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    AVOIDING THE DARIEN GAP

    If entering Panama was hard, leaving the country proved to be much harder. Panama was the last Central American country, and only 90 miles from the coast was our new destination: the infamous Columbia. What separates the two countries is one of the most dense and impassable jungles and swamps on earth, called the Darien Gap. Walking the Darien is almost suicide let alone taking a vehicle through it. A group of British guys tried to cross the Darien gap in the 70’s and their average progress was 300 feet a day! In the end they had to be airlifted out.

    Needless to say, we had to ship the bike to other side either on an airplane or cargo ship. Since we were sending the SRzero electric car and the support van to the other side as well, we decided to load everything on one container and load it on an ocean freighter. The paperwork for the shipping process started before we even arrived in Panama and lasted five days into our stay. Office to office, we chased our tail with the Panamanian bureaucracy, corruption and laziness on every level. At one office, there was a 10x10 room filled by eight female workers shoulder to shoulder with no air conditioning. Inside of that room was another door and this was the door to the director’s office, and as we entered it, we were shocked. His room was four times bigger than everyone else’s and two air-conditioning units were on full blasts aiming at his desk. Gold chains hanging from his neck and iphone in his hand, he was a fat cat and a rude one at that too.

    We also had to get the vehicles inspected at the police station. The police station was in a very dodgy part of town and the police warned us several times not to go across the parking lot to the little store as we might get caught in the middle of a shoot-out. One of the local guys packing some heat, came over from an apartment across the street and cheerily reassured us, “Don’t worry. I have a gun. You’ll be safe!”

    After all the paperwork was done, we had to take the vehicles to Colon, a major port on the Caribbean side about 100 miles away, and load everything up into the container. The paperwork went on until the last minute and it took from 6 am to 6 pm to load one container. The three vehicles barely fit into the 40 foot container with bike going in last and sitting sideways. About 8 port-workers strapped everything down and finally sealed the container. Photography and recording videos were strictly prohibited, but we managed to smuggle my small camcorder in to get some shots. All said and done, the only thing left to do was to take a short flight from Panama City to Cartagena, Colombia and wait for the container to arrive.

    <object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/lev8POi6NQs?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US&amp;rel=0&amp;color1 =0x234900&amp;color2=0x4e9e00"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/lev8POi6NQs?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US&amp;rel=0&amp;color1 =0x234900&amp;color2=0x4e9e00" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object>

    Panama City is a very diverse city with almost every ethnic background from all over the world. From Chinese to Arabs to Germans and Africans, every part of the town is occupied with a distinctive race. It owes its diversity to the famous canal built by the United States army corp of engineers at the instigation and behest of Teddy Roosevelt in early 1900. Roosevelt, despite all protests and oppositions from Latin America, (Panama was part of Colombia at that time) pushed on through with the construction of the canal, and 10 years after its initial start, almost every ship that crossed between the Pacific and Atlantic went through this narrow canal. It changed the map of Central America and created a new country: Panama. Sailors and workers from literally everywhere settled in Panama City and made a one giant international community. Colorful and beautiful, Panama is the most important port in the western hemisphere and a significantly large portion of the country’s income comes from the canal and the shipping industry.

    We had the privilege of getting a private tour of the impressive Panama Canal and even walking across the locks. The ships are guided in, strapped on both sides to small trains to keep them from side-to-side movement due to the narrow water way, and in three steps, they cross the canal. In the first lock, they raise the water to float the ship higher, then they open the second lock and so on until the ship floats on the other side. The width of the canal is still the same as what it was when built in 1914 but there are plans to widen the canal in 2012 to ease the passage for more vessels at a time.

    We were warned and warned again about Colombia, on the drug cartels, the FARC, and the kidnappings and almost everyone was apprehensive to some extent about Colombia. Let see if it lives up to its myths.



















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          Here's a video of the bike getting loaded into the container: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lev8POi6NQs

          Is there a way to post videos here? The embedding doesn't work apparently.

