He doesn’t know it yet but the night of January 12th will be Rusty’s first flight in a plane, an hour hop from Panama to Cartagena de las Indias. We have been extremely busy since my last post driving the length of Panama On A Mission. By the way that’s the Panama Canal from the “new bridge” over the canal looking down at the Gaillard Cut. I drove my boat there in 1999.
Layne the quartermaster likes to be prepared and to be organized to keep her stress levels down and I am glad for that. I attribute her organizational skills to making each of our many border crossings so far very smooth and simple but this final step to actually reaching South America is quite complicated. And the worst of it is that it’s all out of our hands. Ask Webb Chiles, circumnavigator extraordinaire how much he likes giving up control of his boat to transit the canal. I hate this transit to Cartagena as much as he hates using the canal.
The process of shipping your vehicle across the Darien Gap has spawned a business in Panama City. The white Land Rover on the far right above belongs to the owner Alejandro who figured out this business after he and his wife got home from their own overland trip through South America. He’s a young sprog too:
He organizes flights for motorcycles and small cars direct to Bogotá by cargo plane (!), but your car has to be less than 1.95 meters tall (6’5”) to fit. He offers 20 foot containers, 40 foot containers, flat rack platforms and Roll On Roll Off services anywhere you need to ship. But crossing the Darien Gap is his speciality. Overlanders line up here to get to South America.
To recap: The Darien Gap is where Colombia and Panama meet but there is no road for sixty miles across the gap. This is required by the US to prevent foot and mouth disease migrating north from South America. This means you have to ship somehow from Panama to Colombia.
To prepare for shipping you measure your vehicle. The critical container measurement is the inside height of the container door. Containers come in regular heights and “high cube” and all sorts of variations but we can only use those Alejandro has access to for shipping, 20 and 40 foot “high cubes.” Below you can see a pale stripe across the vehicle parked next to GANNET2 which is the door height of a 40 foot high cube. The van fits but the air conditioner doesn’t. That’s the big black box at the back behind the solar panels.
So we have a choice: remove the air conditioner and reinstall it in Colombia or ship by flat rack which is an open container used to ship oversized vehicles.
They wrap GANNET2 in tarps and put the flat rack on the top line of containers on the ship.
Or there is Roll On Roll Off. This involves you handing over your van to a ship that transports large machinery and brand new cars across oceans. Your home is accessible to underpaid sailors on a car deck for the duration of the trip. About 50% of overland vehicles suffer vandalism or theft as off duty sailors break into these obvious targets. It’s a touchy subject but you can imagine we aren’t risking our home to do this.
Our preferred choice is flat rack, obviously the most expensive. A 20 foot container is about $1300 dollars, a 40 foot container is about $4600 which you can share to split the costs and flat rack is $6500 which you can’t share very easily because smaller vehicles will prefer containers. RoRo is somewhere in between but we didn’t even get a quote for that. So the lesson is: travel in a small uncomfortable roof top tent or four wheel drive with a pop top!
Hugh and Sue from British Columbia should be able to squeeze their Land Rover into a 20 foot high cube and save themselves $5,000! Surprisingly the expedition Mercedes below wouldn’t cost any more than our Promaster if it went flat rack:
Rusty sat under the French Unimog, an off-road beast and ignored us while we struggled to figure out our options. Young Magnus from Germany is on his first long motorcycle trip(!) and arrived here from Alaska on his way south. He’s flying his motorcycle to Bogota for $1100 dollars, a journey of one short day. He reminded me of me as a young man.
If you want to see all the vehicles that come through here you can find Overland Embassy on Instagram. Alejandro records it all. He is incredibly patient, reassuring us and holding our hands all the way.
Chris from Marseille in France shipped his Honda 300 scooter from France to French Guyana in South America and has ridden all the way around. He responded to my query in French enthusiastically and we got talking. French speakers love the fact that I can speak to them not in English but their own language.
Why the scooter? Because he lost his leg in a motorcycle wreck! We had lots of notes to compare on our different broken bones. He’s going north to Alaska.
Laura and her Dad are riding Royal Enfield motorcycles south to Patagonia. She had to be back at work in England in four months so we won’t see them again. Mores the pity as they are really funny. Dad stopped riding when she was born but she nagged him to buy a motorcycle and take the trip with her…so he said yes of course! Great fun people.
We crossed paths at the border from Costa Rica but they were quite stressed and don’t remember seeing us. I recall feeling very vulnerable on a motorcycle at places like borders where everybody wants something from you. We just duck out aboard GANNET2 for a quick air conditioned break. Their Himalayan motorcycles getting disinfected:
The Overland Embassy has a campground next door to allow travelers, even those not shipping to have a secure spot in the capital. It’s not pretty but it’s what travelers need. You can see the roof of the Global Convoy bus inside. We met Joel and Becca again but we had to leave quickly as we had an appointment in North Panama we had to drive to.
So GANNET2 will be handed over by us to the ship at the Port of Colon on the Caribbean side of Panama on Friday the 12th of January. They will wrap the flat rack and ship it out January 18th from Colon to Cartagena. We have three seats on the 9:45 pm flight from Panama City to Cartagena with a room reserved in a pet friendly hotel in Colombia. Rusty will support us emotionally by riding between us on the floor. Then we have a rental car reserved so we can drive around a bit (I love driving weirdly enough) and enjoy some beach accommodations as we wait for our ship to come in.
Oh but it’s not over yet! We have to extend our vehicle permit in Panama, we have to find a vet to do the extremely complex and expensive exit papers for Rusty to fly out of Panama and we have to take the time to enjoy Panama in the meantime. Oh and the holidays.
And I got stopped for doing 78kph in a 60 zone. I genuinely thought it was an 80kph (50mph) zone on the PanAmerican and the cop was actually very understanding. Clearly I am not a young speed freak in a muscle car. $50 fine narrowly averted. No bribes no threats no horrid story to tell of being shaken down by corrupt cops. I do wish they’d post the speed limits more consistently though.
Anyway once you’ve digested just how complicated it is to get a vehicle and a dog to South America we can get back to being tourists. I hope this post gives some idea of the head spinning we’ve been doing.
