45.1 mi / 10.0 mph / 2801 ft. climbing
Home: Mauricio’s AirBNB

We kept with our up-at-5:30, out-at-8am cadence, this time because we did have a long day ahead. And it started right off the bat with a huffer, an 800-foot climb out of the city of Constitución, the 2nd-largest city we would pass through on the coast of central Chile. That size meant that there was a lot of morning-rush traffic on our chosen route, the only one that snakes its way across the otherwise-boxy street grid, as it’s the one engineered to ascend the hill at a reasonable grade. We generally had decent space, and drivers behaved well, but Rett still hated it due to the feeling of instability forced on us by the slow climb.

It all got much better once we reached the cloverleaf interchange at the top and turned south again. Our increased speed restored our stability, but also most of the traffic continued eastward toward Ruta 5, Chile’s main central artery, while we again paralleled the coast. The decrease in passenger vehicles meant that now at least 60% of the remaining vehicles were logging trucks or dump trucks. Those seem like they would be scarier than cars, but the reverse is true: the “professional” drivers in Chile generally do a much better job of giving us space than the amateurs do. There isn’t too much they could do though to prevent smacking us with blasts of wind when barrelling by in the other direction, but it was manageable once we knew to be prepared for it.

By mile 13 we were back down at sea-level, taking a break while watching the waves crash in, and were surprised when another touring cyclist pulled up from behind us. Sofia, from Canada, is the first tourer we’ve met in Chile, and the first solo woman we’ve seen in South America. Inspiringly-fresh to this form of adventure, she had an inward-rotated shifter on her handlebar from a crash that I tried-and-failed to fix, though I did tighten up her front brake. Only days later did I realize that her brake pads had been unusually-easy to adjust (she has the same TRP Spyre brakes as us) because of the visibility afforded to them if you install your fork backwards!! I honestly don’t know how she was able to even ride without falling over, but that was just another reason to be impressed by her. We chatted for a while, and then she sped off leaving us in the dust.

While the girls talked, I had spent much of my time trying to find a frustrating clicking coming from (I think!) my rear wheel. It was happening on every wheel rotation, whether pedaling or coasting, but only while I was sitting on the bike. When just spinning the wheel while stopped (or as I was doing here, walking alongside the bike up and down the road) I could not reproduce it. That made it impossible to find the source, so I just resigned myself to the clicking, hoping that it wasn’t an indicator of an actual problem.

As we riding with Sofia in our sights but well ahead of us, my navigation objected and I realized our route had us turning where she was going straight. A quick check revealed that the two routes would soon meet up (so we at least wouldn’t have to worry about her ending up way off course), and while the easy thing to do would be to just keep following her, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to do a real-time experiment. So we reversed direction back to our intended turn. 1.5 miles later, where our route climbed to rejoin hers, we saw her fly past on the downhill just as we reached the intersection, much closer than she was when we split. So not only was ours proven to be the faster route, it was likely more interesting, since it took us down through a small fishing village right on the water. We’ll make sure to tell Sofia so she can switch it up for the next time she rides the Chilean coast!

The minimarket that we stopped at just before our accommodation was of the old-school general-store “tell me what you want and I’ll get it for you from behind the counter” style. It’s the first of that type we’ve seen in Chile, something I assumed we’d left behind in Peru. Thankfully the woman did a good job of simplifying her Chilean Spanish for us to make it easy.

Tonight’s AirBNB was in a somewhat-unusual setting: most of the town runs along the highway, but we made a left turn down a side-street, which quickly became gravel for one block, and then returned to concrete as we reached a planned neighborhood with narrow streets and playgrounds interspersed as a clear part of the plan. The plan also seemed to involve a million barking dogs, some behind the fences of the houses, and some out in the playground, with the woman greeting us owning dogs in both locations.

Rett had picked the place partly because it had a washing machine, but when I attempted to plug it in, I saw that the spacing of the prongs on the plug was too wide to match the outlet. Asking the woman who greeted us (who seemed to just live next door, and wasn’t actually the host) showed that it wasn’t just me who was confused, and her calling the host still failed to resolve the matter (had someone installed this washing machine and connected it to the water supply and drains, but never actually tried to use it?!) She generously offered to do our laundry in her machine, but before I could deliver our clothes, she produced a power strip that did the conversion.