I imagine I'll backdate all of the South America triplogs once they're written, up, and pictures added. But that will be a while yet. For now, this is a temporary interruption to say that I have successfully conquered the Watson Road hill. By "successful" I mean that I have ridden it two consecutive times without falling over. I have also detoured around the hill in fear. Now, one week into this cycling to work thing, I think I've settled on my route.
It's just over 25 km each way to work. I'm averaging 26-28km/hr. My bike is a mountain bike with slicks on it, so the fastest I can make it go using just the pedals is just over 40km/hr - to speed up beyond that, I need a gravity assist, and my feet are just spinning without resistance.
Getting up earlier in the morning has not been a problem yet. Motivation in the morning is, however, hard to come by if, like today, it's cold and gloomy and the weather forecast predicts headwind on the way home. I procrastinated for 40 minutes before deciding to suck it up, only to discover I'd forgotten my keys when I got to work and thus had no way of locking up the bike. Lucky for me, Tristan shared the combination of his cable lock with me, so now my bike is cosied up to his.
Mostly, though, I'm still surprised how much I like bike commuting. I have a pretty route - it's nothing like this. There are only a few sections where I'm battling traffic, and even that is not bad (though I taste fear every time a transport truck passes me on the one section where that is common, I don't like seeing those big wheels spinning 2-3 feet to my left). So far, the cars have been far better behaved than I expected for morning and afternoon busy times. Nothing like this has come close to happening (over 10 years ago, my brother and I got hit on Highway 6 north of Guelph. My brother's bike was damaged, as was his body, and my rear tire ended up shredded and the wheel bent. But the driver did stop and the police did come, and the guy got a serious charge - and he was civil enough that he then drove me home - Matthias got taken away for medical attention - so I could get my car and fetch the non-operative bikes. So I'm not saying it can't happen here...)
I like coming home before 7 p.m. and feeling like the exercise part of the day is done. I like that I feel a lot stronger on the bike than I did three years ago when I did this ride. (I should add that I'm nowhere near as strong as I was five years ago.)
But I'm still driving to work if it's raining (and I imagine the list of excuses will grow as time goes on...)
Our first two nights at the Andes Hostel were spent in a room with a bunk bed. The room was tiny – if we had both the suitcases on the floor, there was no place left to stand. This didn’t bother us, since we had no intention of hanging around the hostel (you don’t get points for that). Consequently, once we’d wolfed down our hostel-provided grilled cheese sandwich and Nescafe, we ventured out. We would have earned a quick and easy few points for getting a proper cup of espresso nearby, but we had other tasks to accomplish.
Task #1 was to figure out the metro. That took about one minute – the hostel is across the street from the Bellas Artes metro station, and the Santiago metro station is not particularly difficult to understand. We changed lines once, and made our way to the Universidad de Santiago bus station (which is contiguous with the Alameda bus terminal). Then we quickly bought bus tickets to Valparaiso, got on the bus, and celebrated our successful negotiation of public transit by awarding ourselves points *and* purchasing some alafajores from the lady selling them on the bus. Gwen is strangely addicted to these cookies, which is understandable since they are little more than a vehicle for dulce de leche.
Valparaiso is cool. It’s a port, which interests me by definition (there’s something about the impossibility of completely gentrifying a working port that fascinates me). Once again, we didn’t have a map, but the geography of Valparaiso generally is easy to sum up: flat bit, hills. The hills surround the flat bit, and the flat bit borders on the Pacific Ocean. If you want to get more detailed, apparently Valparaiso (shortened to Valpo, but that makes me think of dog food and this city was actually not as be-dog-pood as most Chilean cities) was once an important seaport, but the opening of the Panama Canal had some impact on this. During its heyday, the city grew rapidly and the flat part was not enough, so homes started climbing up the hills. The hills, however, are very steep – so steep that it’s not easy to have a lot of roads connecting up and down. The solution to this was to build a whole lot of funiculars (a few of which are still in operation) to connect up and down.
