Day 17

 Well, you can imagine how excited I was to see this sign unfortunately, it didn’t turn out to be what I thought it was.  I stopped when I saw a cop fixing a flat tire. He told me it was a sign for a mountain lion or puma as he called it 

It’s only black because it stands out  on a yellow sign. They’re usually tan color just like in the states

None of these pics seem to be showing up in order today, I’ll try and figure it out later 

This is outside my hotel today where they charge you 30 pesos a minute for parking which is about forty cents for 10 minutes

'The fire was coming right up to the road here on the left where the two fire engines are if you zoom in.

 On the other side of the trees like only a few feet from the road a primary school was completely burned to the ground

Me and the sign 

The first cobblestone street I’ve seen since I’ve been here., no fun on a bike

The best version of my favorite tree that I’ve ever seen, leaves touching the ground all the way around

Totally new sign for me. I never even knew this animal existed. It’s called a Pulu in Spanish and it’s a very small (native only to Chile,in the Andes areas) kind of deer.

Sure I wish my bike was free but really $.75 how am I going to complain and it’s only half of what a car has to pay

This is why half the country is going up in flames. If you blow it up, you can see almost half these trees are already dead because of the drought.  Some places large Swaths are just totally all brown and then others totally all green just depends where the water is I guess.

At one point I was driving down the highway with forest fires on the left, this one about a mile or two away, and the same thing on the right about 3 miles away. No danger to me of course, traffic is moving right along, but seemed pretty bizarre being in the middle of two forest fires.

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Interesting choice of place names, Concepción meaning conception, and Purgatorio meaning purgatory I imagine, and at the time I was heading towards Nacimiento or birth

So today started off really great. I was driving along a river for an hour and instead of twisties this was all sweepers just going like 55 miles an hour left and right, left and right it was a lot of fun  and then that all ended and I was up in the middle of scrubland, boring, nothing to see but I thought well I’m heading towards Forest so I can take it for a while. Unfortunately I started coming upon lots of burned out areas including now several peoples houses and cars totally burned out, on both sides of the road. When I got to a toll booth. I asked the lady when it happened and she said February 1, so that was more than two weeks ago, that’s why there is no smoke or much burn smell in that area anyway.

 I stopped for lunch at a little restaurant. It had lotta truckers in it and ordered grilled chicken and a salad and the chicken had more salt on it than I’ve ever had on any dish in my life. I could only just eat it but I wasn’t gonna throw it away  Before I got in the restaurant, a shy dog had come close to me but not close enough for me to pet it so I thought if I have any food left over I’ll just give it to him when I come out but he wasn’t there when I came out, so I just kept it in my pocket and then when I was another hour down the road, I saw a dog lying on the side of the road who didn’t appear to be starving, but he was laying there on his own in the middle of nowhere, so I turned around and went back  and gave him the sandwich. When he got up to get the sandwich from me, I noticed one of his back legs was crippled, maybe he got hit by a car or it was just a birth defect I don’t know, but he was not in good shape. You would’ve thought this guy had died and gone to heaven the way he reacted, just looked at me with big sad eyes as he started chomping down on it so hard that I knew he was pretty hungry after all.

Around 3 o’clock start looking for a hotel because I knew if I waited until five, when I would arrive here, I might find the hotels are full, depending on how many there were, and as it turned out  I was right. So I pulled into a medium-size town figuring there would be some Wi-Fi somewhere in a restaurant or hotel but before I could even start looking for it, I see a big sign in the town Square that says free Wi-Fi is here so I got off my bike,asked some lady in the park in the center there and she said yeah, this is free Wi-Fi so I turned it on and nope didn’t work. She says well if it doesn’t work here than try the restaurant at the corner so I went over there and she said yeah we got Wi-Fi, didn’t work and the owner of the restaurant came out and she said nope the fires caused all the areas networking connections to go down but now I’m starting to feel bad and then my phone died (out of battery) so I managed to borrow the owner’s son’s phone and make a reservation for the hotel here another hour and a half down the road and that was lucky because it is full

So quite an eventful day, with a number of ups and downs, literally, and figuratively