A couple of days ago we made it to Coyhaique after a couple of easy days of touring on asphalt. The last day we rode up a river valley with a strong tail wind. Coyhaique is a pretty windy place, windy enough that it has a three commercial size wind turbines with lots of room for more. The town reminds me geographically of Bozeman or White Salmon in Washington. It is about the same size as Bend and Bozeman and is a regional shopping hub. It is like Bend in that it is a transition town from wet western coastal to dry eastern deserts with mountains on all sides.
We had a number of errands to catch up on like some sewing modifications for the tent, finding a ground cloth for the tent, laundry and a finding can opener for example. The can opener was quite an epic search. You can pantomime the motion of the can opener but the locals don´t use the kind you twist with your wrist. They use these ones that you jab into the can and are really hard to use. Anyway none of the small towns had the crank type. Coyhaique is big enough to have a couple of grocery stores the size of American grocery stores that did have the first world crank type.
The town is big enough also to support lingerie stores. There is one by our hotel that in addition to lingerie sells an equal amount of candy. This is not something you would see in the US even if those things go together real well for some reason. I am not sure why the bigger towns are more conducive to the cosmo hooker look. Maybe it is more exposure to TV, Internet and magazines. It is kind of cold here so most of the women actually wear pants. After spending a week in Palm Springs before coming down here one thing is for sure and that is no amount of expensive or sexy clothes are going to hide the fact that you haven´t taken good care of yourself.
The mountains do not have the snow and glaciers of the coastal mountains here. One of the maps we have says the real scenic part of the Carretera Austral (the main road we are following) does not really start until we leave here and continue south. All i can say is that has to be some incredible scenery to be a lot better than what we have already been riding through.
Using computers in the Internet cafes is a real pain except for really basic things. You can change the settings for the browser to be English but that only changes a few things. You don´t realize how many other warning messages etc you need to interpret until you work with an operating system configured for Spanish. I tried for example to install an anti virus program to a thumb drive only to have it repeatedly install it in Spanish even though the page i downloaded it from was in English. I got so frustrated i decided to go out and get a netbook which i almost did before coming down here. Most of the people touring have those and a smart phone that they use to make skype phone calls for instance. There are several places here that have netbooks so we picked one only to be told that the price for foreigners was a hundred dollars more. We went to another store where they said the display price was the price everyone paid. We bought one that was the last one left in the display case of a particular model. That led to yet another big learning experience which is after the operating system has initially loaded you can not change the language. So we have to return that for one that has not been turned on yet where you pick the language right off the bat. We will have to wait until tomorrow to do that which has to do with the bank. Laurie broke her kindle by putting it at the bottom of a pannier and we
tried to find another here. The locals have know idea what we are
talking about. You would think there would be a market for that. I tried to download her books from Amazon on to mine here and no way is that happening on these Internet cafe machines in Spanish, at least for me anyway.
One thing i forgot to mention is that except for the bigger towns you better have cash as lots of places would not be able to process a credit card. I was told by a banker in Bend that the best thing would be not to carry a lot of cash and just use the debit card. The ATM would not give me cash today so that is another thing for tomorrow when everything is open - whenever that is as hardly any businesses have posted hours.
Tomorrow we are also going to send a box home with things we are not using. One of those things is a fishing rod and real. It turns out to be pretty difficult to bike tour and stop and fish. The other option is to fish at where ever you happen to camp that also has limitations if the river has a lot of vegetation etc. It is torture to be driving by all these very classic looking fishing streams knowing you could stop and fish. But where do you put a dead fish in a pannier? I am not into fishing enough to want to stop and fish just for catch and release. We ran into a cyclist from Colorado who had a fly fishing rod. He said on one of the streams he stopped at there were fish jumping ¨as big as dogs¨. Now I did not see that myself and it is a fishing story. The local shops i notice sell lots of BIG lures so it appears that there are lots of fishermen down here that are willing to stoop that low to catch fish.
One other thing we noticed is that none and i mean none of the road signs have bullet holes in them. Also the guys do not seem to need to have their trucks enhanced - you know all jacked up with big tires etc. By far the most common vehicle down here is a small four door pick up truck. Somehow they manage to get a lot of work done without a three quarter ton monster truck like those that are so popular in Bend. They come pretty much in two colors red or white and with a roll bar. They carry the loads strapped to the roll bar pointing up in the sky over the cab - big loads. Those loads include lots of firewood as most of the houses especially the rural ones appear to have no insulation and are very crudely fashioned. In rural areas colecting firewood is a main summer family activity.
By the way THE local bike shop has no road bikes, only mountain bikes. This is a issue for touring cyclists in terms of the wheels they choose on their bikes for spare parts.They did have a pair of padded bike gloves for Laurie as hers wore out. They had no other clothes like bike jerseys etc. but did seem to have a lot of miscellaneous parts.
I tried to load some more pictures but it is such a hassle on the Internet cafe machines i am going to wait. By the way don't forget to double click on the slide show to make the pictures bigger and then click on the link to see where they go in a map!
Chow! Chau actually
