November 1, 1999
Day 10 Chillan: colorful market
Hotel Los Presidentes Inn
The motel is nice, no hauling with gear and bikes down three flights of stairs like in most hotels. We just wheel the bike out with panniers still attached. This one is cheap for $10.
We get on the road about 8am and ride about 20kms before stopping for our morning coffee and some toast. Today is a short ride to Chillan, a city that is a "must see" per our guidebook because of its colorful market.
Traffic is very light today and we discover why; today is the holiday "all saints day". We hope that there will be a market. At about 11 we reach Chillan, Rachel checks several hotels but either finds them too expensive, rooms too small or they don't want us.
We go into downtown and do our grocery shopping for the next few days thinking we might go further. We find a market though and we abandon that plan and continue to search for a nice place to stay. We finally find a room on the second floor of Hotel Las Presidentes Inn, a hotel residential, where the owner lives downstairs.
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We get settles and walk back to the market. First, we eat empanadas in a large hall filled with dozens of butcheries and places to eat. The waitresses are very aggressive trying to drag people into their eatery. Empanadas are small dough wraps filled with meats/fish and vegetables, folded double and fried.
We roam the fruit/vegetable market some more and see nice flowers, crafts and spices. Good for Patrick to take pictures though carefully counting how many he could take limited by the number of slide film rolls. (2022 addendum: pictures are from slide film and scanned).
We have CNN in our room, we watch for a while and later go out for Chinese Food. After dinner we watch another bad movie.
Today's ride: 37 km (23 miles)
Total: 425 km (264 miles)
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