The Adventures of a Rally Roadie

I didn’t expect any responses from my emails to Martha and Sr. Gabriel on Sunday and none came. I wanted the bill of lading number and the ship that the container was on to verify that the car had been shipped. Of course, there couldn’t be a bill of lading because the container wasn’t loaded yet. Add the local penchant to not do anything before it’s necessary to do date and the Sunday silence made perfect sense.

Monday started calm and then the flood of emails from Martha started. The first was an email with all of the invoices attached. There was a message but even Google Translate couldn’t decipher it. When I sent responses continuing to ask about the car, I kept getting even more confusing emails from Martha. Finally, a last one written completely in caps. This one Google Translate was able to decipher enough so that I knew what the problem was. Continue Reading »

The flights left and in a few hours, I was in Medellin boarding a flight to New York’s JFK. This wasn’t the most direct route to Charlotte but it got me there the soonest. We hadn’t been gone that long but the thrash at Martha the Exporter had taken it’s toll. I really wanted the break and a week down looked like a great idea to me.

John’s flight left about 4 hours after mine so we parted at the airport in Cartagena. His flight was just about as gymnastic but at least he wasn’t flying past his destination to get to Ft. Lauderdale. But, whatever the final destination, we both looked forward to a week off.

I really wasn’t happy about flying to New York and waving to Charlotte as I went by but the alternative flights came in late in the day so clearing customs at JFK seemed like a good idea at the time. Looking back on it, I have no idea why I thought that clearing customs wouldn’t be a bummer. How could US Customs at JFK at 6:30 in the morning not bee a bummer? It was. Continue Reading »

We’d cleaned up the car yesterday and reorganized the gear that we were leaving in the car. We’re not really too worried about the gear (the car is being shipped inside a 20 foot container) but there are somethings like the car’s spare parts that we don’t want to lose.

Shipping in a container lessens the possibility of theft but since we have to leave the key to the lock that’s on the metal chest that we have the valuable items in, our efforts may be for naught.

The only thing left to do until we head for the car dropoff is finish packing thye gear we’re taking on the plane. We sleep in, have breakfast, check out and when we can’t waste any more time, we head for Martha’s office. Continue Reading »

I had sent the email to Martha late last night and early this morning I got a response. The email had her phone number and the address of her office. We waited til about 9AM to call only to find out that we couldn’t dial out on the phone in our room. I called the desk to ask about it and they just said that they’d dial it. A few moments later, we had Martha on the phone.

Or rather John had Martha on the phone. Martha doesn’t speak English so John’s Spanish had to suffice. This was a warning that things were to get a lot more complicated. John gets off the call and says that Martha told him to come over. Down stairs to get a taxi.

All taxis know exactly where the address is when you get in the cab. Something happens after you get moving, though. Yes he know Manga, the neighborhood where the office was and, yes, he’d get us there. With a little circling before landing. But we do get there. Continue Reading »

We’re still in the mountains though most of Medellin in in a valley between a couple of mountain ridge lines. We’re driving down the autopistas headed to the north trying to make Cartagena today. It’s about 400 miles but it’s doable and if the roads are as good all the way to Cartagena as they are leaving Medellin we might even make it before dark.

As we get out of Medellin proper, the traffic thins and we’re making good time. But then the autopista abruptly ends and we’re dropped into a small town centered around a sugar mill. We look at the GPS which is happily sending us east(!) when we’re expecting to be driving north. We ask for directions and the truck drivers tell us that we have to back on the autopista one exit and take a right at the circle on the exit.

Back down the autopista, take the exit and at the round-about we take a right. And immediately start climbing. With all the truck traffic that’s headed to Cartagena. Here we go again. We’re climbing pretty quickly but soon the road narrows so that the truck traffic becomes difficult to pass and we slow down to a crawl. Continue Reading »

The southern part of Colombia is just beautifully verdant tropical jungle. Palm trees and banana plants dot the steep hill sides. The road is often canopied with flowering trees and amazingly tall bamboo groves. Lush is an understatement.

And Colombia is known for its mountainous terrain. We have been driving up and down since we entered Colombia. The roads are two lane and narrow and steep. The Panamericana is also the only north south link between the ports in the north and the rest of the country.

That means that the narrow steep roads are also the only way the 18 wheelers carrying the cargo containers, gasoline and everything else tat has to brought from the ports to the rest on the country have to travel on this road and they travel 24 hours a day. Continue Reading »

We’re trying to get insurance for Colombia before we get into Colombia. We may be able to get it at the border but we’re hoping to get it out of the way before we get there. In order to do that, we’re going to stop in Quito to look up a Mapfre office that we’ve found using a Google search.

The road is still rainy and the clouds are low enough so we can’t see much and, if anything, there’s even more traffic than last night. On the way to Quito, it starts raining even harder. This just makes matters worse.

The GPS map set we’re using doesn’t seem to know that there is a place know as Quito when you try to give it a specific address to navigate to. It finds the city of Quito just fine. Addresses? Not so much. Continue Reading »

It’s only about 30 kms to the frontier. We read that the exit immigration for Peru was 2 km south of the Peace Bridge and the entry immigration is about 3 kms north of the bridge. We’re on a divided highway just north of the last town in Peru and we can’t find the exit immigration and there’s no apparent way to turn around to find it if we missed it, though I have no idea how we could have missed it.

We cross the Peace bridge and finally come to a border checkpoint in Ecuador. But there’s an old inspector there with a Peruvian uniform on. I young man stops us and asks us question about the trip, asks for our passports and then the old man strikes.

This is a unified Peruvian/Ecuadorian immigration control. The old guide book was now officially wrong. But this is the Peruvian exit customs control and the old fart now wants our bags out of the car. Continue Reading »

We plan on spending the night in Tumbes, Peru. We’re probably close enough to make Ecuador but we’ll be crossing in the dark and we could end up with a very late hotel search in Ecuador.

The road has really left the desert and the coastal fog. This area of Peru is on a large gulf that protects the land from the cold Humbolt current. Because of the location instead of deserts we’re surrounded by banana plantations. There’s still a lot of sand but this is a working agricultural region and there are plenty of small towns along the road and they all have speed bumps. The going is getting slower all the time. Continue Reading »

Windblown Dunes

The Panamericana through Peru has run in the coastal plain along the Pacific Ocean. Sometimes it diverted inland a ways but it always comes back. And almost the entire way the road has gone through desert that may be statistically less arid than the Atacama, you would not believe it when if you saw it.

The only respite from the barren desert have been the small towns along the road. In the south of Peru, the towns have been almost exclusively small fishing ports. Farther north, the towns have been primarily farming oriented with irrigation water provided by aqueducts from the distant mountains.

The upside to the northern towns has been the greenery. Avacado farms, rice farms, cattle ranches, sheep/goat farms. Some huge factory farms but most small plots with workers digging by hand and plowing with horses. All a rock throw from the desert ready to be reclaimed by the blowing sands. Continue Reading »