Now that we’ve shared our experiences travelling through the flood ravaged areas of Northern Chile (in the last post), we can focus more on our experiences pedaling through the utterly vast and barren expanse that is the Atacama.  From Chanaral it was 4 long days of riding to the next populated area.  In this time our only resupply areas were small posadas, which are roadside diners that mainly cater to truckers as they drive across the desert.   We witnessed stunning sunsets and sunrises, were awed by the stars, visited a famous (and massive) sculpture of a hand rising from the desert, and were welcomed into the home of a wonderful Chilean family.  In short, it was an incredible week of riding!

One of the best things about this part of the desert is how easy it is to camp.  There are no spiny things to worry about, no mosquitoes to sting us, and no ants to eat our tent.  We can walk off the main highway and set up just about anywhere.  Once night falls, the wind dies down, traffic tapers off, and it’s like we have the whole vast expanse to ourselves.  We spent a few nights camping this way:

We saw some incredible sunsets and sunrises, too:

At the posadas we often stopped to get their fixed lunch menu and to fill up on water.  In the US, restaurants are expected to have multiple menu options, but that is not the case here.  We love it that the offerings are simple, hearty fare for a very cheap price.  For example, we got a small salad, a bowl of hearty chicken soup, and a plate of fried fish with rice for a whopping $5.50 each.  And this in the middle of the desert!  Our options were chicken or fish with the rice, but they had already run out of chicken.  At another place we decided just to get the soup, and were surprised when Jason’s dish arrived with a chicken neck included!

The posadas were sometimes few and far between, at one point we had 101 km between them.  For this stretch we simply carried lots of water and kept pedaling.  Luckily, the winds were with us for most of the uphill stretches.  Over the course of two days we climbed up up up to 7,000′ elevation.  Of course, that also means we got to go down down down for the next two days!  During the descent we came across the iconic concrete sculpture of the ‘Mano del Desierto’, or ‘Hand of the desert’.  It is simply a giant hand that rises out of the featureless sand.  Of course, we had ourselves a little photo shoot.

We skipped one of Chile’s largest cities, and continued north towards Bolivia along the main highway.  We passed some absolutely massive copper mines.  The tailings from these mines are piled up in such a way that they appear to be mountains.  Upon closer inspection they are giant terraces upon which over-sized dump trucks drive and deposit their loads.  It was just as we passed our first mega-mine that we also hit another big trip milestone:  the tropic of Capricorn.  It’s hard to believe that we’ll be in the tropics for the remainder of our trip.

That same night we slept in a funky hostel run by a retired miner who had built a number of small rooms next to his house.  Our room was mostly finished, but still had stacks of mattresses and smelled like paint.  We had privacy though – he came in and nailed up a blanket over the room’s window for us.  Ha!

The next night we camped in the desert again, but this time the stars were almost overshadowed by all the bright lights from the surrounding mines.  We are truly in copper country now.  Chile has some of the world’s richest copper deposits, and is home to the world’s largest open pit copper mine.  Clearly, mining is king around here.  We got to spend some time with many of these miners just the next day.

We met a group of mountain bikers in a posada, and they invited us to share a second breakfast with them.  Of course we accepted (well, Jason did, I just had coffee).  What followed was a fun hour of chatting and laughter.  One cyclist, Eduardo, invited us to his house in Calama and drew us a lovely little map.  We all set off from the posada at the same time and started pedaling up the hill towards the city.

We soon learned that cycling on pavement with heavy bikes is easier than cycling on the dirt with light bikes.  Shortly after leaving we passed all the mountain cyclists!  We decided we had to stop and take a long rest to give Eduardo a chance to get back to his house before us! It was still a nice ride, and we received a warm welcome from Eduardo and his family.  They even organized a Chilean barbecue (asadero) in our honor.  We got to spend the evening drinking Chilean wine and laughing with the cycling guys we met earlier.  Thank you all so much!

Despite being up late at the party, the next day we headed off towards the tourist town of San Pedro.  We climbed up and up to 11,240′ of elevation.  This is the highest we’ve been in our entire lives!  As we descended towards town we passed many lovely rock and salt formations.  Towering above the town is a string of volcanoes along the Chile-Bolivia border.  We are spending 3 days resting here, and acclimating to 8,000′ before climbing ever higher into Bolivia.

Next up, we’ll pedal to over 14,000′ into Bolivia and stay there for weeks as we ride dirt roads through scenery that promises to amaze.  Don’t be surprised if we don’t update for a while though, as we expect internet to be increasingly scarce and precious during this stretch.  We are very excited to enter a new country!

