November 20, Day 35: Temuco to Traiguen
The pannier hook finally broke this morning, while I was carrying everything to the bike. There's two hooks that attach the pannier to the rack, the one that broke split completely in half so there's no way it'll bear any weight. If I was trying to squeeze all the drama out I'd mention how the consequences of having an unattachable pannier are pretty severe ... but without trying too hard I can see three different ways to strap it on so let's just move on to getting it fixed.
First of all: can it still be hooked on? I put it on and the one working hook plus strap keep it on, but it's a brittle setup: one good bump and it'll probably swing around in some horrible way putting strange unexpected forces on that one last hook. I don't trust it to survive the trip today...
Maybe I can get a replacement part: where's the nearest shop that sells Ortlieb panniers? The Ortlieb website has a store finder, and the nearest is 615km away. Guess not.
So it's time to Google for "bicycle repair shop". There's a few in town, most open at 10, I head for the one that opens earlier. With some help from Google Translate, I had a chat with a junior-looking staffmember. Do you fix panniers? No. Do you know of a shop that does? No.
Which is not great. I'm trying to figure out whether I should wait for the 10 o'clock shops to open, and which ones are worth trying, or whether I should try a new approach with this one when the lady in charge comes over for a look. I show her the broken hook on the pannier, and she heads back behind the counter and returns with... zipties! Good plan. We ziptie the pannier to the rack, it's not elegant but I have nine more days of cycling, I can get through those with only one removable pannier.
I'll have to swap the contents around though. The two panniers are divided into stuff I'll need while cycling (tools, raincoat, highvis webbing) and stuff I need when not cycling (clean clothes, laptop, cables and stuff). The removable pannier currently has the cycling stuff, I'll exchange everything tonight.
Problem solved, time to get moving. In all the excitement I'd moved about a kilometer down the road, away from my planned route. Komoot asks if I'd like a path to get back to it: sure, it can figure out the best way through all the one-way system here. But the route it shows me is a completely new and different way to Traiguen. I'd planned a route that went along the backroads, but now it thinks a route parallel to Ruta 5 is the quickest way. This is a bit dubious, Ruta 5 is the main north-south highway, two lanes going each way at great speed, and I like to be a long way away from it. But it passes through a few towns, which the old one didn't, and since I've got unreliable gear I definitely prefer the route with more people!
So I'll take it, trusting that Komoot knows what it’s doing. It starts by taking me through some quiet backroads (great), up to a very busy two-lane road (not looking great), and announces Turn Right Onto Bike Path (actually great). The bikepath is on the other side of the busy road so getting there means using a pedestrian crossing like a pedestrian, because I do not want to mix with the morning traffic.
The bikepath looks like it's been snowing. The trees are dropping some white fluff, which is collecting on the ground and being blown to the sides of the path and behaves a bit like snow.
One other perk of this new path is the street art. There's a few very nice wall paintings along the way.
The busy road is actually Ruta 5, the bikepath is beside it and takes me out of town for a few kilometers. I can't say it's nearly as good as the Dutch ones, because it's not even in the same league, but it's very nice to have a reliable traffic-free path for a while.
Until it unceremoniously ends, and I'm now on a shoulder of the highway - going the wrong way, with only some very old cat-sized bumps (think cats-eyes, but the size of the whole cat) keeping me separate from the traffic. And four meters of asphalt to the white line at the motorway edge, I suppose. So it's not bad. There's some old, faint bicycle icons painted on the ground so I know I'm in the right place.
That's only for about a hundred meters. Then through an excitingly pitch-black underpass to the other side of the Ruta 5.
And after that the route leads onto the actual Ruta 5. I'd seen this coming and had scoped out another way to go if this looked unsafe. But in this section the highway shoulder is twice the width of a car so there’s plenty of space: I keep going, on the far right. There's so much of a gap I can't even feel the wind from passing traffic so I'm OK with it.
After a kilometer the route takes a sideroad onto gravel. I'm tempted to stay on the Ruta 5 - but further ahead the nice wide shoulder disappears. Gravel it is. (Full credit to the street data here, it means the highway has been split up into sections so the different shoulder widths can be recorded accurately, so Komoot knows which sections are safe to ride. And if the dataset includes shoulder width, it suggests there's an awful lot of other info in there too.)
From left to right: zipties holding it all together. Snowfall. Fine street art. The bikepath - not glamorous, but I’m happy to have it.
The rest of the day was mostly on gravel, which I especially didn't like. The zipties aren't that strong, having the pannier bounced up and down will put more force on them, if they fail the day is going to be extra difficult. Also it makes my injured hand ache.
So I rode the gravel slowly and carefully and unhappily. It did make me think of the 70km gravel section of the Ruta 40 in Argentina which was so bad I had to cycle carefully down tyre tracks. This was nowhere as bad.
Traiguen is a bit run down. There were several unoccupied buildings around the main town square, which is not a sign of a healthy town. When looking for accommodation I saw three hostels/hotels in town, all a bit mediocre but I happened to pass one. It's shut and the building up for sale. Which makes me feel like I may have dodged a bullet: last night I'd contacted a B&B that caters for families and asked if they had a price for a single person and they'd said yes, so I didn't have to choose between bad hotels.
From left to right: historic railway bridge. Quaint roadbridge, which I now always check for tyre-sized gaps. Traiguen at dusk. Selfie with town sign. Cobbled street I took back to my B&B.
There’s two cafes in town. One is called “London Cafe” and I dropped in for a coffee just before they shut at 9. They didn’t have an actual coffee machine, my coffee was a Nespresso - but they were so cheerful I’d happily go back for another. They also had a selection of excellent cakes, which I was very tempted by but figured it was too close to closing time and don’t have enough Spanish to check.
Like Temuco most houses have either high and serious fences, or bars on the windows. But there's a few windows on the street that are unprotected. Hopefully a sign that things are getting better.
