On The Road! (Finally)
It’s finally happening for real! We are heading south! It’s not all been plane sailing for all of us though. Poor Scott and Gina are stuck without their bike for a few days. It is held up somewhere in the mysterious dark world of air freight and customs. Gina has joined the tour as a slightly reluctant passenger in the support truck while Scott waits in Santiago for the bike to arrive. The remaining eight bikes headed out two days ago.
The road itself is very uninteresting so far. Four lanes wide, smooth and straight. We crave some corners which we are assured will come soon enough. The general speed limit is 120kph but it’s just a suggestion really. There is virtually no police presence and people progress at their own pace. We nod politely as we flash past a carabinero with his speed camera at X+? above the limit but he hardly notices. Although the army does patrol the toll booths with assault rifles. Everybody pays the toll!
Everybody pays the toll!
Chile has been in the grip of a severe drought, an almost perverse quirk of nature where the la nina event that has brought flooding to the Western Pacific ie. Eastern Australia also causes the reverse in the Eastern Pacific ie Chile and Peru. That said the Maipo valley south of Santiago is a vast fertile plain covered in all manner of crops from corn and vegetables to fruits and especially wine grapes. The holdings appear to be quite small by Australian standards but the agriculture is more intensive. Virtually all arable land is utilised to feed the people.
We spend our first night in the tourist town of Salto Del Laja in a comfortable motel overlooking a magnificent waterfall.
Salto Del Laja Falls
The night is spent in a boutique brewery and cafe serving very tasty lagers and gourmet food.
Hello hello hello , what’s all this then?
We fall asleep to the reassuringly constant rhythm of the fall of water onto rocks.
Day two starts with a bad omen, if you believe in such things, when I discover my rear tyre is flat and soon after David’s bike develops a flat battery. Both issues are very quickly rectified and the bad juju evaporates. Another express run down the hwy and we are in a funky little roadside cafe in front of a magnificent blue lake overlooked by a lightly smoking volcano. After a hearty lunch we check into our hotel in the super hip town of Pucon. The place is heaving with tourists, a Latin beat pounds from speakers up and down the street and hawkers try to lure us into their shops or sidewalk stalls.
The cobalt blue water and the fire mountain.
Tomorrow I will try to climb the lightly smoking fire mountain while Sally finds something more relaxing to do, like soaking in a thermal pool. Did I mention the town is on a seismic yellow alert. There are three levels of alert, green means all is sweet and red is bugger off out of town NOW! Yellow is somewhere between those two extremes. What could possibly go wrong?
