Riding with dinosaurs

Día 27-28: Humus toil, Mapuche generosity and the set of a classic nineties TV show (153km)

Día 27 Humus Horror

Curarrehue to Melipeuco Komoot GPX (88km)

Jake’s feeling cursed this morning. And it’s nothing to do with that toadstool. We’d bought a seitan bowl from Villarrica and it turned out the fake meat pieces were bobbing row boats in an Irish Sea of humus. Three different varieties to be precise, each more gloopy than the last.

A few drowned lettuce leaves long dead at the bottom made up the slop; unfortunate travellers across a treacherous mashed chickpea quicksand.

For Jake, the humus hasn’t gone down well. He can’t bear to hear it mentioned.

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We wiggle through Devonshire style hills; ups and downs, farmland and forest, gravel and tarmac.

Starving after little breakfast we stop at a delicious fast food joint, The Rabbit Bite. After the usual confusion, mild teasing and sceptical smiles towards our vegetarianism, we secure some world-class chips.

I wolf them down with solpaipillas, a great accompaniment to Martin Odegaard’s precise finish in a 2-0 away win at Newcastle that filters through Arseblog’s live updates. These days it’s shockingly easy to be a football addict even at a 7,000mile distance from the team.

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In Los Laureles, people are queuing to vote at a police station; Chileans are sizing up the proposed constitution and making their mark.

At the counter, an old man sips coffee using a tiny plastic spoon.

“Do you know the Argentinian president? He’s much better than that communist we’ve got.”

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3pm. I’m having a paradoxical afternoon: the sun’s turned gold and the sleeves are off but in my ears is a crime fiction podcast about murder, sects and Nazis in southern Chile.

I pass a man waking along the road with an axe over his shoulder. A brick goes through a window in the podcast, and the man makes a sudden movement with his upper body. I nearly fall off the bike in ‘intentional’ evasive action. That’s before I see that he’s swinging the axe out of the way to send me a huge thumbs up and a wild grin.

That was close. Nearly another crash landing.

Later, two Mapuche women find us about to camp on their land when we’d tried to be discreet. We think we’ve been caught..

“Of course you can camp here! You’re welcome to. You won’t leave any rubbish will you? We don’t like people who leave rubbish.

This is a great campsite. You’re lucky you met us though, these dogs may not have been so kind otherwise. Anything you need just come along to our house and ask.”

I’m reminded of the belief of many indigenous tribes that land cannot be owned by humans. We are simply in debt to the Pachamama (Mother Earth) for what she has given us.

Jake’s still humus-queasy so I regale him with bed time tales of hot tubs full of tahini, of showers splurging chickpea paste, of bulging pots of- you get the picture.

I doze trying to evade thoughts of forest dwelling neonazis but thankfully, there are no obvious signs of fascists by the time I drift off.

Día 28 Riding with dinosaurs

Melipeuco to Curacautín Komoot GPX (65km)

El bosque seria muy triste si solo cantaran los pájaros que mejor lo hacen - dicho Mapuche

The forest would be very sad if only the birds with the best voices sang - Mapuche saying

Setting off on volcanic ash is my favourite way to set off.

To our right a broken cliff decked with layers of sediment rises sharp and dignified. A bare-chested fossil, unable to conceal its age. We sample tens of epochs in a momentary glance.

Now we’re scaling lava flow. Llaima is the continent’s second most active volcano, having popped its top 52 times between 1640 and 2009, imagine being that annoyed. The road needs to be reshaped each time this happens.

Softer side roads allows us to coast our way down little volcanic dust humps, smoother than the gameplay in Mario Kart 64.

We wend our way back into the forest and arrive at the Rainbow Lake, where fossilized trunks jut out of transparent water the colour of shifting amethyst. Walking with Dinosaurs was filmed here in 1999. The prehistoric vibe is inescapable.

Jake sheds a tear, the trauma caused by the death of a baby stegosaurus in Ep4 still lurking in the back of his mind. We were exposed to harsh truths early in that series.

What remains of the day is spent hunting for lunch at Lago Conguillío. This involves stabbing plastic wrapped cheese and sacking the entrails, ripping open a pack of pickled vegetables and slicing through the oesophagus of some wild (okay, freshly baked) bread. Our ancestors have nothing on our predatory instincts.

More monkey puzzles confuddle our path out of the national park. They are truly magnificent fauna. However, though they can live for more than 1,200 years and grow taller than 40m, they are confined to a tiny 400km2 borderland between Chile and Argentina.

Unsurprisingly, the impact of human settlement and the livestock they have brought with them are having a detrimental effect on these gentle giants.

Nowadays, the main issue is that their seeds are just too goddam tasty.¹ Mice and parakeets used to distribute these in effective ways that benefitted the mighty Araucania. But now, human introduced cattle, goats, horses, sheep, pigs, boar, hares, rabbits and red deer have joined the nutty fiesta. The Monkey Puzzle is under lethal attack from no less than nine invasive species. Fingers crossed for their futures.

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We shimmy under a fallen log being chainsawed to pieces whilst a road-blocked Swiss couple look on with arms folded. They shipped their do-it-all truck from Europe and set off from Brazil on a 9-month travel extravaganza. They do, however, have to wait, whilst we peddalers can slip on by.

As we emerge from dense foliage, we stop to chat to some Chilean hikers, who’ve just finished their exams in Santiago. One of them, a rather entitled young man (who I take an immediate disliking to) claims there’s no chance we’ll make it to Curacautín today.

We keep going till after dark to ensure his moral defeat. He’ll never know that we made it, but I’d like to think he felt inexplicably disgruntled that evening.

Is that my toxic masculinity emerging or did we do the right thing and curb his superiority?

I’m not sure anyone cares.

Fin de Chapter 4.

Photos below.

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Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Instagram | Komoot

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1. The Monkey Puzzle Tree Faces More Threats Than a Barrel of Monkeys (Scientific American) https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/monkey-puzzle-tree/