We just completed 12 days and 760 miles of riding through the world’s driest desert.  When we started on this route we imagined high temperatures, blowing sand, and the potential for days without water.  We were also very worried about supplies and road conditions, since the major towns were severely damaged by flooding a mere week earlier.  In spite of our worries, we sincerely enjoyed this challenging and desolate stretch of road.  The temperatures were bearable, the wind was almost always at our backs, and we never had to carry more than one day’s worth of water. Oh, and we hit 12,000 miles!

In the Atacama desert.

In this update we will share our journey from the lovely city of La Serena through the flood-ravaged towns of Copiapo and Chanaral.  In Copiapo we had to ride in streets coated in a thick layer of mud, and in Chanaral we saw the destruction that flash floods are capable of.  It’s been a wild ride, but let’s start at La Serena, on April 1.

The excitement began before we even left town – there was a 5.5 magnitude earthquake that shook us out of our beds at 5:20 am.   We both awoke with the motion, but Jason was much faster to realize what was happening.  He shouted ‘doorway!’, and we leaped out of our beds to huddle together in the doorway.  Doorways are a bit more structurally sound than ceilings, so they provide a bit more protection in case the building falls down.  It was over quickly, but we were a little out of sorts.  That was scary!

As we left the seaside city we had lots of climbing to get into the higher valleys of the desert.

Tendrils of fog creeping over the mountains.

We spent most of the day coated in a thick layer of marine fog before emerging suddenly at the top of a climb.  Suddenly we were in the real desert.  We hit 12,000 miles and decided to camp in the soccer field of a small town (with permission of course!).  It was a good introduction to the desert.

Big desert roads.

Morning visitor at our soccer field camp.

The next day we once again awoke to another earthquake.  This one was only a 4.9 magnitude, but we still got woken up.  We weren’t as worried this time though, as we were quite confident the tent wasn’t going to collapse around us.

From there it was just long, straight roads through the desert with the occasional long climb.  We were very lucky with road construction, and had one half of a divided highway all to ourselves for well over 50 miles.  It was a dream bike path through the desert.   Something that we really noticed these past days has been the true vastness of the desert.  It is so big, and so stark, that it messes with our sense of scale.  Sometimes we can’t tell how far away things are, and what we think are small rock are in fact distant boulders the size of a house.

We saw a surprising amount of pick up trucks, cars, and firetrucks draped in Chilean flags and driving north.  They were all packed with emergency supplies like food, water, toilet paper, and clothes.  These folks were driving themselves to the north to help the disaster relief.  It was surprising and uplifting.  Chileans are no stranger to natural disasters, and seem to jump at the chance to help each other out.

Firemen driving supplies and volunteers north.

After 3 days we came to the big city of Copiapo.  This is a city that powers the entire region with the money from copper mines in the hills, and about a week ago it was hit by a flash flood following torrential rains in the mountains.  When we arrived we were blown away by the amount of mud still coating everything.  The main road was barely passable and coated by a thick layer of mud, and oftentimes standing water.  The side roads?  We didn’t even dare explore them, but we would occasionally see earth-moving machines pushing small floods out of them and onto the main road.

Because the sidewalks and bike paths were impassable, we were forced to ride through the muck in traffic.  At times the mud was 4 inches thick, and at times we were riding through standing water.  Needless to say, when we finally emerged we were dirty, and our bikes were coated in filth.  Luckily, just a short ways out of town we found a gas station with a car wash. That’s right, we took the bikes (and ourselves) to the car wash.  2.5 hours later we were clean and back on the road.

The fun wasn’t over yet though.  We had two more mostly uneventful days of desert riding:

Nothing here. Just sand and rocks.

Next we reached the town of Chanaral.  This town had been built, really, in a place that should have been left free of human settlement.  It was at the outlet of a wide river valley draining a vast stretch of high-altitude mountains.  When the flash flood reached the town it came with massive force.  Large trucks carrying toxic waste from the nearby copper mines were turned over and over again, eventually coming to rest (ruined) in the mud.  Houses were swept away.  The main highway vanished and was literally washed out to sea.  All that was left was a new inlet where seawater crept closer to what remained of town.

There is supposed to be a highway here. Excuse the power lines.

An alternate route had been created for traffic, so we could sneak through and witness the destruction.  It took us longer than expected because there was so much to see.

Ultimately, we were happy to leave this area behind and head into the wide and isolated desert.  We loaded up our bikes with over 30 pounds of extra water and headed back into the hills. There were still scattered areas that had seen flood damage, and a surprising number of huge puddles in the desert, but for the most part the next section of riding was punctuated less with sad disaster areas and more with unique desert highlights.  More on that in the next update!

An alternate road we didn’t take.

Beautiful, stark camping spot in the desert.

More road damage – this is Chile’s main highway!