The Exporters – 5/10/2013
May 21st, 2013 by rallyadmin
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.
We’d noticed that all of the customs brokers offices that we’d visited were on the 2nd floor and all of them were heavily barricaded. Martha’s office was no different. Second floor. Double padlocks on the outside grate and the front door locked. We knock and the door opens. “We’re here to see Martha.” “Please have a seat.”
Martha is with another client whom she kind of hustles off when she sees us waiting. Hello. How are you? You are Paul and you are John? But all in Spanish. She really doesn’t speak any English and neither does anyone else in the office. This going to be complicated.
The first bad news is that we can’t load the car until Tuesday. The container ship doesn’t leave until the 17th and is supposed to arrive in Colon, Panama on the 20th. To make matters worse, John has to be the one to do the loading because he did the temporary registration on the way into Colombia.
This is a problem because John is trying to get to Florida to deal with some serious family matters and our plan was to make the car arrangements today, drop the car tomorrow (like we did in Baltimore, Vladivostok and Sydney) and head home or wherever for the intervening week. We’re blowing hundred of dollars a day hanging out in Cartagena (a true beach resort) and we’ll probably spend less money going home and returning to Panama. That plan looks like it’s up in smoke.
Now the language problem is really coming into play. We ask a question, Martha tries to answer John in Spanish, maybe that works. If not, it’s off to Google Translate. Maybe that works. But mostly, it kind of works. It looks like Google is stumbling over Martha’s Colombian vernacular Spanish. She types something madly, clicks on translate and semi-gibberish comes back from Google. This translate thingie seems to work better in commercials than in Cartagena.
We tell her that we have to leave and that we are willing to “work harder” to see if something can be done to expedite the car drop off. She thinks about it for a while and then makes some calls. Meanwhile her staff if busy typing out forms and submissions so it looks like the car is going to get on a boat for the 17th sailing.
She takes a form from one of her staff and gives us directions to the official notary. The form is a power of attorney to handle the shipping for us. (Not only do we give them money, the car, the car keys and everything that’s in the car but now we have to sign over power of attorney. If we ever see this car again it’ll be another one of those “miracles”.)
We don’t really understand what’s going on. But something is going to happen. We take a taxi to the notary, register the document, pay the fee and return to Martha’s office. Martha then tells us that she has to go visit some people (probably the “work harder” system) and that we should come back at 4PM.
Okey, dokey. We leave for lunch but with nothing to do we’re back at the office early and Martha’s not back yet. We wait and when she does return, she has a big smile. She has made the “extra effort” and the car can be dropped off tomorrow, Saturday. We do owe her an extra $190 for which she produces an invoice. We pay in US dollars. (Nobody seems to want Colombian pesos around here.)
She tells us that everything is in place and we can come tomorrow at 11AM to finish the paper work and drop off the car. Great. This is all coming together. Back to the hotel.
We spend the next few hours making plane reservations back to the States, me to Charlotte and John to Ft. Lauderdale. We both get overnight flights. Mine goes through Medellin to JFK to Charlotte. John goes through Bogota to Houston to Ft. Lauderdale.
Then out to find a restaurant. Just a street over there’s an Argentine restaurant that turns out to be pretty good and, no surprise, has some decent wine. We celebrate. Things are going well.
And we leave for home tomorrow.
Obi-wan