49.7 mi / 11.7 mph / 1293 ft. climbing
Home: Romina’s AirBNB

Way back in Valparaiso, I had roughly plotted out a 33-day ride to Puerto Montt, including a detour across the Argentina border and back. It included a reserve of five off-days, a dangerously-low amount for us, since we’ll frequently burn through five days in a single town without much thought. We’ve already used up two of them, but thanks partly to favorable conditions (light- or tail-winds, relatively-cool temperatures), but mostly to Rett’s mental dedication to accomplishing the task we’d challenged ourselves to, we’ve been slightly-exceeding the original (already-crazy) plan for the last several days. So by completing the most-recent 5-day ride-plan in 4 days, we were able to use an off-day yesterday, while still keeping three in the bag. It felt so much like earning a “free guy”/extra life in a video game, that I could nearly hear the “da-ding!” chime when we accomplished it!

Leaving Valparaiso, we did four riding days before an off-day, then five, and most-recently six, before yesterday’s off-day. So now I guess we’re destined to do seven days of riding before our next break? Ok, maybe not!

Our Friday morning exit from Temuco (Chile’s 6th-largest city) was not nearly as empty as our Sunday exit from similarly-sized Concepción had been. Bike paths got us part of the way, but then they disappeared at the bottleneck caused by the Cautin River. Traffic was so backed up that we were able to outpace it by lifting our bikes up to the sidewalk and riding there for a while. A little way after the bridge, the road widened enough for a shoulder, and then merged back onto Ruta 5. We saw a girl riding her bike down the shoulder for a short section where the frontage road through her neighborhood disappeared, confirming that riding on the shoulder of Chile’s main “Interstate” highway is a totally normal thing to do.

After 13 miles of easy, relaxed Interstate riding, it was time to say farewell to Ruta 5, our friend for less than three days. But while we would now need to be more concerned about vehicles again, our paths would also become more scenic, and feel more like “bike touring”. And almost immediately after exiting to Highway 199 at Freire, we were rewarded with our first sight of Villarrica volcano, an elegant snow-capped pyramid that we would be riding toward all day.

Following our more-eastward turn, the winds would now be coming almost directly from our right sides, vs. straight into our faces like they had been blowing the last couple days on Ruta 5. So it was pretty surprising to feel that the crosswinds actually slowed us more than the headwinds had. I knew that riding in the slipstream of all the trucks on Ruta 5’s shoulder had been helping us, but it was it was amazing to have real-world experience now revealing how much they had been helping us. The invisible bubble created by a regular stream of fast-moving trucks is effectively a poor-man’s Hyperloop (whose whole deal is enabling high speeds via the near-elimination of air-resistance)!

It was also clear that smaller, more-aerodynamic vehicles don’t create nearly the same bubble, because we actually had a pretty steady stream of them on the two-lane road (also, it gets more-cancelled-out by the cars in the opposite direction, since there is no median here to separate the two streams of air). After lunch, the vehicle flow was nearly non-stop, perhaps with people heading to the lakes and mountains for the weekend?

The shoulder we had wasn’t huge, but it was super-consistent (unlike the road on the west side of Ruta 5 had been), and along with the new smooth road surface, that made it feel reasonably-comfortable the whole way. We lucked into some clear moments during the few downhill sections, which allowed us to let it rip and fly down them at 25mph in the center of the road, a speed that doesn’t feel safe when cars are confining us to a narrow shoulder.

Instead of leaving Ruta 5 at Freire, we could have continued a little further south to Pitrufquen on the other side of Tolten River (the river that drains Lake Villarrica). The road on that side shows a little more cyclist heat, and since it has no shoulders, that suggests it has far less traffic than the route we took. But it’s five miles longer, and a bit hillier, so when I gave Rett the choice she picked directness over peace-and-quiet. Now having survived the quite-unpeaceful version without too much stress, I’d say it was the right call.

Especially since I was surprised how easy the 50 mile day with no downhills and headwinds felt. We did 41 miles by lunch, and arrived to our destination a little after 1pm. The town of Villarica is something we haven’t seen in South America yet: a cute European-feeling mountain town snugged up on a lake.