Ruta 5 Chile – Meet I-5 Oregon

When you travel to a new place your mind naturally tries to relate to a familiar experience. This mountain is like the Rockies, this is like riding in Eastern Oregon, oh look, they have McDonalds here too.

But, for the last seven weeks criss-crossing the Andes in six countries, I have never had a Deja Vu moment; the scale, the colours, the smells, the people, the roads, the customs have all been completely disorienting, fascinating, and overwhelming.

Until now. Leaving Santiago, Chile we took the freeway to to get south quickly and cover six degrees of latitude in one day.

Ruta5 is exactly the same experience as riding I-5 through Oregon. The road leads down through a wide fertile valley with orchards, wineries, and pine forests with the familiar smells of agriculture and logging. We passed 18 wheelers hauling logs and wood chips and signs off to wine tours. The roadside billboards were for fertilizer and farm machinery. The vegetation changed from high desert to corn and grapes and yellow mustard seed and sod farms and evergreens surrounded by yellow Scotch Broom. The valley is edged on the east side by a row of high snow capped volcanoes formed by subduction from the Pacific Plate colliding with South America and on the west side a lower Coast Range to protect the valley from the Pacific.

Welcome home.

One thing that was not the same. Ruta 5 is a toll road that more closely resembles driving along a French Autoroute with regular infuriating toll booths but also an immaculate, well maintained, secure road surface and frequent excellent gas stations that all had great service and food. Interstate-5 would not qualify for any awards for service, surface, or safety. America – learn from Chile.