Cycling through Chile

Hey everyone!

We (Stephen 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 and Vaiva 🇱🇹) have just completed our first fortnight of 1-2 years cycle touring around South America. Our first step is getting from Santiago, Chile to Ushuaia, Argentina. We are currently in Concepción where we’re taking a couple of days of well earned rest!

We’ve covered just over 700 km and average around 60 km per day at the moment.

If you’d like to follow our trip feel free to check it out here 🙂: https://instagram.com/gentle.spin/

We have absolutely loved the journey so far; it’s had its highs and lows but that’s what we expected and we’re trying to embrace it as much as we can.

We’ve learnt loads already and the absolute highlight has to be how welcoming the Chilean people have been so far. Everyone has absolutely gone out of their way to help us and make us feel at home in their country and we are incredibly grateful for that.

The scenery has been very varying from Santiago – some beautiful sections and some not so. We know the really stunning sections are still to come 😁

A few lessons we’ve learnt (as relative bicycle touring novices) about touring and specifically touring in Chile:

1. Don’t have an exact plan – it will change.

2. Don’t expect to have a system in place right away for all your stuff – it takes time for everything to find its place and then that all goes to pot when packing away in a downpour 😄

3. Trust people! Despite being told by numerous Chileans to not trust Chileans, so far we have found the exact opposite to be true.

4. Don’t trust Chilean road signs! It’ll say 49 km to go, you’ll travel 3 km then it’ll say 50 km 😒. Happens a lot.

5. The sun here is STRONG! We’ve applied factor 50 several times a day and still get burnt. In Europe once is usually enough so there’s a significant difference.

6. Drivers in Chile are generally very courteous. This was a concern of ours before starting but have been pleasantly surprised by how respectfully we’ve been treated on the road.

7. Completos are life (Chileans will understand).

These are a few of many lessons we’ve learnt so far 😆 we know there will be many more to come.

If anyone is around / doing the same trip then please give is a shout! We’re all about meeting new folk on the road and sharing ☺️

PS. I’m going to put photos on another post because for some reason it won’t let me here!

by StephenC31