Greetings now from Santiago. It's been 19 weeks and a day and
I'm right around 18,400 miles travelled since I left Oakland, but
I forgot to check the odometer before writing this so I'm not entirely
sure. I know I crossed the 18,000 mile mark yesterday, and another
major milestone was the bike turned 30 today, 30,000 miles that is!
It's also making a nasty grinding noise, but I think it is just the
chain scraping across the various guides. I tightened it quite
a but yesterday but it is super loose again today. When a chain
stretches that much in 400 miles you can pretty much write it off.
However, all it has to do is get me about another 40 miles total.
We are in Santiago, and this is our end destination for South America.
Tomorrow we are going to ride 12 miles out to the airport and
try to talk to cargo companies. In the best possible scenario
we will leave the bikes with one and they will ship both bikes to
California. In the middle of the road scenario we will have
to drive back to Santiago and then back out to the airport at some
specified time and drop the bikes off for shipment. Worse case
is no one will agree to ship the bikes for a reasonable price and
we will ride back to Santiago to regroup.
I last wrote from Quellòn, on the island of Chiloè,
and it was raining. Late that afternoon the sun came through
after a couple of last gasp downpours, however it was too late to
continue on. The clear skies didn't exactly last through the
night, in the morning it was cloudy with some ground fog. It
didn't look too bad so we decided to go for it. When we got
the bikes out of the hotel garage, it started misting a little, and
by the time wed been on the road for a few minutes it started to mist
heavily, and then it got to what I would definitely have to label
light rain. Maybe even moderate in a couple places. But
then we broke through and got back to the "occassional showers
with an occassional sprinkle" zone. This continued until
we reached the north end of the island, managed to get on the ferry
to the mainland at 12 noon sharp, with about 2 minutes to spare before
the ferry left, and then a couple hours on the mainland. After
this, it cleared up almost completely. This was yesterday, and
we made exactly 500 miles, the biggest day of the trip for me since
my Las Vegas to Tucson leg, and really good considering we had a ferry
crossing. We arrived Los Saltos del Laja easily before
dark, under fair skies. This morning dawned cloudless.
This lasted about an hour and then some clouds materialized out of
nowhere. No problem though, no rain fell on us. We arrived
Santiago around 3PM, and proceeded to look for a decent hotel in the
Bario Brazil (Brazil Neighborhood). A couple "helpfull"
what were they, um, tourist van drivers perhaps? Tried to get
us to go to a couple hotels they could get a commission at, but they
either didn't have a room or proper parking, so we were like "thanks
but no thanks." They asked for a "propina", a
tip, for trying to locate a room so Dick offered them a dollar to
cover their gas, but they wouldn't take it. So then they
ask for money, for what, more? Like, you tell us this place
in a part of town we don't want to be in has parking, but it really
doesn't, and the other place didn't have a room. You didn't
tell us we would be charged for your "service", since you
get commission. Screw you. So then they pretend to call
the police on us (who, the tip police?) and follow us for a few blocks
while saying our license plate numbers loud enough for us to hear.
Should have taken the dollar, or not lied to us about the parking
situation, dudes.
