Saturday, January 10

Today was fairly uneventful.   Packed up our camp while having coffee and breakfast and hit the road quite late, around noon.   Heading north back to Santiago the tempuratures gradually increased. We  stopped quickly in Chillan as I was hoping to say hello to my friends at the honda motorcycle shop, but we arrived a little too late and they had closed.  We continued on until Curico, a town of about 70,000 a few hundred kilometers from Santiago.   We found a hotel downtown, but looking at it, it didnt appear to be a particularly good one.  Walking into the lobby however, that all changed. Inside was an exquisite hotel by Chilean standards and after the 4am rooster of the night before it was a welcome find.  After a quick swim in the courtyard pool,   We walked around a little of the town for a short while and saw several older buildings falling apart.  Curico was hit pretty hard by an earthquake in 2010 and some of the heritage buildings collasped.  This included the collapse of a church that had been buit in the mid 1700's and was their principal landmark,   At the Plaza De Armes is another church build around the same time, but with a newer facade.  We ended up eating pizza at what could be considered the Chilean version of Dominos and then back to the hotel for the night.

Our hotel from the street

Our hotel inside

Plaza de armes

Only traffic on the street at 9:30am on a sunday