Chili Chico – January 18, 2015
Jan 20th, 2015 by rallyadmin
A quickie coffee and we’re moving out of La Junta. The sky is a low overcast and it’s raining lightly. The road through town is being rebuilt and the workers are out in the rain as though nothing was amiss. US construction workers would be home.
The road is paved for a few kilometers out of town and hen reverts to the usual dusty gravel which, because of the rain, is now mud. Slippery mud. This is Ruta 7, the main thorough-fare through Patagonia, so there’s an occasional vehicle coming the opposite direction and, as the road gets narrower (it always gets narrower as it gets farther from a town), passing on-coming traffic gets more “precise”.
Not 10 kilometers from La Junta we hit our first construction zone. The road has just come to a fjord and we’ve just started driving parallel to the water. A barricade stops us and the sign guard tells us that there’s about a 20 minute wait. Okey, dokey.
We wait. Take some pictures. Take a bio-break. Notice a sign that says the this section of the road is closed daily from 1PM to 5PM. Glad we got here in the morning. This isn’t the most idyllic place in Patagonia to spend 4 hours waiting. In the rain.
Sure enough the sign guard motions us on and we pass a sign, “zona de explosiva”, blasting zone. That explains the 4 hour shutdowns. The usual procedure on these roads that are built where you shouldn’t even consider building a road, is to drill blast holes all morning, detonate the explosives and then spend some time removing the blast debris without the hassle of traffic.
It must be really interesting when the do a blast because the road is just barely passable now. There’s heavy equipment everywhere. There’s on-coming traffic. And the road is even narrower that it was before the construction started. We creep along.
Every time we ;leave a construction zone, we only drive a few hundred meters and we hit another sign guard and another construction zone. This goes on for most of the morning. We’re making very little progress. We’re well below the recommended 50 k/h speed. More like an average of 5k/h.
But we finally leave the construction zones and work our way around the fjord on a twisty gravel road. And the rain even stops. The road alternately climbs high above the water and then descends back to sea level. With no guard rails, the very occasional on-coming traffic suddenly surprises you if you don’t stay alert. It’s either a plunge over the side and down a cliff to the frigid water or a quick dip in the frigid water. Pick your poison. And stay alert.
The road eventually returns to pavement and the speed picks up as we leave the fjord and head inland. We clicm through a pass an on the descent down the other side we pass a stranded Toyota with a man and two woman standing around. The woman waves to us a swe pass by.
The rule of the road in Patagonia is to stop and lend assistance and this looks like oine of those times. We continue down the hill for a short distance and find a place where we can turn around. Back up the hill and pull in behind the 4-Runner.
There’s and older man, his wife and her sister. They’ve a substantial rock and flatted both of their right side tires. And the have no spare. They are well and truly stranded.
The man has a small tire-inflator and he’s trying to get the right rear tire re-inflated but the right front is done. Just as we start formulating a rescue plan, the fog comes in and the rain starts We offer to take off the front tire and take them to the nearest town where they can get the tire repaired or replaced. We lock he left side wheels with fallen rocks (there’s no shortage of fallen rocks), remove the wheel, load it and the 3 stranded travelers in the back of our Toyota and head down the hill to the next town, about 25 kms away.
At the bottom of the hill, at least the rain has stopped and we pull into the little town (a hamlet, really) and start looking for a tire repair shop. We find it almost immediately. The man goes to the house behind the locked repair shop (It’s 4PM on a Sunday) and knocks on the door.
After a rather long talk, he returns and reports that they can’t help us. The man who actually does the tire repair is in Puerto Somewhere and won’t be back until 8 or later. But there is another man in own who might be able to help. We search around for him but evenually find that he’s also out of ton at Puerto Somewhere-else.
As a last try, we stop again at the first shop to ask if the tire repair man has a cell that we might call to work out a plan. Now, we find that there’s another shop in Puerto Ibanez back up the road 10km, take a right, drive 30 kms to Puerto Ibanez. We head for Puerto Ibanez.
It takes maybe 45 minutes to get to Puerto Ibanez and we have a great chat with the man. He speaks English well has is the head of a family that does engineering work. His company has 1,200 employees and they service the mining industry in Chile’s north. By the time we find the repair shop, we traded all of our histories. (He loves San Francisco.)
The man knocks on the door and a man comes out properly dressed in worker’s dark blue cover-alls. Things are looking better. We might actually get this tire fixed.
The repair man tries re-inflating the tire but no luck. He takes the tire off the rim by hand! These Toyota 4-runner tires are big and heavy and he has no equipment, just tire irons, a lever device for breaking the tire bead and a compressor.
As soon as he looks at the interior of the tire he sees 2 cuts that are the problem. It looks like the tire is finished. But out here everyone is resourceful. They’re a long ways from the nearest Goodyear shop so they have to make do.
He puts 2 adhesive patches on the inside of the tire. He says that’ll do. The car owner wants him to put a tube in to play it safe. They argue and the repairman finally “guarantees” that the patches will work. He puts the tire on, pumps it up and and finds, to his dismay, that the tire is holding air but it’s bulging where the patches were placed.
No worries. He dismounts the tire again. Puts in a much larger patch (this one is about 6” in diameter), remounts the tire, re-inflates the tire, no bulge, puts the tire in a water trough to check for leaks, no leaks and declares victory.
The driver thanks him for saving them. He pays the repairman, we get some of his cards o pass out to other travelers, we reload the tire and the passengers and head back up the hill to remount the tire. As we drive up the hill the for rolls in again and the rains starts again.
We get to the car and, (Thank You Jeezus) the rear tire is holding air. If it was flat again, we’d have to do this trip all over again for the rear tire. But i’s holding air. We mount the newly resurrected tire, help them repack their 4-Runner and say our goodbyes. Just as we’re leaving, I give them all cards with the RallyRoadie blog’s web address. They start up the car an start rolling up the hill and promptly run over the rock that was chocking the left front! We keep driving down the hill.
Hopefully, they’ll check out the site and drop me an email. No, we never got their names.
Another couple hours of driving. The sky has cleared and he lat day sun is brilliant against the pure white clouds in the deep blue sky. It’s finally turned in to a beautiful day.
We come to a small (an I mean, small) town, Puerto Murta, and find a little B&B. Ot’s a couple small house siurrounded by rose bush gardens. We to for the night. We had hoped to make Chili Chico and cross into tonight but that plan end when we started to rescue.
But that’s okay. We’re still a long ways from Chili Chico and the border might be closed if we get there too late. And the road into Chili Chico is, according to Lonely Planet, spectacular. It sounds like for any number of reasons that we should wait until the morning. Spectacular usually means great views, massive drops off cliffs and no guard rails. Yeah, we should wait until morning.
Obi-wan