35.3 mi / 10.3 mph / 1354 ft. climbing
Home: Maria Nancy’s AirBNB

With our AirBNB’s driveway connecting to the highway, we just continued straight along the route we’d been on yesterday evening, back into the left-side bike lanes that inexplicably* continue for 25 more miles along the south shore of Lake Llanquihue to Puerto Varas (*my guess is that it again has something to do with the unusual bicycle-attention given by the owners of the Cruce Andino border crossing, since their route officially starts/ends at Puerto Varas). There was one big difference though: low clouds had swept in, making the Osorno volcano nearly invisible, even when there was nothing but water between us (and there wasn’t even a hint of Puntiagudo, or Calbuco, the latter of whom we would only learn about days later when skies cleared at Puerto Montt!) So we felt even more lucky for yesterday’s wide-open skies.

The bike lane ended abruptly at the outskirts of Puerto Varas, exactly at the place where it would have been nice to have a bike lane start. We didn’t get a chance to see the German-influenced town (we saw plenty of signs with German words on the road in though), because we quickly made a left turn and began climbing from the lakeshore. The first sections weren’t too bad, but near the top, on a curvy 9% hill, any hint of a shoulder disappeared, and it would have been really dangerous to keep wobbling up. Luckily there was a sidewalk on the left side that we jumped over to to continue pushing up, until we reached a bus stop where we sat to eat our lunch.

Once we got near the Paseo Alerce mall outside of Puerto Varas, traffic was backed up in both directions. I couldn’t tell if that was just the normal pattern, or if it was “Friday before Christmas” traffic.

Our AirBNB house was conveniently (for now, at least!) up on the northern outskirts of Puerto Montt, 400 feet above the center of town, so we had a pretty direct route in. But there was one more steep uphill after we’d entered the neighborhood, and as I shifted with my derailleur hanger still bent from yesterday’s fallover, my chain got pushed over the innermost cog and jammed between the cassette and the spokes. Apparently my muscle memory was still fresh from when this happened to me 17 years ago near Zion National Park (that time due to the cassette lockring loosening), because here my legs instantly reacted to stop pedaling, and after some careful work, I was able to pry the chain out without any apparent damage to the spokes (at Zion, I needed to get spokes replaced and the hub refinished). Phew.

Rett had gone on ahead to meet our AirBNB host, but when I got my bike back upright with the bags all reattached, and pedaled the rest of the way there, she was still waiting at the locked gate. The drips of rain that had started to fall right when my chain fell, had become more constant, so we were stuck standing for 15 minutes with no shelter, getting colder and wetter. Normally this is a situation that would have sent Rett’s annoyance spiraling up into anger (especially since our host had said to make sure that we were there on time!) But I think the comforting knowledge that we were at our holiday destination, where we would now have weeks to warm up and dry out, overpowered the negative feelings.

Once the weather had “stuck” us in San Martin de Los Andes for five days, I figured that was the end of our record-setting ride-density. But now with five more days of riding after that break, our 25 days of riding (since we started 33 days ago in Valparaiso) were enough to accumulate 91h55m of riding time, more than 10% higher than any previous 33-day period. Happily holding each other in the rain at the end of the effort, is a major success!

Days 2-16

Our neighborhood is unusual. It’s a “new” single-family development that was built as Puerto Montt expanded, about 20 years ago. The houses are all small, and while there are about five different designs, they aren’t mixed together like they might be in a development in the US. It’s more like “these three blocks get the one-level door-on-the-sides, these cross streets get the two-story versions…” The effect is a patterned uniformity that movies have made me believe also exists in London.

Our two bedroom house is about 600 square feet, perfectly sized for us, sitting on a lot that’s only 1200 square feet. So for a single-family neighborhood, it’s incredibly dense. And while all the houses look older than their ~2003 construction would imply, the fact that ours is decorated with 1970s-1990s furnishings makes it feel even older. But it also makes it perfect, since that’s the era of our childhoods, which is exactly where we want to be during the holidays. Even better, Rett found some Christmas-y tablecloths stashed away, and the family (who must live in this place part-time) had already installed some flashing Christmas lights outside, and more in the front window-box that literally everyone in the neighborhood uses for displays.

