November 4: Planning day in Puerto Montt
The big task for today is to figure out the rest of the route to Santiago. Since I'm doing this trip at tourist speed I'm finding all the interesting things I can, then setting up a route that visits as many as possible. A park with life-size dinosaur statues. A town that declared independence from Chile for two days. An erupting volcano. A waterfall hotel that can only be entered by rope bridge. 70,000 empty coke bottles arranged in the shape of a Coca Cola logo.
Unfortunately some of these are north of Santiago, or so far inland I can't get to them. But the rest: I'm going to do my best. So my route looks a little wild. For more than a few things, I could get there ... but it'd cost a day. I mostly took the hit. I didn't stick around in the south, for reasons I may have shared, which means I do have a few spare days.
The rest of the day is other biking chores. My gear is coated in fine roadgrit, after the long wet rural day yesterday. Showers are the best way to wash these things! Panniers, rack bag, shoes, outer layer, cycling gloves, not sure about the woolly gloves. There's even a heater on the wall which gets both sets of gloves dry overnight.
I also go out to find the zero kilometer sign for the Careterra Austral. It's several kilometers away, at the top of a steep hill, accessible only by a busy road, with no bicycle path, in a carpark that looks like a great place to find hard drugs. The waterfront would be a much better location. Just getting there was hard work: I'm glad I'm on foot, and not doing this on the bike after a long day. The road into town was thin and busy and this is worse.
My SP Connect cellphone case has a problem. This is the case that's permanently on my cellphone. It has a double-slot which matches the double-tab on the handlebar mount. You match them up, push the phonecase in, turn ninety degrees and it's locked. And it works pretty well; ten times a day I'll take the phone out one-handed while riding, get a picture and put it back.
The problem is that sometime yesterday, the connector on the phonecase has turned like it's locked in, when it's not. So it doesn't fit into the handlebar mount, and I can't figure out how to untwist it. SP Connect support is useless, Youtube has nothing except reviews, the best I can find is a ten-second TikTok video showing how the included tool in the updated SP Connect fitting works. After an hour of failure and bent fingernails I've given up, and swapped it over with the identical backup one I have on my spare phone.
From left to right: old case with unusable SP Connect fitting. Backup one. Grumpy street art. Shady street art.
Headphones are another thing. I have old-school wired headphones, because I use audio directions and I often ride for longer than the batteries in wireless ones can last. Unfortunately mine don't work so well any more: they got damaged when I accidentally yoinked them out on an especially windy day in Patagonia. They were OK for a while, but now there's lots of audible static and the phone connection drops regularly. So they're basically unusable and it's to replace them. I bought new ones in Rio Gallegos, and although they came in an authentic Apple box inside was a cheap wired Bluetooth pair. Indeed: both wired and Bluetooth.
Headphones like this are common, they're a sad side-effect of Apple's rules. As a hardware manufacturer it's really tough to get your device approved so it works when it's plugged into an iPhone: I expect Apple wants the phone to recognize it and pop up a picture to the user. For the manufacturer that means certification tests, registered ids, approvals, lots of patience, and more that I can't guess at. But! If you plug an uncertified device into the lightning port you get power. And audio over Bluetooth is an open standard. So cheap manufacturers put these two things together to make headphones that get power from the lightning jack, and audio over Bluetooth. And that would be fine except the microphone is so bad my family complains, the audio lag is so long that I get annoyed, and the volume controls don't work.
From left to right: the actual path to the Careterra Austral zero-kilometer marker. The marker itself. More street art! And later I found this sign on the waterfront.
To make a long story short: found an electronics store on Google Maps, got trapped in a mall, said no to several Chinese wired-Bluetooth options at other places, found the carpark twice, and when I'd given up and was just trying to escape I walked past an Apple Approved Reseller who had what I wanted.
Also caught up with the Chilean engineers to celebrate finishing the Careterra Austral, and so today's update is late. Not sorry.