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            How was that police officer doing that was hit? What happened, did he cross in front of the car and get hit or did the car not have the right of way?
            Cowboy Up or Quit. - Run Free Lou and Rest in Peace

            1981 GS550T - My First
            1981 GS550L - My Eldest Daughter's - Now Sold
            2007 GSF1250SA Bandit - My touring bike

            Sit tall in the saddle Hold your head up high
            Keep your eyes fixed where the trail meets the sky and live like you ain't afraid to die
            and don't be scared, just enjoy your ride - Chris Ledoux, "The Ride"

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              We didn't see the hit, but we got there maybe seconds after it happened. He was screaming and holding his head the whole time. He sounded like he was hurt pretty bad, but there wasn't a scratch on him. He kept laying down and didn't get up as long as we were there. The funny thing is that helmet laws pretty strict in Panama but this police officer wasn't wearing any himself. The traffic in Panama City was horrendous, not as bad as Lima, Peru but worse than Mexico City.

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                I have loved the journey and to all who are considering doing it-go for it! I didn't travel on the bike as much as originally planned due to us joining up with the RGE team and the filmmaker needing to be on the bike to film but I still had chances here and there which were my favorite times. Going on a bike is so much better than in a car.
                Last edited by Guest; 11-17-2010, 01:30 PM.

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                  You guys are both awesome.. And Cynthia..well all i can say is that your a hell of a girl and what a trooper and inspiration for women and yound ladies everywhere. I deserve a girl like that in my life and you set an example for the type of gal i wanna meet and settle down with someday. Thansk, Chuck.
                  MY BIKES..1977 GS 750 B, 1978 GS 1000 C (X2)
                  1978 GS 1000 E, 1979 GS 1000 S, 1973 Yamaha TX 750, 1977 Kawasaki KZ 650B1, 1975 Honda GL1000 Goldwing, 1983 CB 650SC Nighthawk, 1972 Honda CB 350K4, 74 Honda CB550

                  NEVER SNEAK UP ON A SLEEPING DOG..NOT EVEN YOUR OWN.


                  I would rather trust my bike to a "QUACK" that KNOWS how to fix it rather than a book worm that THINKS HE KNOWS how to fix it.

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                    thank you for your kind words Chuck...there are many women, young and old, who have gone before me and I took my inspiration from them! I hope to do more traveling by bike as I have started a love affair with seeing the world on a bike...that combined with my passion to help others...no better combination!

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                      Are you home yet?

                      Have you started looking for your own bike?

                      I'm glad that you enjoyed the experience. I'm sure that everyone would be interested in your take on the road trip. There were so many beautiful pictures.

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                        Life in Cartagena, Colombia

                        First I would like to thank James South, Lynn Minthorne, Gregory Quinn, Rich Jordan and Ahti Peura for their support and generous donations. You guys are part of this expedition as much as I am, and to this day I’ve been amazed by your support and generosity and humbled by your selflessness. Big corporations have not shown us much love, as apparently feeding little kids is not their business idea, so we’ve relied on public support to carry on our mission.

                        I’ve personally invested everything I had in this non-profit organization, and if I find a penny on side of the road I still put it towards the cause. But one man’s wallet is not big enough to take on a project like this effectively (Bill Gates is a rare breed). Thanksgiving is in a few days and while the times are still tough for many back in United States, you’d be amazed what your spare change could buy for the kids down here. I’m not asking for anything for myself, I’m just asking you to consider making another family in need happy with a spare dollar bill that won’t buy you anything in US. Enough begging now, let’s get to the story.

                        Tuesday morning found us aboard a short and uneventful flight on the COPA Airlines, from Panama City to Cartagena, Colombia. You can either take a boat or fly from Central America to South America. The boat ride is around $250 depends on the captain, and the airfare is somewhere around the neighborhood of $300. Since we were told that the container will get to Cartagena in 3 days, we took the short 40 minutes flight rather than going on a 5 day long ocean journey (big mistake). From the second we came out of the airport, I was relieved to see countless motorcycles, all in the 125cc range whizzing around, because at least I could find bike parts in this town. We settled just across the peninsula from El Centro in the Manga district in an apartment that Claudio rented and were glued to the balcony every night watching the spectacular sunsets across the water.

                        It soon hit us that our stay in Cartagena wasn’t going to be as short as we thought, as the container never made it on the ship in Panama as scheduled. Cynthia and I had taken just our laptops and one change of clothing each as we had anticipated arriving in Cartagena and getting our things from the boat in a few days. As Claudio likes to say, we were living in hope, and that lasted for 17 days. We were stuck in Cartagena.

