Fruits, vineyards and a nail

Valparaiso to Santa Cruz

We left Valparaiso and followed the route “Ruta fruta”, as they call it since all kind of fruits are grown here. Momentarily there is strawberry time. And everywhere they offered big baskets of these bright red fruits. We did not buy any though (I guess we thought we would buy them later till we finally had left the area… a mistake I keep doing repeatedly on my travels).

Instead we got into an area, which was full of vineyards. Grape vines everywhere. It was steaming hot, even though we had been freezing just a few hours before on the coast where the wind blows from the icy cold pacific.

But inland the Heat.Was.On.

It was not far to our destination when we passed this fantastic house in the middle of the vineyards. We stopped and quickly decided to stay here for the night.

The owners grow and sell grapes to the surrounding vineries. We had a fantastic view on the fields. A short swim in the nice little pool cooled us down.

After my swim I realized I had a flat tire. I located a 3cm nail sticking out of my rear tire. I decided that this would be a quick fix and disassembled the rear wheel. But when it came to take the tire off the rim it just wouldn’t work how I expected.

I used all the tricks I knew and had heard of. But it was too tight. Even with the help off the receptionist, a massive 1,5m crow-bar, mother gravity and his weight of approximately-pretty-much we didn’t get the tire off the rim. The whole action was accompanied by a wide variety of German and dialect curses (such as “godverdamminomool”), intranslatable …). But then I was told there is a vulcanizador just around the corner and so I brought the wheel there the next morning and with the right machines it was off in not time. In South America a lot of tires get repaired, other than in Germany. The profession is called vulcanizador, so this was the right guy to go to. He got everything fixed within a few minutes and we were off the road again.