43.7 mi / 9.8 mph / 2626 ft. climbing
Home: Enzo’s AirBNB

The day started like a fall morning, with a pleasant cool bite in the air and crisp blue skies. That meant we were granted a second day with excellent views of Villarica volcano, so we took a little detour back to the waterfront on our way out of town so that Rett could get some of the views that I saw by myself last night. Given the relative lack of photos from other bike tourers who have gone this way, I get the impression that we’ve been exceptionally lucky; there may be some people who pass this way and have no idea there is a volcano at all, as it can be completely hidden by clouds. Even better, we would continue to head straight toward the snow-capped peak for the first half of the day, so it would only grow larger in our eyes.

Like yesterday, we had a choice between two roughly-parallel routes to get to the east end of Lake Villarrica and the town of Pucón: a more-direct, busier route, or a longer, hillier, but quieter route. Unlike yesterday, today we chose the longer route. This is because the route hugging the lakeshore has sections with no shoulder at all, and if the Saturday traffic volume from weekenders was anything like yesterday, that would make it a total nightmare. Also, because we took the shorter route yesterday, we could use that reserved energy today on the longer route!

The first step then was to sort of back out of town, climbing a steep, busy 200-foot hill up to a sort-of-suburb, at which point we could turn east again to parallel the lakeshore. There is a surprisingly-huge amount of development up there (including chain grocery stores and tons of housing), entirely distinct from the small-town vibe down on the lakefront. That also meant there was a new wide road passing through it all, and surprisingly little traffic given all the housing. Most-amazingly, once we reached the end of the suburb, the landscape immediately changed to forest/pasture, and traffic dropped to near-zero.

I had told Rett that this route was going to take us over the toe of Villarrica, but after climbing a bunch of small-but-steep 10%+ hills, Lamby retorted that we apparently needed to go over all of the toes in the volcano’s foot! It was worth it though to be made to feel like stupid babies playing peek-a-boo, since the white cone never stopped being a jaw-dropping surprise every time it re-emerged from a behind a stand of trees.

When I was looking at the volcano in Satellite View, I noticed a little dot in the center of the cone. Zooming it, it looked…orange? I kept going, and, holy shit, that’s a lake of lava in the center of its crater! You can take a guided hike to the top, but I had a tough time finding other images of the lava lake, so it might have just been a perfectly-timed photo from straight above in 2024. Either way, it was pretty awesome to look at the frozen white slightly-flattened summit, and realize that it’s hiding a crater of molten rock. As if it wasn’t already close to the Platonic ideal of a volcano just from its shape alone!

The road took us within 8 miles of the fire-and-ice summit, but then we dove down a steep 1000-foot hill back to the lake and Pucón. There we briefly rejoined the shore road (before hopping on a bike path), and the constant stream of cars coming from Villarrica confirmed that our extra miles and hills had been easier than battling that traffic would have been. The off-street bike path soon became stupid, and with the road now having two lanes in each direction, we hopped back down into it. But then suddenly cones appeared in the road, narrowing our direction to a single lane (it appeared to be some sort of reversible lane?) By this point the bike path had switched to the left side of the road, and angry drivers were waving us over there like we were idiots. Uh, no, the people who suddenly messed up this road are the idiots! And we’d love to get over to the bike path, but with a bunch of cars now in both directions, do you expect us to just teleport there?!

We finally made it over to the left-side path alive, and for once it was actually a decent path, because it ran alongside the airport where there weren’t any crossings to screw with it. Of course that decentness ended where the path abruptly ended, leaving us to debate riding on the ugly gravel shoulder that continued on the wrong side of the road, vs. rejoining the still-coned-off single eastbound lane. We saw a local cyclist go for the lane, so we followed suit, and I supposed because the drivers saw we now had no other option, they were more-relaxed about having to wait behind us, and would pull out to pass when there was a gap in the cones.

And thankfully we only had a mile of that until nearly all the traffic went left at a fork in the road (apparently to more lakeside weekend activities), while we went right (toward the Argentina border). Once we completed the 500-foot climb that started near the airport, the rest of the way was unusually flat. It was getting quite warm though.

Curarrehue felt very much like a single-strip mountain village, and we had to visit several of its small-ish grocery stores to procure everything we would need for tonight and the next day or two. When we arrived to our AirBNB cabin, it was incredibly-warm inside, over 90°F. At first it seemed like it was just because it had been all-buttoned-up, and opening the windows would cool it down. But it turned out to be 87°F outside, easily the warmest afternoon we’ve had in Chile, ironic since we’re both the closer to the South Pole and higher in altitude than anywhere else we’ve been in this country. Really it shows how lucky we’ve been to have dodged hot weather for nearly a week since we left the protective refrigeration of the coast. We asked our friendly host if she had a fan in their main house/B&B next-door that we could borrow, and she first said “sorry, no”, but then I think she went out and bought one for us! With that, and the sun setting behind the nearby mountain by 7pm (more than two hours before actual sunset), Rett managed to avoid overheating.