We had a wonderful breakfast at 9:30am with fresh bread and eggs and orange juice and avocado – best breakfast in a long time. We saw a parade of locals passing through the street with music playing which was a local church group according to our host Carlos. Carlos was sad because his cat had been missing for 2 days. We took some more pictures of the homestead and old Singer sewing machines and the ongoing work to replace the old terracotta roof tiles with more modern ones. We chatted with Carlos while packing our bikes. He was happy for us to take our time and I added several stickers to my bike and we both noticed that our new back tyres had been marked by the owner’s dog 😂 Carlos then took some pictures of us and the bikes for his instagram site: hotel_losartesanos and just before we left, he found his cat and he was so happy and relieved 🙏🥰

We left just after the sirens went off in town indicating it was noon. We only had a short ride of 92km to our next stay at Lean Hosteria. The weather was sunny with wind blown wispy clouds in the sky. We fuelled up in Villa Alegre on our way out of town and again in El Colorado which seems to be the last petrol station for the next 255km. We saw many man made canals filled with flowing water and passed Lago Colbún and then crossed Rio Maule twice. We rode down a dirt road for a very short bit (had to get my off road fix for the day 😂🏍) and took pictures of the canal, the first bridge over the Maule River and the impressive mountains in the backdrop.

We arrived at Lean Hosteria at 2:30pm and were shown to our “Villa” out the back behind a gate. It is an entire holiday house with two bedrooms and the guy asked if we are sleeping in seperate beds 😂 We told him we only needed one bed 👍 – we asked about the restaurant we saw on the way in and he said it was open and we said we would come for food shortly. We only unpacked the essentials marvelled at the surrounding mountains and changed out of our motorcycle gear and walked to the restaurant- we noticed that the swimming pool was out of action 😂 We had grilled chicken with rice and salad and then paid for the accommodation and lunch together and asked for bed sheets and towels since none of the beds had any sheets on them. He walked with us to the house and handed us two towels and a black plastic bag with the bed sheets – apparently you have to make your own bed here 😂 but toilet paper was included 😂😂

We then used the afternoon to fix my fork brace and we managed to take it off and turn it around 🙏🔧🪛 and as we had the tool roll out we also finally had time to clean the surface rust off all the tools which had formed when the tool roll had gotten wet during the endless rain days we had a few weeks back – at the campground in Ensenada they had steel wool to clean your pots and pans with in the camp kitchen and we had taken a bit of it with us and now used it to clean all the tools with WD40 and steel wool. While we were outside working on the bikes and cleaning the tools, we listened to the song of many austral parakeets (Enicognathus ferrugineus) flying around the trees.

We had coffee and chocolate wafers for afternoon tea and worked on the blogs and turned the gas heater on and finished our left over wine and other food items in our cooler bag that we can’t take across the border to Argentina before having an early night.