3/6/23

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Once you get up in the hills, away from the valley where the vine yards and the rivers are, it’s back to desert again

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A group of goats were on the road, about 20 to 30 of them, when I came ripping around the corner. Well not ripping just the usual 58mph.  They scattered like crazy, only a couple of them stayed actually in the middle of the road, so I turned off my bike and watched them and after they got used to me, in a few minutes, they all got together in the center and then walked off again in a group, that was pretty cool.

Yeah, a lot of stuff here is Second world or Third world but the that hospital behind me is as high tech looking as anything I’ve ever seen and this was not in a major city

Looking back at where I came from in the morning,

I’ll explain about the diamonds when I get a full set of them
 

This starts the second set of downloaded pictures for yesterday. I was having trouble with the Wi-Fi so waited until this morning.  This is a sign for the chinchilla reserve. The last one left in Chile.

All the cactus here seem to be in bloom. This one has a beautiful couple of arms covered in red flowers but soon after I saw a bunch of other ones where all the arms were covered in red, but one’s enough to get the idea.

This is a common site, a raised garbage container because the dogs tear the plastic bags up and most people don’t seem to have garbage cans

The entrance to the chinchilla reserve. Unfortunately, the sign on the gate says closed due to the fires.

This is the topo sign for the speed bumps

Got another wild animal road sign and I doubt if I’ll ever see this one ever again in my lifetime

Kind of looks more like a mouse than a rabbit, but I’ll take it

The blooming cactus up on the hill

The sign says that hunting is prohibited because it’s a wildlife protection zone

My spot in line, although I was further back earlier

Welcome to the national chinchilla reserve

Skies are getting clearer and bluer, but there’s still a haze over most of the country up here

In the center if you blow it up, you can see a solitary house out in the middle of nowhere

Here’s a new sign telling you not to let your dog go to the bathroom in front of the gas station and you either

Appear to be water towers, but I’m not sure, but some pretty fancy indigenous peoples  paintings all over them

For those of you who’ve been to Mexico you know what these are,  they’re called Topos and they’re at the entrance and exit of every town but here in Chile there’s like 20 of them in every town sometimes only like 100 feet apart. They really wanna slow traffic down in the little villages

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This is on the fence next to the hotel I was in last night and it says  electric circuit which means  electrified fence 

I didn’t bother trying to test it out to see if it was a fake

So the day started off great as far as I got off early for a change, I was gone by 10:30 but it was cool because of the marine layer,  and as you can see from that one picture by the time I got up to the top of the hill half hour later it was a fantastic day, perfect weather I’m guessing around 8o degrees. I stopped to get gas and the Chile guide books all seem to mention this and even though they do it I don’t have any reason to suspect that they were trying to rip people off. Basically when you pull in they take out the pump handle and then they look at you and they point to the dial on the pump, and they say see you’re at zero and they start pumping so evidently in the past they had trouble with people not noticing that they were not starting at zero, but I think it’s not anywhere near as prevalent as they’d like to lead you to believe.  There’s a lot of advertising for pre-fabricated houses and in the beach cities there’s a lot of them in expensive neighborhoods as well as cheap ones. Basically they just stack them ar different angles or sometimes put them together in a row and I guess they’re a lot more dependable than some of the ones people build themselves or get people to build, especially with the earthquakes and everything.

It’s amazing the number of new or almost new cars that you see sitting outside of basically a shack out in the countryside. Everybody seems to have money for a cell phone,a car and DIRECTV because I see those antennas dishes everywhere. Quite a few radar cops out there, so I’m glad that today I was not speeding even though I’m never really speeding except once in a while to get around cars because there was another cop out in the middle of the road with his radar gun.   When I got to the little town about halfway to where I was going, I thought I might have to get gas instead of trying to risk it to get to where I am now, so I pulled into the gas station and all the guys are looking at me and saying no no no no no no and then  point to the line which I hadn’t noticed on the other side of the gas station there’s like 10 cars already in line waiting to get gas I said oh sorry man sorry I’ll go to the end of the line.  I spent 20 minutes waiting to get gas but allowed me to go into the grocery store next-door and get a cold drink and check a few emails not a big loss to take a break.  Almost upon getting here when I’m now pretty relaxed  thinking about getting off the bike and taking a drink I came around the corner and a big,full-grown, male, brown goat jumps off of the side of a hill onto the road 10-12 feet down about 20 feet in front of me and I had to get on the brakes some but he quickly bounded down the hill.  God, . now I not only have to look out for dogs but I gotta watch out for jumping goats, so I’m being more vigilant day by day. Getting weird out there.

So when I stopped to take pictures of the chinchilla preserve, I guess the guy who was the caretaker who stayed in an office about 100 yards inside the fence heard my bike and so he came up to talk to me and we had a pretty good chat about the chinchillas. Unfortunately it turns out that first they’re nocturnal so you’re never gonna see any and second that they’ve estimated there are more than 10,000 of them just in the preserve, which isn’t very big.   Hunting them has been prohibited for quite a while in Chile because they’re endangered or in danger of being extinct. I asked him if he had any inside the preserve even though it was closed because of fires and he said yeah we have a few but sorry I can’t let you in to see them.

It appears from what I heard that the kids are all back in school and I know that from experience too because this hotel is right next to a high school and I can hear the kids playing in there, so getting a hotel from now on should be ok.  Not going to bother to reserve a couple hours ahead anymore because there should be no problem now and I can make an  in-person choice rather than from a picture on the Internet

Evidently I was thinking about Colombia when I was remarking about the poor quality of the Chilean coffee. Turns out they don’t grow any good coffee here hence the instant for many breakfasts that I’ve had.  Yuck, didn’t realize I was becoming a coffee snob.