42.4 mi / 10.7 mph / 2479 ft. climbing Home: Cabañas Mi Ruca
Our ~US$55 room included breakfast, though when our hostess offered yesterday that it would/could be served at 7:30am, we hadn’t yet planned out today well enough to know if that would result in too late of a start, so we had been non-committal. By this morning, our plan was to get up, pack, and load the bikes all before breakfast, so that we could be on the road shortly after we finished eating. But I heard very little rustling around upstairs as we packed and 7:30 neared, so I was getting nervous that our lack of a firm commitment (and poor language skills!) were resulting in no breakfast for us.
But no, right on schedule it was ready, for us and the lone other guest (surprisingly not one of the many cyclists we had seen in/around town). Bread, cheese, cold cuts, butter, jam, NesCafe, and lightly-scrambled eggs. Good stuff, and we didn’t have to wash the dishes!
Even though this little church in Villa Santa Lucia looks like it was recently moved to this spot, it had been sitting here since well before the mudslide. I wonder if the community losing a significant fraction of its population to a natural disaster led to an increase or decrease in the desire for religious services?Even with our “late” start, we still rode for many miles before the sun “rose” over the surrounding mountains.Gaps in the mountains on our left side would let sunlight through, while gaps on our right side would reveal…more mountains.Some clouds in the sky for the first time in days meant that the mountain views weren’t quite as pristine, but some of the lighting was dramatically atmospheric.There’s some proper sun.Most space heating in this region is done with wood-burning stoves, which creates a cozy pastoral atmosphere even if you aren’t currently a recipient of that warmth.Ok, and some of the left-side mountain gaps also reveal more mountains, which is what Rett is looking at. Just because who knows, maybe they’re even better than the mountains ahead of us, behind us, and to the right?Some trees on a high ridge are so tall that the sun is lighting their undersides.This was an extremely vocal little cow, with its plaintive moos echoing off the hillsides for the entire five minutes while we took a break here.We spent most of the day playing leapfrog with this couple (though since it seemed like their main language was Spanish, our only interactions were hellos, waves, and smiles).
All of the mountains on either side of us were funneling snow and rain down into the Frío River (and later the Palena), whose ice-blue water we would be flowing alongside of for the entire day. The 0.2% downhill (600 feet over 42 miles) would have been too shallow to be noticeable even if it didn’t contain dozens of up-and-downs as the road did a disappointingly-poor job of tracking the river. But, with those hills causing us to accumulate nearly half-a-mile of climbing on a “downhill” day, it’s at least good that the river wasn’t flowing the other way!
The Frío River at “El Condor”.For some reason it feels like we usually only see rivers this color when we cross them and they’re running perpendicular to our route. I can’t remember ever following along one for such a distance where it maintains the pastel glow.A case where kayaks wouldn’t have just helped avoid the up-and-downs, it would have been a prettier journey too (not that we really have any complaints about the view from the road!)Another version of the farmland-forest-mountains trifecta that we find so satisfying.A look back to the cyclists we’ve been leapfrogging, and a pretty awesome valley.More amazing scenes in every direction. And bicycle-speed is the perfect way to absorb them. I guess if the road had stayed at the river’s level all day, we wouldn’t have gotten photos like this!What goes down must go back up (wait, no, it mustn’t! But it did anyway in this case.)No farmland in this one, but even with just forest and mountains, it’s still pretty good.I always like to have Rett in as many photos as I can, because I feel like her human form provides perspective, and reminds viewers that we’re really riding our bikes through all these amazing places. But there’s something refreshing about getting *other* cyclists in photos, and there is no better place for that than the Carretera Austral.The day’s landscapes (and glacial river) already had made it feel very much like New Zealand, but this one-way bridge really transported us there!
Our long day and relatively-late start meant that we actually stopped for a roadside lunch for the first time in a while. Recently we’ve been getting to our destinations before lunchtime, and “saving” the lunches we’d packed for the next day. So it felt nice to break out our chairs in a pretty roadside spot (where we could almost see down to the river) and just enjoy our natural surroundings rather than the inside of a restaurant or our AirBNB.
Five miles outside of La Junta, we passed this set of really fancy newly-built (and still under-construction) “cabins”.The river is still glowing turquoise, even as clouds coalesce overhead.
We’ve had incredible luck with our start on the Carretera Austral: not only have we had no rain for an entire week, there has been no chance of rain. And while we’ve had to endure some unusual heat instead, it means that we’ve been able to ride for seven straight days. We even have one more day before the weather pattern changes, and Rett was surprisingly willing and able to ride for what would have been a record-tying eighth straight day. But the cabin we wanted to book for several days to wait out the rain in Puyuhuapi wasn’t available for tomorrow night, so we decided to do two nights in La Junta before moving there.
Here we also got a nice cabin (one in a row of four, booked via WhatsApp, but paid on site via credit card!), and did our usual walking tour of the small town’s small grocery stores, did a load of laundry in the included washer, but mostly just holed up and relaxed. On the second evening I walked over to the Shell gas station, and in addition to getting our camp stove bottle filled, I found Rett’s beloved Tuareg coconut cookies (none of the other stores had them), and an ATM. A trifecta almost as good as the scenery-trifecta!
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