                        Even though we had more time in beautiful Cartagena, we didn’t go around as much as one would think. This is in large part because we aren’t on vacation, but are on a volunteer mission which involves endless hours of work between the two of us, and also, because we simply don’t have the money. We did enjoy walking around the Centro (the historical walled old city) at night a few times, and had a chance to explore the Spanish Castle, the largest standing Spanish fort in South America after asking for a reduced rate to get in. Best of all, I got to do my favorite activity in the world, going all over the city hunting for bike parts.

                        Since I broke the turn signal switch in Nicaragua, I set out to find another and I lucked out. I bought a new signal-light-horn combo switch from another bike for $12 USD. It has an on/off for the headlight, and it’s built like a tank. The downside was that it had 16 wires coming out of it with no instruction, and it took 2 hours with a multimeter to figure out what was what. I also bought two new marker lights $1.50 each, two spare relays, spare clutch cable (just the cable), two new tubes for the tires and a new H4 lamp for the headlight as the Chinese lamp I bought in Panama was absolute crap. I could do nothing with all this stuff since the bike was still missing somewhere on the Pacific Ocean. So we waited and waited and waited some more.



















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                          Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.


                          Here's the video of the sunset in time laps and more pictures. How do i post videos here? The link is the only way?





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                            Need some help locating shaft seal, shims and such, please see this thread:

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                              Life in Cartagena, Colombia

                              Day after day we waited for the bike to arrive, but it never did. And to irritate me more, our website disappeared from the worldwide web because apparently it was causing problems on our sponsored server. When I started this journey, Montana Internet Corporation sponsored the hosting of our website for 5 years which was very generous, but MIC wasn’t really set up to be a host. They provide wireless internet, and they are great at that. However hosting is not their real business so everything was pretty much outdated and couldn’t handle the load of our site. So they shut down our website, and it was time to move servers. Nevertheless, many thanks goes to MIC for putting up with us and giving us a helping hand when it was most needed.

                              I spent days trying to back-up our stuff with the horrible internet connections and started a quest to find the best host in the world and narrowed it down to one: Inmotion Hosting. My expectation from a good host was to be fast, reliable and up-to-date, and Inmotion fit the bill on every level. To make it even better, it’s a solid American company. They provide 24/7 customer service which is top-notch with no Indian accent like other hosts.
                              Inmotion hosting joined our sponsor team and now the website is faster, better and never down again. Many thanks to Alyssah Hastings for making this happen despite the difficulty communicating back and forth from Colombia. Inmotion is a great host, and I don’t just say that because they sponsored our hosting; every review on the internet is better than the other when it comes to this company. I like good businesses, and if you have a blog or website that needs a reliable and affordable host, give them a try. They won’t disappoint.

                              As I was busy with the website ordeal, days went by, and there was no sign of the container anywhere. I got an email from a fellow rider who had a bad experience with shipping his bike on boats, and he said that his bike was missing for 4 months at one time which didn’t make me feel any better. After 15 days we finally got the news that the container was at the port and it was time to pick it up. The paperwork took 2 full days and when we arrived at the port in the morning, it took us another 16 hours to get the container out. But the GS was safe. No scratch, no water damage, and she started right up.
                              The SRzero electric car had a little misfortune at the port and caught on fire all by itself. Toby put the fire out quickly and there was no visible damage, but it wouldn’t run. The RGE guys started troubleshooting and it turned out that we were staying in Cartagena for another 5 days so they can fix the car. Now that I had the bike in hand, I could start my routine maintenance before heading out on the road again.

                              I needed to solder the connections on the signal switch but my butane soldering iron was out of gas. We searched the whole city (I’m not exaggerating) for butane gas and didn’t find any. Either butane is not known to Colombians, or every store we went to was out of stock!!! I ended up buying an electric soldering iron and getting the job done. The electric iron is probably a better choice anyway since I have an inverter on the bike that will run it, but I just don’t like being out of options. The bike being ready and the website done, we used our time to visit clinics, orphanages and poor sections of Cartagena. Stay tuned.

                              Here's a little video of the work:

                              Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

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                                They provide 24/7 customer service which is top-notch with no Indian accent like other hosts.


                                We are all aware of the cliché of western corporations and the offshore enterprises they run that exploit poor hungry people. The ones that profit from poverty and hope it never goes away.

                                I am sure you like Indian people and appreciate that there are so many of them hungry who work at call centres to earn their daily bread.

                                Hope you find your parts.

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