Shipping Gannet2

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. 

Global Convoy

Villa Paula in the village of Tijeras is a well known stopping off place for travelers going to or coming from Costa Rica so here we are. There are two Dutch couples, a Spaniard, a Briton living in Costa Rica, and a Finnish couple we met briefly as well as the magic school bus above run by a couple of characters. Joel, below is from Minnesota but lives with his British girlfriend Becca,

…and the occasion for the photo was their departure from the campground. 

Their journey to South America was interrupted by the Panamanian blockades and protests that slowed our own journey but now they are gone from this campsite  and expect to load their school bus on a car carrier to Colombia later this week. It’s unlikely we’ll see them again as they have to move much faster than us retirees of leisure. Notice the youngsters traveling in perfect safety through countries most Americans classify as dangerous.  

Joel was struggling with a failing alternator when we arrived and he finally had to solve the problem by buying and installing a new one. Fortunately for them it worked; unfortunately for us they had to leave. 

Joel and Becca organize adventure journeys by gathering numbers of travelers to join them for segments of their trips as a low cost way to see the world. Becca gave Layne a full tour of the bus. Their desire to get to Colombia was fueled by their plan to regroup with their passengers for the holidays in South America. 

https://www.globalconvoy.com/

We have had a few interesting conversations with Rudi from the Netherlands as well as Kasper, also Dutch, both experienced travelers with children, full of stories about North Africa and Europe and hints for us approaching South America. They make our modest needs as a couple with an uncomplicated dog look easy to handle. 

We had the briefest encounter with Aline and Essa a young couple from Suomi Finland though we hope to catch up with them on the PanAmerican in South America. They told stories of meeting officials who had never heard of their country and the struggle to make themselves recognized. Finland? Where’s that? 

I was wandering around doing chores, figuring out the complex trash recycling system for a start when I noticed the signboard Kati and Nelson, the Panamanian owners, had put up. I realized with a start we are more than half way down the road to Ushuaia even though we started from our northernmost point of Fort Kent Maine, not Alaska. 

Only 4500 miles to go in a straight line. But we never drive in straight lines. 

Panama

The road from Costa Rica runs out and you are in Panama. Just like that. If you look in the photo above the Costa Rican flag is in front of the Panamanian border building, the one with the arched roof. There are no border police or barricades between one country and the other. It’s a mess. But it works! 

When you leave Costa Rica you pay $8 per person online or $9 to a business that will give you a receipt. “Impuesto de Salida” means exit tax. You pay in Colones or dollars and not even a smile. Boy let’s move on across the street. Find your way around and give the receipt to Immigration and they stamp you out. Customs suspended our import permit so if we need to we can re-enter Costa Rica within 90 days. The agriculture guy looked at our permit and said Rusty was good to go. Jolly good. 

First buy car insurance, 30 days for $25 flat fee. Panama uses the US dollar so this is the local currency. Oh and the time changed here, we were now standing an hour later in Eastern Standard Time. 

Isn’t this weird? A bus area with people just milling around inside Panama. The building with the red white and blue squares is the customs and immigration building.  We could have just walked off into Panama. We didn’t though! We need papers to ship GANNET2 and ourselves to Colombia. 

We stood at the customs window for a while as they typed out our 30 day permit line by line.  A Ram Promaster is not a common vehicle around here but she found it in her files. We got our permit. Then cans Rusty. Panama is notorious for being difficult to import animals. During the US Canal Zone era they had a four month quarantine so things are better now for dogs entering by land. 

Our papers from the vet in San Vito worked like a charm. The clerk asked for $25 and we said nothing but handed over the money. “Now the vet inspection,” he said. Our hearts sank. Rusty still has a big bald spot on his bum from his tussle with fire ants. We feared we might get some grief about that. He went out and came back alone. “The vet’s not around,” he said. And with that we fast walked back to GANNET2 . No one inspected Rusty sitting in the air conditioned van. 

A customs inspector checked our van. He peered in the back doors and asked for a tip. I played dumb and that was that. No inspection of our fridge or anything. Fair enough. 

Finally we had to do immigration. He checked our van papers and said nothing about any dog. We thanked him and split. Modern travelers like to put stickers on everything they pass. We met Moonrise Odyssey in Mexico and they drove this far with lots of engine trouble and quit driving. They shipped the truck home and are touring Vietnam. But their stickers still here. 

