showed few to no cyclists use it, so my first-order assumption was that it’s a cycling death-trap, but some StreetViewing revealed that it had usable (though far from excessive) shoulders. So it was then encouraging when we saw three cyclists (and a bicycle road sign) within our first three minutes! However, it became more of a death-trap after that, with the shoulders frequently narrowed by encroaching wildflowers, bridge guardrails, or just for the “fun” of it. But Rett again soldiered on with little of her usual anger at close-passing traffic.

Our entrance to Collipulli was timed with lunch, so we did another efficiency-optimization where we saved our packed sandwiches for tomorrow’s longer day, and instead got our first “completos” in Chile from a parkside food truck. The completo is the Chilean hot dog, but supposedly given a different name to differentiate it from relatively-incomplete American-style hot dogs (and we technically got “Italianos”, either a sibling or sub-specification of the completo, where the mayo/tomato/avocado topping combination is named not for their origin, but for matching the colors of the Italian flag!) As former Chicagoans who expect our hot dogs to be “dragged through the garden” (i.e., piled high with toppings), this was perhaps less-unusual than it would be for other Americans, with the biggest difference being the more-sturdy, more-bratwurst-style bun.

After Collipulli, we finally joined Ruta 5, Chile’s central artery. As expected from the reports of many previous cyclists who have used it without issue, there were no “no bikes” signs at the entrance ramp, though our initial greeting with a shoulderless section was much less-welcoming than I’d expected (luckily we’d timed it with a lull and only a couple vehicles passed before we reached the end of the bridge and appearance of the wide shoulder). There are sections where it’s the only viable north-south road in the area, so I guess it’s a bit like US Interstates in the West where bicycles are allowed when there are no other options. But then we later saw signs telling pedestrians to walk against traffic and wear reflective clothing, so it also is much more in-line with the default, de-facto practice of bikes/pedestrians being allowed on divided highways in Chile.

Our continuing favorable weather and good strength were allowing us to complete the stretch between the large cites of Concepción and Temuco in four days rather than my initially-plotted five, but only if we could find a place to stay that split today and tomorrow reasonably in-half. The towns seemed to have pretty limited accommodation options, so it seemed almost too-good-to-be-true that there was an AirBNB four miles past Ercilla (which would have been a little too short), at a country house right off the highway.

We slowly navigated our way up the gravel driveway toward the building that sat closest to the pin on AirBNB’s map, and had to open the barbed-wire-and-branch gate to let ourselves in toward the house up the hill that matched the AirBNB photos. But as we got closer, I said “wait, that window on the left side of the door is a different shape than the photo. And the air conditioner isn’t there…” That’s when Rett received a message on WhatsApp, sent just a couple hours before, with our AirBNB’s actual location. Which was not here. It was back behind us, on the far side of Ercilla, six miles away! Fuck!!

We had already been pedaling for nearly four hours, so the idea of redoing our last six miles, back down from the top of the 400-foot slow climb that we’d just reached the top of (and would then need to re-climb tomorrow) really pissed us off. I checked the map and messaged a potential hospedaje in the next town to see if they were open, with the idea that we’d be able to get a refund on our so-badly-wrong AirBNB. But our host recognized her fault, and soon sent her husband with one of his employees in a pickup truck. We loaded in and then traveled (what ended up being 10 miles, due to needing to turn around on the limited-access highway) to the place we could have been at 90 minutes earlier if we’d known where it was.

But that wasn’t the end of our stress. We were now at least six miles further away from our next AirBNB, on what had already been planned as a long, 50 mile day. We messaged to ask if we could get returned in the morning to where we’d been picked up, but that wouldn’t be possible for our hosts until 9am, which would be much too late for us, especially with headwinds expected to pick up as the day went on. Her husband must have intervened, because she then came back and said that their employee could drive us earlier, but that it would be good if we could give him a “tip” for his services. Yeah, of course he should be compensated, but how about being compensated by you, the ones who screwed up here?! Especially since the AirBNB was our most expensive in South America (a cost were happy to pay for its purported location!), so it’s not like they were getting shorted. The principle of that relatively-inconsequential cost is what kept us stressed and agitated about how to communicate for much of the evening, and eventually broke down the negotiations. We told them to forget it, we would just manage on our own.

I did some research, and it does seem like hosts with rural addresses can genuinely have difficulty marking their location, since AirBNB stupidly only allows you to enter an address, rather than selecting any point on a map. But our host knew that her location was not just wrong, but massively wrong, and compounded by the fact that is seems right, matching the “outside of town, just off the highway” description, on top of the insane coincidence that the building under the pin is nearly-identical to the actual building six miles away!! So she really should have told us about the correct location immediately upon booking (we likely would have canceled if we knew the real location), or at least when we had messaged about check-in time the night before. Waiting until the morning when we were on our way (with phones in airplane mode) was just stupid. Ugh.