Today was almost very, very bad.  Tomorrow could end up being pretty hectic, but I'm reasonably optimistic that it will turn out right.

We were told to be at Girag Air Cargo at 8am this morning to get the bikes moving towards Ecuador.  Today is a holiday, but Barbara assured us that she would be there at 8, along with someone else to do the packing of the bikes.  We were on time, but the only person there was a security guard who spoke no English.  In our broken Spanish we communicated that we were looking for Barbara, but he kept saying manana.  Esta manana?  No manana manana.  Uh oh.  So we waited a few more minutes and then got him to call her on his cell phone.  She was very sorry but her boss told her not to work today.  Yeah that's great but she assured us she would be there and that it was safe to buy a passenger ticket to Ecuador for this afternoon.  It's a damn good thing they were sold out of economy tickets, so we scheduled for tomorrow morning.  However now we have to bring the bikes in tomorrow morning. 

The logistics officer for Girag showed up while I was on the phone with Barbara, and the security guy kind of grabbed the phone out of my hand and hung up on her, which was weird.  The logistics guy spoke excellent English, and told us that operations began at 12am tonight, and that if we bring the bikes in at 6:30am tomorrow we "should" be able to get through the paperwork and still make our flight.  Barbara and he should both be there at 6:30, but he avoided saying "definitely" be there.  Making our flight "should be no problem."  I guess we'll see.

With any luck the next report should be from 5-10 miles south of the equator!

Monday January 2, 2006 - 06:21am (PST)