This place is chaos but don’t let it worry you. We were done in less than two hours. One final panic when the animal health department flagged us down and we thought: what now? Rusty??  No it was just the usual fumigation. $6 and we were done. Like these motorcycles from Britain. They got hand sprayed while we drove through the shed and were in Panama. 

I want to mention in passing a conversation we had with some travelers as we all waited for our papers. There is an easy way to smuggle your dog into Panama around here because the border is completely porous. People from Costa Rica apparently do it all the time to save the $150 fee (which was $25 for us apparently). I was glad for the information if I ever need it but we have to have Rusty legal for our exit by plane to Colombia. Besides I’m not very good at breaking rules. And I’m not explaining here in public how it’s done. 

This border crossing had been on our minds and I do wish we had traveled Costa Rica properly first but it all went well, and rather faster than we expected. Next time…

We expected for sure to be inspected at the police checkpoint half a mile from the border. Nope, we must look innocent as they waved us through with a bored look on their faces. Police all the way from Texas have shown zero interest in hassling us or demanding bribes or any of the other horror stories. Go figure. 

The PanAmerican Highway is a four lane bouncy cement roadway close to the border. Eventually it turns into smooth asphalt and that was lovely, with no speed bumps and no potholes. A steady 50 mph, the speed limit, made for an easy drive. 

Everything is slightly different here of course but the best thing we saw was the local price for regular gasoline. It’s 91 cents a liter which multiplied by 3.78 makes $3:44 a US gallon. Much better than $5:25 charged in Costa Rica. 

We stopped at a fruit stand of course. Rusty got his first sniff in Panama and Layne came back with corn cobs for dinner. 

Villa Paula half an hour down the road has electricity, laundry, swimming pool and dollar beers on the honor system. Oh and a bunch of travelers, more than we’ve seen in weeks. 

$10 a night? Sign me up, this is decidedly cheaper than Costa Rica. Costa Where? 

Change Of Plans

You have to be flexible if you are an overland traveler, and more so if you have a dog. It’s not Rusty's fault exactly but it kind of is as Panama has strict entry requirements for pets and so…

We had read in iOverlander about Dr Castro who has a reputation for making paperwork easy. He struck me as a James Herriot figure, the literary English vet, with a farm practice as well as dealing with “mascotas” (pets). One reason we arrived at “oh dawn thirty” was to catch him before he starts on his daily farm rounds. His son speaks English, and is his office manager which may be helpful to travelers. 

His office is located in the tiny mountain town of San Vito where we slept the night before under blankets at 3500 feet. He is personable and very easy to work with and he took all the stress out of getting Rusty ready to enter the most complex, pet unfriendly country in Central America. We stressed too much thinking about dealing with officials in Nicaragua and they were nothing but nice when we met them, so we hope for the same entering Panama. 

Dr Castro is a brilliant vet but best of all he knows the Costa Rican government officials. A process that can take up to ten days to be approved was ready in thirty minutes. He told us the papers are good for five days but we have to go by the Pacific Coast crossing as they won’t cause problems. If we go by our preferred route on the Caribbean we may not get through as they may not recognize these papers. Not having any reason to doubt him and not having any way of knowing better I wrote this as we set off from his office to the border 30 miles away. 

The road from San Vito to Paso Canoas is nothing short of spectacular with steep descents and winding curves that flow and dip as though molten.

Costa Rican road builders take their cue from the Romans and roads here aren’t designed the gently fold around obstacles. There’s a mountain? Go up it.

There’s a plunging canyon? Go straight down it. We spend our time in manual first gear reflexively leaning back as our Promaster takes on the aspect of a ship sinking into the abyss bow first.

Photos don’t show the grades but when it was 20% I had both hands on the wheel…











Entry on iOverlander:

Coming down the mountain the brakes were warming  up and because we had been at the vet’s door promptly at 7:30 for Rusty and his papers, I was hungry and ready for breakfast.  Layne found us a lovely spot and I walked up to see if they served breakfast to non residents. They did and they also have an electric car charging station. The guest chalets have astonishing views so bring your Bolt to Casa Linda Vista next time you’re passing…

I was going to go for a Tico breakfast of rice and beans and so forth but Layne started making noises about the American breakfast and yes, it was delicious. We gave the brakes time to cool off as we sipped coffee and enjoyed the view. 

And I cobbled together this post. Onwards to Paso Canoas and let’s see what difficulties Panamanian customs give us.