Category: Bike Tour

The brand new divided highway connecting Coihue and Angol (Ruta 180) very visibly communicates that bicycles are not allowed, which suggests an unfortunate trend toward USA-ism in Chilean transportation (later this day we would see that Ruta 5, the Pan-American Highway and Chile’s central artery, explicitly allows pedestrians, and thus presumably bikes as well). But…

The winds were expected to be somewhat less-friendly than they had been yesterday, so we had the alarm set for 5:30am, when the skies are just beginning to lighten. The goat-guarding dogs would go on random barking sprees through the night, and the latest one was timed just before our alarm anyway. It was 45°F,…

During this intense weeks-long push, we’ve done a pretty good job of getting to bed early so that we can be up early to maximize our opportunity to take advantage of favorable weather conditions (winds usually don’t pick up until the afternoon), and in general have kept ourselves more-disciplined than usual (hence this journal entry…

Concepción would be the largest city we’ve been to since Valparasio, and while it’s technically a port city, our inland route to get there would mostly be on major highways. So we “slept in” until 6am, expecting that there wouldn’t be much scenery to stop to look at along the way. Our more-inland route meant…

We woke to our first clear day in what feels like a week, and since our continuing ability to stick near the cold Pacific should protect us from the sun’s heat, we could simply enjoy the effects of better light for the day’s improved scenery (or was the scenery improved by the higher-contrast lighting?) Our…