29.0 mi / 8.9 mph / 2501 ft. climbing
Home: Rocio’s AirBNB

Somehow our room managed to cool down enough relatively quickly, allowing us to get a good night’s sleep (even though Rett and Lamby were far away in a whole separate bed!) We emerged into a cooler, cloudier day, which was good because we hit some hills with double-digit grades at the beginning, forcing Rett to walk up a couple of them, and meaning that it was still a sweaty morning. Eduardo, the cyclist we had met on the ferry yesterday, had intended to continue all the way to Hornopiren, our two-day destination. We hadn’t even considered doing that, but it quickly became clear that it would have been utterly impossible in the blazing heat of yesterday afternoon, and I hoped we wouldn’t find Eduardo’s heat-stroked body laid out in the shoulder somewhere.

We had a couple of dog encounters that indicate an entirely different culture has developed here amongst the dogs in Patagonian Chile compared to Peru. They no longer want to kill us, they want to play with us! Which can actually be almost as annoying, since they still come right up on the bikes as we pedal, though they quickly become better-behaved as their initial giddy excitement fades. But what makes them so different? Like the worst dogs in Peru, these were clearly “owned” dogs who had a home to guard, but they just exhibited an entirely different attitude when squeezing out of their front gates. Maybe it really is just different breeding?

Traffic was light enough the whole way that we only had one case where an overtaking vehicle needed to wait behind us a bit for an oncoming car to pass, and almost everyone waited behind us anyway if there was a blind curve ahead.

We made it into Hornopiren by 12:30pm, and our AirBNB host was happy to let us check in then, but we were too hungry so we first went past into town and found a good restaurant (fish & chips for Rett, some kind of giant burger-adjacent sliced meat sandwich for me), and then did our best at the two not-great, produce-deficient grocery stores before heading back out.

Our host was the most-communicative we’ve had out of 17 AirBNB stays in Chile, explicitly and proactively showing us exactly where her place was (even though it was correct on AirBNB’s map too), and once we she welcomed us in and realized we don’t speak Spanish, she told us to communicate in WhatsApp in our native language, and she would do the translating! Many hosts prefer to use WhatsApp rather than AirBNB’s built in chat, but we always find that a little annoying because AirBNB does the translating automatically and WhatsApp doesn’t (plus, it takes the record of our conversation outside of AirBNB’s view). I’m quite sure that no other host was even aware of this downside, much less willing to compensate for it themselves! (but of course, we’re the guests who don’t speak the local language, so totally accept that it should be on us to do the extra work).

Making the experience even better, our super-cute unit had a laundry machine in it that the listing hadn’t mentioned, and the sun finally came out to dry our load on the already-strung line out in the back yard where the river chortled loudly under a large willow tree.