PowerCycle

Here’s my new and improved plan for getting to the tip of South America.

I emailed Koga last night and they wrote back very quickly. They were quite surprised at the damage and offered to send a new frame ASAP given that it has a lifetime warranty. The thought of dealing with this right now is rather unappealing so I’m going to wait until I’m in a place that has a good bike mechanic and where I feel like stopping for a couple weeks. Not sure when that will be. Maybe Australia or New Zealand. Or the Netherlands if plane tickets to one of the aforementioned counties are too expensive. That’s my plan B anyway. I’ll just ride from Europe to SE Asia instead of the other way around. Koga is in the Netherlands so I can just drop the bike off for them.

09/27 Who would have thought riding through the driest place on the planet would make you thirsty. I’m not sure what prompted me to bring an extra 5 liters of water plus my 3 water bottles but I’m sure glad I did. My map said there were 2 communities along the way–Cerrillos and Barros Arana. Neither one exists which left zero options for getting water between Calama and San Pedro de Atacama. It’s only a 60 mile ride but it was hot (95F to 102F all day) and heading toward San Pedro it’s uphill for the first 39 miles. Of course the typical strong headwind was blowing full force the whole time.

Saw a lot of touring motorcycle riders on the road. They are always pretty cool and 99% of them wave. If there’s one thing I really like about Chile it’s that very few people honk when they pass. I ended up camping before San Pedro to take advantage of some nice views of the Valley of the Moon heading down from the pass at 11,253 feet. I woke up this morning and thought my right arm was gone. I don’t know how the hell I managed to fall asleep on it so badly but I panicked for a second when I got up because I couldn’t feel it at all and it was trapped under my body so I couldn’t even see it.

I’m here in San Pedro now after knocking out the last 15 miles which consisted of a nice downhill, a fairly decent climb up and then another short downhill. On the last hill I came so close to breaking my top speed record of 44 mph but I ran out of downhill and topped out at 43.5 mph. I had half a bottle of water left thanks to conservation efforts like not washing my dishes after breakfast and using almost none to brush my teeth.

The town is smaller than I thought but I like it (5000 peeps or so). Lot’s of gringo/as running around. The roads are all dirt excpt by the main plaza. There are hippies of course and stupid dogs but they are all sleeping on the sidewalks because it’s hot (the dogs; not the hippies). The dogs will wake up later and bark all night I’m sure. I’m staying at Hostel Miskanty. Every place here is pretty expensive. This place was $29 US a night but I got her down to $23 if I stayed for 3 nights. There’s a private bath, hot shower, wifi and enough room for my bike. Looks like I can get some Argentina pesos here which will save me from the stress of not having any cash leaving Chile.

This is a good place to stock up for the ride to Paso de Lago Sico and then on to Salta. Should take about 10 days or so to get there. This will be another section that will require some good food and water planning. It’s unpaved, there are a couple passes over 15,000 feet and there are very few populated areas along the way. If the road is washboard I’m turning around and taking the paved option.

I took a day off in Calama to relax but I ended up spending hours and hours trying to get the wifi on my laptop working. It worked on my iPod Touch but for some reason I couldn’t get it to connect to the hotel wireless. It connected fine to an open connection the night before. Turns out it was just their wireless not working. It works fine here in San Pedro. Argh.

GPX track

09/24 I’m back in the lowlands again. After leaving the border area with Bolivia there was a bit of climbing up to 13,000 feet and then it was all downhill. OK, not quite but here I am at 7,500 feet; lower than I’ve been in 3 months.

Chile and I are not getting along well. It has to do with my wallet. It is horribly freaking expensive here!!! Lunch was $9 US for a beer, some little pieces of chopped meat, a salad (haha, it was some lettuce and 3 slices of tomatoes) and some rice. This is all local stuff–nothing needed to be imported. $9 freaking dollars! OK, then we get to the hotel. This is a big city (142,000 peeps or so). I rode to 5 places and they were all twice as much as this place. It cost me $35 US a night! It must be an amazing place for that price you say? No, it is crap. OK, it’s not that bad but it should be $9 at the most. The internet doesn’t work (I’m stealing it), the shower is so small that my shoulders hit both walls and I can’t even bend down to wash my damn feet, the paint on the walls is cracked, there are no electrical covers, there’s not enough room for my bike and the pillow cases have dried blood stains on them. I could go on.

