Days 2-5

One good thing about me occasionally riding Rett’s bike up steep hills is that it gives me a chance to notice any potential mechanical issues that might escape her detection. For the last few days, I’ve felt a sort of vibration, or “buzzing” coming through her pedals and into my feet when pedaling. With some time off here, I was able to remove the chain and crank and verify that the bearing in the non-drive side bottom bracket is grinding and has play in it. Given the timing, I have to wonder if the cause was the same silty water that infiltrated and gummed up my freehub a couple weeks ago. Though unlike the 8-month-old freehub, her bottom bracket has 20,000 miles on it (or, by rough calculation, some 10 million rotations!), so maybe it was just normal time and wear.

Unfortunately, Shimano Hollowtech II bottom brackets are even less-serviceable than my barely-serviceable freehub was (they literally have “Do Not Disassemble” printed on them). So replacement is the only reasonable option, which not only requires a new bottom bracket, but a specialized wrench for removal/installation that I don’t have. Surprisingly this tiny town of Puerto Rio Tranquilo contains a sort-of bike shop in its 3-by-4 block grid of buildings. So I rolled over there one evening, and while the mechanic wasn’t there, his assistant helpfully called him up just to confirm that they didn’t have any bottom brackets available. Shoot.

The next option was getting in touch with Viaje en Bici, a bike shop in far-away Concepcion, but well-known for helping touring cyclists throughout Chile by shipping parts. I asked about the possibility of them sending a bottom bracket ahead to Cochrane (the next town we would reach), and not only did they immediately respond, they also took the initiative to contact the owner of the similar barely-a-bike-shop there to verify that they had the wrench necessary to install it. Amazing! I have no idea how long the bottom bracket would continue working until total failure (maybe a week, maybe a year), but since it has already been in this “grinding” state for nearly a week, it seemed likely it would survive three more days of riding to Cochrane.

With that (partially) settled, it was time for some tourism, a paid-for non-bike excursion that I don’t think we’ve done since we were in the Sacred Valley of Peru. We knew the Marble Caves were a popular attraction, but it was still discombobulating on the day we rolled into town when multiple touts on the street approached us to ask if we were looking for a Marble Caves tour! They were in front of the street running towards the water that is lined on both sides with the small buildings of competing tour operators. And then of course this was the destination of many of the buses that had passed us on the road. In short, it was a level of tourism infrastructure more-developed than anything we’ve seen anywhere in all of Chile, so to see it in this tiny little town in one of the most-remote parts of the country was quite a shock.

The “caves” are only accessible by water, and surely the coolest way to see them is by kayak, but that sounded like a bit too much complexity to add to our lives, so we just went with a normal boat tour. The weather pattern on the Carretera Austral for us has alternated between several days of clear weather, followed by several days of cloudy and rainy weather. So far, our planning (and a bit of luck) has allowed us to align our riding with the clear part of the cycle, and our breaks with the rainy part, but that meant we had to wait a few days during our “time off” for the sky to clear enough to light up the lake’s turquoise water and reflect it into the marble caves. When we finally went to book a trip (walking over to the kiosks and finding the place that Rett had sent an unresponded-to WhatsApp message), they still wanted to take us out then during the cloudy morning, but eventually we convinced them to put together a tour for the afternoon when the forecast showed the skies clearing. When we returned at 3pm with the sun brightly shining, the operator acceded with his smile: “yep, you were right!”

We set off with a family of six, leaving a couple of empty seats in the low-slung, open, fiberglass motorboat, similar to the “pangas” on which we visited the gray whales in Baja, Mexico. Our tour guide and captain spoke only in (Chilean) Spanish, so we didn’t understand much, but you could say we got the picture. We did the “full” tour, which meant that we first crossed the arm of General Carrera Lake toward Puerto Sanchez, and the group of islands that lie in front of it. The islands themselves were really unique, and it was just nice to be out on a boat ride on a lake. Thanks Rett!

For most of the tour we moved at slow-to-moderate speed winding from shore to shore, but once we had seen everything, our captain made a beeline for home, cranking up the speed and crossing an area with much larger waves. This caused the boat to temporarily fly, and then smack down onto the concrete-hard water, eliciting yelps and laughs of excitement from Rett and a couple of the other women on-board, and reminding me exactly of those trips in Baja (though here we had chairs with a bit of padding, vs. Baja’s wooden bench seats). Clearly it was intended to be part of the entertainment, and I definitely feel like we got our money’s worth (~US$70 for both of us).