Hills and funiculars and ocean make for pretty. But organically growing cities make for challenging navigation, particularly so when most of the lanes are not wide enough for anything except foot traffic. We considered buying a map, but were unwilling to shell out 4000 pesos for yet another cartoon (we will never learn, I know). We had all day, we knew that the Pacific belonged on the west, and so we set out exploring with no plan. It worked, wonderfully – we ambled through lots of neighbourhoods that probably weren’t highlighted on the cartoon map. Most of these are gentrifying, and the transition means that gorgeous villas are next to corrugated tin shacks. Eventually, we got to the touristy bit, at the top of Cerro Conception – and it is as pretty as the books say. Also, as soon as you hit Cerro Conception, prices rise steeply, crafts are on sale, and restaurant menus feature English. We chose not to care, though, since the Brighton patio has a stunning view of the city and it had been at least 12 hours since our last pisco sour, so we enjoyed an overpriced, run of the mill lunch with a 10,000 peso view.
Riding a funicular was part of our to-do list and would earn us points, but we declined riding the Conception one because the home-made signs around the neighbourhood made it clear that tourist traffic had priced the funicular too high for the use of locals. We kept our 500 pesos and walked down, only to walk back up (next to the Reina Victoria funicular, there were steps and steps are fun). At the top, we returned to our aimless wandering through neighbourhoods, though it now rapidly got sketchy and a Chilean boy did chase after us to tell us to not go further, it wasn’t safe. We were about to reach that same conclusion, so went back down (and at one point were followed far too closely for our comfort by two men – Chileans are slow walkers. Gwen and I are not. If Gwen and I speed up, we are walking orders of magnitude faster than the average Chilean. Fortunately, Gwen and I also communicate effectively, and when I swung a very sharp right through a gap in the traffic on a busy street she was right there already and we lost our entourage). After that, we earned some points riding the longest of all the funiculars up to the maritime museum. We didn’t go in (it was closing anyway), we just looked at the view. The sun was about to set, so after that it was time to toddle along the flat part back to the bus station. To earn further points, we went grocery shopping, knowing that we probably wouldn’t be in the mood to go out once we finally got back to Santiago. That, and we had yet to consumer large quantities of avocados, that was on our list! And so we lugged several pounds of avocado, tomato, grapes and bread back to Santiago. And wine.
To our great disappointment, the cookie lady did not get on the bus on the way home. But whatever, successful day, and not only did we now have fresh food to amend our breakfast grilled cheese sandwiches but we met Rob while gleefully diving into our avocados and bread when we got home. We watched him assemble his bike gear, and then he talked about Mendoza over a bottle of wine. We were more convinced than ever that we would go to Mendoza (even though we failed to buy bus tickets on our way home from Valparaiso – we tried, but they wanted all the passports of the people going, and Lorenzo wasn’t even in Chile yet!).
(pictures are coming)
Gwen and I have this obsession with The Amazing Race. Not so much with *watching* the television show – though we do that, intermittently. But, even with having seen fewer than even 20% of all the episodes of this show ever produced, we are convinced we would rock the concept. We’re all modest like that…
To prove that we’d rock it, we do our own version when we travel. This means that, whatever we happen to be doing becomes a task in our own amazing race, and we award ourselves points for everything we do successfully and every time we overcome adversity and of course each instance where we have a lot of fun. And yes, we do know that the television show doesn’t actually have *points* (nor does it have a shop for shoes segment, and we rock that one too), but this is *our* version of the race. Last fall we conquered Western Canada (awarding ourselves about six million points for our scary crossing over Vermilion Pass in a tiny car during a snowstorm at night, and additional bonus points for how much we enjoyed each and every hot springs pool we subsequently soaked in). This time, we took the race to South America.
We started by flying to Santiago. Well, not entirely true. We started by checking out the new international Maple Leaf Lounge in Toronto, and convincing ourselves that it was the best idea in the world to drink several glasses of wine since it was an overnight flight and the wine would make us sleep. And you can tell me anything you like about alcohol and eight thousand feet pressure and respiratory rate, I will counter with: I slept for seven of the twelve (we sat on the tarmac after boarding for over an hour) we were in that plane. And I *don’t* sleep everywhere. I’m actually very bad at sleeping in places other than a bed. Sleeping in planes is Gwen’s skill (we feel the need to balance the skills in our amazing racing abilities). But I slept.