But for $35 the infrastructure in the city must be amazing you say? No it is crap too. OK, it’s actually not bad but you can bet that $10 of that room cost isn’t going to taxes. The roads are in pretty good shape but only in the central area. Overall there’s a fairly modern, clean look to the city but that certainly doesn’t justify the cost of basic goods. The one huge negative was that I saw a lot of stupid stray dogs sleeping on the sidewalks. You would think they’d at least get rid of them so there’s not crap all over the place. Outside the city all there is to judge things by is the road and until 20 miles ago it ranked as one of the top 5 worst roads I’ve been on in almost 3 years of travel.

Why is it so expensive here? I have no idea. I did some research and couldn’t come up with a good reason. The electrical costs to industry and individual are about the same as Peru. The food I eat isn’t imported. The infrastructure isn’t any better than comparably-sized cities in Peru and those cities are much, much nicer (Cajamarca, Cusco). The value of their currency might be an issue but I’ve only been consuming local things.

Basically all this means is that there’s no way I’m staying in Chile for the ride down the 770 mile Carretera Austral like I was considering. I’ll head out of here over to Argentina and go down south that way.

The ride from the border to here was through some truly remarkable landscape. All along the border with Bolivia were massive, snow capped volcanic peaks, huge salt lakes, occasional lagoons dotted with pink flamingos and lot’s of wild vicunas (deer-like things). I even saw a lizard running around at 12,300 feet.

Finding a place to camp out was very difficult at times. The road drops down into the Atacama Desert–the driest place on Earth. Some weather stations in the desert have never received rain. The terrain is flat, sandy and devoid of any bushes/trees/old buildings to hide behind. It took me 2 1/2 days of riding to get to Calama. The first night I slept way up off the road next to a salt mining camp. The next night I slept in a dry river bed.

The notorious southwesterly winds hit full force leaving Ollague starting at 10am or so. There was no let up until 6pm which made for a tough day of riding. It was hilly as well–climbed about 2400 feet the first day (40 miles riding) and 1400 feet or so the next day (55 miles). Today, getting into Calama, was easy (900 feet @36 miles paved from a few miles before Chiu Chiu). The road was worse than the wind. It was washboard 75% of the time around the lakes near Bolivia and then it was bumpy and dirt (or occasional beat-up asphalt).

GPX track

09/21 I made it into Chile and I owe everything to a stuffed armadillo. After getting stamped out of Bolivia and paying Bs.15 I rode the couple miles over to the Chile side. Inside the immigration building I filled out the paperwork making sure to check “Yes” next to the question about carrying any fruit/vegetable/meat products (including dehydrated which I was along with some jam and an opened thing of lunch meat). Checking no and getting caught is a $200 fine.

The guy gave me the max of 90 days and mentioned that if I leave the country and come back in again I’ll get another 90 days. Good to know. With that done he pointed me over to the line for baggage inspection. I was behind a bunch of bus people so it took a while for my turn to come up. I was watching the one guy doing the inspection and he was very thorough. I thought for sure he’d make me throw out all the soups and canned goods I had. That’s when the armadillo saved me.

The lady right in front of me had a stuffed one in her bag along with some kind of jar of fruit or something (animal hide/fur is prohibited). The guy hauled her away and I never saw either one of them again. For the next 10 minutes I sat on the curb waiting for the guy to come back but he never did. Finally another guy came out of an office and asked if anyone had checked my bags. I told him no and pointed to the pannier with my food in it along with the big plastic bag I had all my soup in. He just told me to bring in my trunk bag (the biggest one) and the pannier with my food in it. The other 7 bags never got looked at. He opened both up and hardly spent 10 seconds going through each of them. Then he looked up and told me he was done. Sweet.

Chile is freaking expensive! The hostel cost me $10,000 CLP which is about $21 US. The same room in Peru or Bolivia would have cost about $7 US. The cheapest in town was $6,000 CLP but they were full. Lunch wasn’t as bad. Maybe a little more than the equivalent in Bolivia. The electrical plugs here are different than anywhere else I’ve been (EU style) but I have a universal plug adapter so I’m set. Supposedly the water in Chile is safe to drink from the tap. That’ll save me some money. The internet is free but the buildings are too far even for my mega-antenna so I’ll have to head outside later.

GPX track