A river in Hornopiren

Trekker thinking
When I was washing my clothes earlier, I accidentally spilled a quarter bottle of my camp suds soap. My instinctive reaction was, ‘sweet, less weight!’

I need to start camping soon because I’m getting resentful of my tent and stove and all these other pounds of things I’m carrying but not using. Though I realized today, laziness isn’t the real reason I haven’t camped yet — it’s because I’m alone. If I connected with a group and they were pitching their tents, I would join them rather than spend the extra cash to have a bed and wifi, but I don’t want to be alone in my tiny tent all bored and lonely. So I stay with families or at hostels, where there are other people around, or at least a comfy chair to sit and read in.

Postcards
I’ve been looking, but I haven’t found any yet. Well, a couple in Puerto Montt, but they were tacky and/or of places I’ve never been and have no intention of going, at least not on this trip. But along the Carretera, I’ve seen nothing. Postcards just aren’t a thing here.

Or so I thought. Then today a store clerk told me that a local printing company burned down recently. They supplied all the region’s postcards and several tourist maps, which are therefore temporarily unavailable.

The picture above is not of that company; it’s of the big supermarket in Hornopiren, which also burned down recently. A guy in the main plaza told me there aren’t enough firemen around here.

Trutrucas
The guy in the plaza, Carlos, was selling these Mapuche instruments called trutrucas. You blow into it like a trumpet, so of course I was terrible at it.

Safety
You will notice that Carlos is not in the above picture. He is off getting lunch at this time — leaving his backpack and merchandise behind without a second thought.

People keep telling me that down here in southern Chile, no one steals anything. It’s hard for me to trust this, but then again, I suppose these are mostly small towns where everyone knows eveyone, and would notice if someone suddenly had something of someone else’s.

The hostel owners always put my bike in a barn or a garage or, in one case, a fenced-in yard guarded by a dog who barks at anyone who enters, but they all told me that around here you can leave things out and no one will mess with them.

As for physical safety, the travel advisory warnings for Chile, even in Santiago, are about pickpockets and scam artists; armed mugging isn’t even a thing.

Samuel confessed he’d been nervous about the trip before he started, but on his first day, he knew everything was going to be okay. I feel the same. And Samuel pointed out that when you travel alone, people are more ready to help you. When you’re with a group I guess people figure that someone else can take care of it, but when there’s no one else they jump in and do what they can.

So yeah. Though obviously anything is possible, at this point I’m much more concerned with physical injuries from falling while riding than I am about any dangers that come from people.

Except maybe people who are driving big trucks. They can still be pretty scary.