We¿ve made it to South America! This is my first time
here. On Tuesday morning we showed up at Girag Air Cargo just
before 6:30am. We weren't too surprised that no one expected
us, no one spoke any English and no one could help us. Fortunately
Barbara showed up a little after 7am and started hurrying through
the paperwork. We told her we needed to be at the airport at
9am to catch out flight. This was mostly true, 9:45 would have
been the required 2 hours inadvance but we wanted to instill a sense
of urgency. She worked so fast at the paperwork that she mixed
up the colors and VINs on Dick and Erics bikes, but she got mine right
first try. We gave her a ton of cash and then got a ride from
the guy who had showed up the day before. I think we got to
the airport at jsut before 9am. Not bad.
The flight from Panama City to Quito was non-stop and pleasantly eventless.
The only weird things were that they didn't put exit stamps in out
passports, and at the Quito airport they checked our boarding passes
on teh way off the airplane, which I had never seen before.
I think this was because some people remained on the plane which was
going to Guayaquil and they wanted to make sure that we were getting
off in the right place. I got through emmigration no problem,
but they detained Dick for a while because he didn't have a Panama
exit stamp. Eventually they just stamped him in to Ecuador,
what else could they do? Send him back to Panama?
Quito is at 2850 meters, and it is the rainy season here. It's
been cloudy most of the time, and I've had a headache from the altitude
since I got here. It's starting to get better. I rarely
have problems with this altitude but I´ve been at sea level
for most of the last 6 months and I hardly ever spend any significant
time over 8000 feet.
We were going to stay in the Old Town section but the girl who set
us up with the cab at the airport said it was quite dangerous, and
recomended the Mariscal section, which is also a little closer to
the airport. We found a decent hotel just outside the Mariscal
section, and have been walking in to Mariscal for food, which is where
I am now.
Yesterday Dick called the local Girag office about the bikes, and
they knew nothing about them. An hour later Girag told him that
they were definitely not on yesterday's flight, but there is another
flight on Friday. He's back at the hotel now trying to call
for confirmation. If the bikes do come in on tomorrow's flight,
we will be lucky to get them through customs ourselves. We may
have to hire a local expert at $50 per bike to get them to clear in
2 hours instead of the 2 days it takes most people who try to do it
themselves.
We saw a KLR650 in front of a tour operator office here last night,
and the tour operator laid out an interesting route for us to follow
down to Peru. It stays off the Pan American Highway and runs
on the east side of the Andes. There are a ton of huge, snow
covered volcanoes along the way on the west side, and on the east
side the Andes drop into the Amazon Basin. It's supposed to
rain a lot.
Today we are going to take a bus to the equator, which is 15 miles
north of here. Yesterday I filled the bathroom sink with water,
and then let it go to see if it would rotate one way or the other.
I thought that perhaps since we are so close to the Equator it would
rotate little or not at all, but sure enough, once it was half drained
it started rotating clockwise with a little whirlpool running down
to the drain. The spot we are going to on the equador has a
park with some displays that only work on the equador. I figure
a pool draining straight down into a drain is likely to be one of
them.
Hey the sun! It seems to shine maybe 5% of the time for at least
the couple days that we have been here. More later!
Thursday January 5, 2006 - 07:41am (PST) |
