Off To Coihaique

This Guy is Good!!
City of Coyhaique pressed up against the Andes

Tue. Jan. 27

I left Chaiten early this morning, about 8:00am and headed south not really knowing where I would end up for the day. I wasn’t on the road very long, before I came to a Police check point in front of the regional Police station south of Chaiten. The officer motioned me to stop. He asked if I had stayed over night in Chaiten, or elsewhere. It looked as if they where collecting information regarding where people traveling in the area were from. He was quite impressed by the BMW, and mentioned that he was also a Moto Officer, as he pointed to the two Police Honda 250cc motorcycles on the porch of the station. A very pleasant person. As I went on, I came to a large suspension bridge that caught my eye, so I found a spot to take pictures from. Now, you have to realize that I was standing at the base of the bridge in a valley completely surrounded by very tall mountains, and the cloud cover in the morning was extremely low. I say this because, above the completely overcast sky, I could hear the drone of a small plane passing over head, and I thought to my self, how is this pilot going to get thru the clouds to land with out hitting a mountain? The next thing I saw was a little Piper Cub pop out under the clouds and fly up the valley. This guy is good, I thought. He obviously knows the area very, very well. I took my pictures and continued on. At about noon, I reached the small town of La Junta where I stopped for gas at the Copec. Mind you, I was fairly low on fuel, even though I did have spare gas in the gas can I carry, but when you pull into a gas station in this part of the world, and you are low on fuel, and the pumps at the gas island have been ripped from their moorings, it gives you cause for concern, to say the least. There where two guys ripping the island apart, so I asked if there was gas and one replied, si, and pointed to a pump near the corner of the building. I was a bit relived. After filling the tank and paying for the gas, I got back on the bike and turned the key, pushed the button, and again, “Click, Click, Click”. This is not good! After the beads of sweat subsided, I thought, there has to be something else going on here. What else would be killing this battery? Then I thought, I wonder if the battery terminals are lose, so I popped off the seat, took out a few tools and low and behold, both terminals were slightly lose. After tightening them, and reassembling the bike, which is not easy when you have so much stuff on the back seat and don’t remove it, the bike started up. It has been starting normally since, so I guess it may have been lose terminals all along though they where not very lose but I was able to give them each a quarter turn. OK, back on the road. I hadn’t gone more than a few hundred yards, when I came to a road construction road block. The flag lady told me the road was closed until two in the afternoon due to blasting that was going on a little farther down the road. Great! Now I have nearly two hours to cool my heels, so back to the gas station I went. As I pulled in, I noticed there was another BMW R1200GS parked there, so I got off my bike and wandered over to the guy that looked like he had been on the road a while and we struck up a conversation. Seems he is from Brazil and was also on his way south. We talked about the must see areas along the road south and after two hours of that, Felipe and I rode south together the rest of the day. We are now in the city of Coyhaique where we found two different hotels because it seems there is so much tourism here that most of the hotels are full. We found two hotels that each had only one room available, so we took them. After settling in, we met again and went out for dinner. Coyhaique is in a spectacular location, and as you approach from the north on Rt. 7, you suddenly come around a curve high on a mountain on the opposite side of the valley and you see the city pressed up against the base of a high mountain on the far side. Very impressive!
In the morning we will ride to Chile Chico, an all day ride to the south again.