And then it was morning, and there were snow-capped peaks outside my window, and I convinced myself that every one of them was Aconcagua (and one of them actually *was* Aconcagua), and then down into the smogbowl that is Santiago, and instant summer. Ha! It was like going to Alberta in reverse! We stopped at customs long enough to award ourselves points for being prepared enough to have pens handy (the ones supplied by customs were *all* broken, so we got bonus points for lending our pens to other people) and more points for our luggage being first off the belt. Our race, our rules.
Of course, two white girls noisily congratulating themselves for earning points in English inevitably get the friendly Chilean airport support person picking them up, which means that we were escorted to the bank machine to get our cash and had our taxi called for us in the crew area, and *of course* paid far more for said taxi than we would have if we weren’t said white girls humouring the friendly Chilean airport support dude. We thought about it, and decided it wasn’t worth getting upset about, instead awarding me some points for still having some small Chilean bills from the last trip and actually bringing those so we could tip the overpriced taxi procuring man.
(For the record, should you go to Santiago, if you take the official airport taxi called by the official airport guy, they will happily fleece you 20,000 pesos to go to the centro on congested roads. If you take a regular taxi from the city, you will pay 14,000 pesos including highway toll to go the superfast way, and 12,000 pesos on the congested roads. Much more cheaply, you can take the Transvip shuttle. Or you can get a taxi to the nearest metro station. But we had luggage. And it was a race! A race to get to the first pisco sour and empanada, at that stage, but hey, we had the points to afford it. And we had luggage. Way too much luggage for a 2.5 week trip, but there was going to be desert, and altitude, and damp coastal stuff, and work stuff, and hot summer days stuff and…)
In any case, our expensive taxi took us directly to the Andes Hostel, where we came across the one person working there who was not bubbly and wonderful – but we didn’t care. We ditched our luggage (the room was not yet ready) and went off seeking more points. Which we earned by eating empanadas at the Plaza de Armas (points awarded for not getting pickpocketed), purchasing a cell phone (major points to Gwen for that one, great idea), buying the phone card to go with it (several points, though we did not achieve the maximum, since we never did figure out the long distance or even the prefixes – I solved all of this by giving people *our* number, and when they called us hitting save for their number, and subsequently calling only those people! And we did get points for switching the interface from Spanish to English).
Our navigation that first day in Santiago left something to be desired. Essentially, if something was 500m away, we would walk approximately 3500m in a perfect spiral until we hit it. Fortunately, there are rivers which mark the boundary of the centro, otherwise the spirals would have gotten very big. No points for navigation. When we got back to the hostels, we graciously awarded some points to the hostel staff for putting our luggage into our room. We stopped long enough to change out of our plane clothes (which were, technically, pants, but felt more like pajamas) before eagerly going in search of points.
One of the few episodes of the televised Amazing Race that both Gwen and I had seen involved going up the funicular to the statue of the Virgin on Cerro San Cristobal. We decided to do the same, slowing down only to scope out the patio beverage possibilities in Bellavista en route. And then, we cleverly didn’t buy an up and down ticket for the funicular, we bought an up with the funicular, down with the cable car ticket. The lady at the ticket booth made it perfectly clear that the cable car would not return us to the same spot, and we were in perfect agreement that this was okay with us without so much as glancing at the map. Between the two of us, we have five geography degrees, we don’t *need* no stinking cartoon map!
So, funicular to top, lame easy challenge, whatever. Look at the church at the top – it was pretty enough to make the girl who went on a Birthright trip last year proclaim she’d go to mass here – and gaze up at the massive statue of the Virgin. We were in awe of the Virgin, since we realized that you could probably see her from lots of different places *and* there were floodlights, making her a useful navigational beacon at night too! There was some obligatory poking into a chapel and some points were awarded for resisting the lure of the cervesa up there, since we had Bellavista plans. And besides, we still had our cable car tickets!
