Day 125 - December 5th

For whatever reason, it was much easier getting the bikes out of the hostel this morning than getting them in last night. Not too sure why. Probably geometry. That's a good start to the day though.

Having some leftover pizza for breakfast was enough to get us to Andacollo, which was our first city off the beaten path since entering Chile! Last night, Trevor got in touch with his old boss at Teck Metals to try and set up a tour with one of the Chilean operations. Unfortunately, there was no time to arrange anything, so we figured we'd just show up and try our best.

First thing's first... After arriving in town,we found a cafe and got our morning coffee. While finishing that, we wandered over to an archeology museum. It cost us $300 Chilean pesos (60¢ Canadian) each for entry, which may or may not have been worth it. The museum was tiny, and not very amazing. Maybe if we could read more than 10% of the Spanish it would have been better.

Next, we tried to go to the Teck copper mine. Driving up to the front gate, we were greeted by confused security guards that didn't speak a word of English. We told them we used to work for Teck in Canada, and basically quit our jobs to drive down here (which isn't exactly true, but bear with me). They told us there wasn't a tour, but they'd see what they could do. They got in contact with a friend of Trev's old boss, just to make sure our story checked out (I think) and from there did everything they could, but a tour wasn't in the cards for the day. Too bad. We still had lots of fun talking to them and hanging out. And the lady security guard apparently loved our blue eyes!

On our way out of town, we took the same road back to the Panamerican highway, which was an awesome road. Twisty and mountainous, it was our first breakup of the monotony that is the Chilean desert. Awesome. Anyway, we made it back to the highway, and except for a couple gas and snack stops, we kept ripping for the whole day.

One time, after a toll booth, we met a German couple on a 26 year old BMW. Pretty cool seeing a classic bike like that, which he had apparently torn down and rebuilt from scratch before the trip. The bike was shipped to Chile, and the two of them were doing one month of travels before she had to fly home and he kept going for another 6 months up to the USA. Great to hear some of their stories.

Eventually we arrived in a town called Papudo, which had a cool beachy vibe to it. It seemed like a tourist destination for Chileans, but not many foreigners. Pretty cool. We found a cheap hotel/hostel thing, and parked our bikes in the restaurant. This isn't even weird to us anymore. After a wander down to the ocean for dinner, and then a coffee shop with WiFi, we called it a night.