Although the kitchen was one of the best-equipped we’ve had in South America, we still had some challenges cooking our complex and traditional holiday favorites. First, like every oven we’ve seen on this continent, there is no thermostat to control the temperature. There is simply a knob to adjust the gas flame level, no different than the burners on the stovetop. Most ovens do have temperatures printed around the knob, but this one didn’t even have that. Which I actually respect: since there is zero feedback from the oven to that “temperature” setting, suggesting that it can control the oven to a particular temperature is basically a lie. At least this oven was honest about its failings! And for many things, such rudimentary control is fine. But for baking, it’s…not good.

For ingredients, even though we had access to the most foreign/international products that we’ve had in South America (via Lider/Walmart, Jumbo, and Santa Isabel grocery stores), we still couldn’t find everything we wanted. “Brown sugar” doesn’t seem to exist in Chile, the closest thing is “chancaca”, which comes in solid blocks. Sawing at it with a knife causes it to disassemble into granulated form, essentially a molasses-heavy super-brown sugar. At the other end of the spectrum, powdered sugar doesn’t seem to exist either. But, I learned that you can pulverize regular granulated sugar in a blender, our kitchen had a blender, and it totally worked! (in reverse, a Chilean in the US would probably wonder why he can’t find 10 varieties of liquid sweetener in a bottle.) Despite Jumbo having a collection of McCormick spices in its “foreign” section, allspice was not among them (nutmeg and cloves could be found in local versions). Finally, our initial attempt at canned pumpkin (to go in our dinner rolls) turned out to be more of a pumpkin soup, necessitating a Christmas Eve ride back down to Jumbo (where I had spotted the “American” version previously). That was actually a blessing in disguise, since I was finally able to really feel the Christmas-season atmosphere on the chilly ride to a store filled with mobs of other people doing their last-minute shopping.

Beyond food, we spent a lot of time doing our normal relaxing, with a surplus of Netflix Christmas movies. I even explicitly joined for our traditional viewing of “Love Actually” (with Rett’s sister Sophie included virtually), as well as “Jurassic World: Rebirth” and “The Long Walk”.

Our AirBNB location nicely put us within walking distance of both of the region’s malls (ok, the downtown one was a really long walk that we took an Uber back up the hill from), and Rett was able to do a lot of clothing-replacement at the unusually-high percentage of outdoor-oriented shops inside them.

At those malls, we got a little bait-and-switched at what I’d intended as a Christmas surprise for Rett. Up until a couple days before, she’d had no idea that the latest ‘Avatar’ movie (a series we both love, but her especially) was being released. I’d been looking for info for weeks, and was excited that the theater at the downtown mall would be showing it in 3D, with Spanish subtitles (and thus the original English dialog, not dubbed). But things got switched at the last minute, and the only non-dubbed version was in 2D, but, now it was at the closer mall. So while it was a bummer not to be able to see it in 3D, it was still incredibly lucky that the only non-dubbed showing in the entire southern half of Chile happened to be a 20 minute walk away!

I had thought I might be doing a lot of work to get the bikes in shape for the Carretera Austral, but there really didn’t seem to be much needed. I straightened my bent derailleur hanger, as well as I could without a measurement tool at least. And then I investigated a clunking on Rett’s bike that had prevented her from using her two smallest rear cogs over the last week or so (“Doc, my bike clunks when I use these gears.” “Well don’t use those gears then!”) It coincidentally turned out to be a loose lockring on her cassette, so it’s a good thing she hadn’t thrown her chain into her spokes as well! In Bariloche my bike computer had fallen out of its mount, and someone must have rolled over it in the 3 minutes between when I noticed and went back to find it, because the temperature and altitude sensor no longer works, and unfortunately I couldn’t figure out any way to fix it.

So, well-fed and well-rested, I think we’re ready to roll on into 2026! Our early-to-bed, early-to-rise sleep schedule got horribly degraded during our time off, but that meant it wasn’t too hard for us old people to stay up until midnight on New Year’s Eve. Our “going out” though was limited to stepping out into our moonlit front yard after midnight with our glasses of Asti Spumante. A few fireworks in the distance, and some revelers dancing down the block (we got a “feliz año”!) made it perhaps the quietest New Year of our nomadacy, but it felt just right to me.