The cable car was interesting. Great views. Several moments where I found myself thinking, engineer is one of the most prestigious professions in Chile, so this little glass and steel box will not now plummet me to my death at the *beginning* of this trip, even though it totally feels like it. And then we were down again.
And nowhere near Bellavista. And not in possession of a cartoon map. But we did have comfortable sandals on, and we knew enough to keep the damn hill on our right – even though that meant crossing a big street, and skipping around a lot of dog poo. We saw at least 145 stores that sell lapis lazuli jewelry, remarkably few dogs considering the volume of poo, and not much else. Except at the end of the walk, where we saw a great courtyard off Pio Nono and in that great courtyard saw big red cushions on a sunny bench outside a restaurant and then we saw the jug of beer on the menu and points were awarded.
You’re probably thinking we don’t deserve that many points for our crappy navigation in Santiago that day, but keep in mind we were *scoping*. We had to know what there was to do! Besides, let’s put this into perspective: the first person who called us on our cell phone was Humberto. Humberto *grew up* in Santiago. He picked us up at our hostel. He heard our description of the big houses we’d seen, and of drinking beer in Bellavista. He asked if we’d like to see a “not so nice” neighbourhood, and then he started driving.
It was very interesting. Especially the part where he said “don’t worry, I have a gun” (it took ten days to work up the nerve to ask him if he was kidding!). It got even more interesting when Mr. I grew up in Santiago confessed to being completely lost. And interestingly enough, even the natives apparently subscribe to the travel in spirals til you magically get there school of navigation, because I think we drove the entire ring road. I know that I was watching the lit-up Virgin, and that we frequently passed under the purple lights and Humberto’s transponder beeped. And that we maybe made fun of him. He finally decided to get off the highway, but only because the highway ended. He also got a parking ticket while we were in the restaurant (where we earned pisco sour drinking points). So don’t give me none of that you touristy girls are far too dippy to rock the Amazing Race stuff, he was local. On the other hand, he does know how to use the Chilean cell phones, so points for him too.
This winter of spinning class obsession actually paid off - I rode my bike to work today, and it didn't hurt. Except for the part where I was going up Watson Road hill, which of course kicks my ass, but I was determined to make it up and I had very little momentum and I shifted down and the chain stuck just the tiniest bit - it does that, if I have any momentum, I can unstick it in seconds - and of course I was clipped in because I *was* going to make it up and thus ensued my usual slow motion wipeout onto the shoulder. This is why I wear padded gloves. But even stopping to untangle myself, cuss a bit, and walk the bike the rest of the stupid Watson Road hill that I will make it up without stopping even if it means I wear my gloves out toppling over first, I *still* got to work in well under an hour.
This was my first bike ride outside this year. The last time I rode my bike to work, it took 65 minutes to get here. Thus, yay spinning class. And I'm going to keep riding to work, because boo gym when it's nice outside. I have not been able to make myself go since coming back from Chile (I went once. It was fine. I kept looking out the window at the sunshine the way a toddler lookes out through the bars of his crib when he doesn't want to go to sleep).
In other firsts, I paddled my kayak this past weekend on Sam's annual Algonquin season opener. This time, the trip involved a portage. I brought Ikea bags to carry my crap across (we won't really dwell on the bushwhack version of the portage I did on my first trip). Then, I put my boat on my shoulder and valiantly muscled it across myself. Or rather, I was valiant and stoic for the first 75 meters. Then I put the boat down, took off all the accessories that add extra weight, and went to find the piece of ridge rest I use as a bum pad to pad my shoulder. On the way home, I wanted to put my boat on my shoulders the way I saw Sam do it. I'm not Sam, and my shoulders didn't fit, so I carried my boat on my head. Both my head and my right shoulder have tender spots. Ah well. The weekend was wonderful, my boat leaked, and there are pictures (promises promises, I know).
