After a couple of days of uncertainty about where my BMW parts were,
I tracked them down Saturday morning at the local DHL office.
The address of the office was not to be found on the DHL web site,
so I did a search on Google and found a story by someone who had shipped
something from there and mentioned the address. It was a 5-10
minute walk from here to the office on Ave del Sol. It took
them a few minutes to figure out that they actually had it, but once
they did it was instantly in my hands.
I tried to call the local mechanic that was recomended by Peru Motor
Tours, but I kept getting an error message I couldn't understand.
I walked to Peru Motor Tours and was lucky enough to find Alex, the
owner there, and he said Richard the mechanic was out of town until
3-4pm, come back then. I went back at close to 4 and they said
he hadn't returned. He was on a motorcycling adventure on the
dirt roads outside of town and perhaps he had trouble. They
called another mechanic and told me to go right over there.
We were hoping to get right into the bike and try to get the pump
installed yesterday afternoon, but when we got there we found him
working in an outside workspace, and rain clouds were looming in a
most ominous fashion. He told us to leave the bike and to come
back at 10am this morning.
I woke up this morning to almost clear blue skies, the nicest weather
in ouw week here. I took this as a good omen. We taxied
over to the mechanics shop to find it locked up tight. The guys
at the paint store said he wouldn't be in until tomorrow. We
were a couple minutes early so we just stood there, and a moment later
a motorcycle drove up. "Hey that's MY motorcycle!"
I thought we were going to start work on the bike right then, when
in fact it was already compete. I was handed the old water pump
parts and charged $50. I could have probably haggled, in fact
it almost seemed expected, but Dick said something like "that's
worth it, how much would you have been charged in the states?"
It being a Sunday morning and these people having just done me
a huge favor working either very late on a Saturday or early on a
Sunday, I paid the asking price, and drove the bike back to the hostal.
The clutch lever had too much play, which I adjusted back at the hostal.
The shift lever seems a little wierd, maybe the shifting is a little
more crisp than it was, but after reading the f650 faq page on doing
the waterpump repair it seemed other people had this sensation too.
The oil was low but not below the minimum line, and the coolant was
topped off right at the full mark. Seems he did some good work,
though I really would have liked to see him do it. He didn´t
use the new gasket for the LHS crankcase cover, but the faq page said
that it wasn't always required. It's nice to have the bike back,
and I'm looking forward to getting back on the road. I need
to research a little on Bolian weather for this time of year, and
the forecast for the next week, as I talked to a German guy at the
Peru Moto Tours place that said it could get quite nasty this time
of year. He had done a similar trip 2 years ago. So while
I'm doing that, I'll upload a handful of pictures from Cusco and Machu
Picchu that I just had burned to disk...
