Day 41 - When did it get so hard?

Melipilla to Lituche (80km) - Tuesday 4th October


As we left town we realised that today would be straightforward but fairly filled with traffic. The road; gently undulating, but surrounded by beautiful green fields and mountains, almost imitating the French Alps; was buzzing with trucks, busses and fast moving cars who didn't seem to want to obey the "keep 1.5m away from cyclists" sign. Either that or they were never very good at orders of magnitude estimates at school!

So the morning would have been delightful if our heads weren't brought down by the gushing roar as each engine powered object shook by.

There were however, several places to stop and grab lunch (probably due to the heavy traffic!) so we were grateful in some ways! We took advantage of a truck stop and sampled our first out of city Chilean food. This wasn't dissimilar to Peru's offerings, which is no bad thing at all, especially as they understand hand soap, toilet paper and bathrooms here. Although the ordering process is much more pot luck as Chileans are incredibly difficult to understand and their voice boxes, set to "Incomprehensibly fast", seem to be only capable of single speed offerings. So we had two mountainous lumps of tasty boiled pork, with half a plate of tasty rice and a fresh salad.

Soon after San Pedro we turned off the main road and headed towards the surfer town of Pichilemu, our target for tomorrow. We knew there was a small town on route Litueche, but had no idea if it would possess any sort of home for two weary cyclists. We also knew there were cabiñas somewhere around a lake to our left, but we had no idea at what point of the (probably 50km) loop they would be located. It seemed likely near the top, but who knows! So for now we just pedalled and enjoyed the not quite traffic free road and it's beautiful greenery.

Being undulating our legs had been tested somewhat today and both pairs had forgotten to revise the 'getting up hills' section they learnt in Peru. So we were delighted when the road dropped into a dam and realised we had a 200m 10% climb out the other side. It burned, but we survived. Our quads may be a little worse for wear though.

Also being green you would think we had plenty of choices for a luscious spot camp should the need arise - you would be wrong. Although teased with plenty of glorious looking terrain on both sides of the road, there was a barbed wire fence throughout its entirety, stopping us from getting there and meaning if we needed to make use of it we'd have 3 options: 1- fence hop, not likely to leave us or the boys unscathed and not really the done thing; 2- hope for a break in the fence, not highly likely; 3- start hunting for houses in this vast arena and ask sweetly if we could camp (we hadn't seen any houses for miles).

So we were putting all our hopes into finding a place to stays d for this reason our next turning led to a very important decision and a big dilemma. Do we turn left downhill towards the lake in the hope we will stumble across the cabiñas but could perhaps end up sever tens of km out of our way and lakes usually mean a lot of private land. Or do we stay on this road and hit the town in 16km heading for a hotel that might never come on a road that doesn't look tent friendly. Not an easy choice, but we decided at least the town would have food and the possibility of people taking pity on us and helping us find a camp spot, so we pushed on for the last 16km up and down increasingly steep hills. Of course during those steep leg wrecking 16km we found plenty of accessible camping options which added to our dilemma - stay here and set up camp, or keep pushing onto the town and either lose the camp opportunity or have to cycle another 10km back up this steep stuff on already broken legs.
Well as Ant said "fortune favours the brave Stewie, lets push on".

And this time he was right. After the excitement of seeing the first hospidaje sign and the disappointment of being told it was full, we found another two possibilities in the main street. I tentatively ventured into the best looking of the two and was delighted to be shown a clean room with a double bed and even cleaner shared bathroom. It was heaven! Though my Spanish is nowhere near sufficient to understand Chilean, so the very lively and happy owner had a permanent look of disappointment every time she excitedly asked me a question, then rephrased it in several ways then gave up. She was so interested in us but alas - we let her down.

Another huge lump of meat in stew and rice from the restaurant next door  and two pints of beer later and we were tucked up ready for a good night sleep to try and get rid of the colds we seem to be developing... Aaaaahhhhhchooooo.
Night night.