My boat leaked because I lost one of the bolts that holds the footrail in place. I don't know where or how I lost it, but I do know that I wondered why my drypants were sloshing in so much water. I'd done a careless wet launch, but it still seemed like a lot. And it kept increasing... I got to the portage and pumped out the three inches of water I had accumulated and flipped the boat over, puzzled, and then I saw my 1/4" hole...
I know it's a 1/4" because last night I went to several hardware stores to try and replicate the screw (I took out the corresponding one on the other footrail). I got one that's a bit longer and one that's a bit shorter, but I couldn't find a 1/4" rubber washer anyway. For now, I put a metal washer on, and the longer screw fit - I futzed with it last night, and the rail slides perfectly within the housing. If it still leaks, I'll put duct tape over it.
I bought a new bicycle pump at hardware store #1 yesterday. My old one had simply stopped functioning over the winter. It was 10 years old, so hey, no big deal. I got the fancypants new one home (my old one fit one type of valve - the kind my bike and car tires have. The new one fit every valve ever invented) and noticed a key part that holds the adapter bits in place was missing and I had a fancypants useless piece of junk. It is now sitting a bag with the store receipt, to be returned. I bought another (much cheaper) pump at hardware store #2, and the kayak screws, and I searched in vain for rubber washers in hardware store #3.
Oh, and I could illustrate everything because I have a new camera. I loved the old camera, a Canon A95, but it died a tragic death during a visit to the devil's cellar at Concha y Toro winery. I replaced it with one that's almost exactly like it, except twice the megapixels, more fancy features I won't use, and SD card instead of CF. At least the digital SLRs we have at work use the CF cards, so my memory card investments are not entirely in vain. The new camera is the Canon A640. The transition has been seamless...
There are things blooming in my garden. That's all I know, because I've spent no time there. I get very tired of this climate when winter lasts forever but it's not *good* winter (I like skiing winter), and then there's endless mud and cold and it just drags on. But then, this time starts, and there is nothing quite as special as the long summer evenings in May, June and July. At this time of year, I can't imagine living anywhere *but* at a northern latitude (or why anyone would want to live anywhere else).
Except I want to *go* somewhere. I am full of ideas, but not so much on the follow-through. I wanted to go to Germany for next week. I procrastinated on making the decision for so long that all the good points flights were gone, and the affordable flights too. That made the decision for me, I stay put... and then this morning, on a random daydreaming check of flight sell offs at 6a.m. (you have no idea how many random daydriming flight sell off checks I do) I saw a flight to Frankfurt for $550, taxes and fees included, on a cheapo charter but exactly the dates I want. Now I'm all in a quandary again. If it weren't for this being busy at work thing... I just don't know. I'll procrastinate til the deal no longer exists, I suppose. I'm not so keen on spending any money, is the other thing... I want a Bike Friday, and I can't even consider ordering one of those until all the debt is paid off, and the less money I spend on going places, the more money I can put on the debt, and the faster it gets disappeared... the end of all degree getting and car buying debt is very close, and I just want to get there already.
Of course, I'll get there faster if I make cycling to work a regular thing. Gas is expensive, driving is frivolous when there are alternatives... and it's fun. Way more fun than portaging a kayak.
"I looked on your blog to see where you are right now the other day and I thought, April 8th? How is that supposed to help me?"
That's what Stef said yesterday, when she stopped by with her baby in tow. Oops.
But I'm here! In Ontario! I'm just not that thrilled about it. Gwen and I just had two and a half weeks of warmth, and wine, and avocados and cheese and seafood and good friends. How cool is it that I have a job that lets me go to Chile, and how cool is it that if I've already got a plane ticket to Chile, it only costs 9000 Chilean pesos to take a bus over the Andes to Mendoza? And how much fun is it to spend time there, and go rapelling, and sit in hotsprings, and buy leather goods? Less fun was the endless effort required to not get robbed in Mendoza, but we awarded ourselves points for our success. We awarded ourselves points for just about everything, including piloting a tiny car over a scary pass in northern Chile, consuming over a kilo of grapes before an international border so as not to waste them, and seeing penguins and dolphins.
And I'm gonna tell you all about it...