22nd November - 9th December (Entry 13)

---

Road miles to date: 20,371

After a respite in an empty house making use of rare luxuries including an oven and a washing machine, we left Puntarenas and went in search of a new rear tyre and a superior pump. We headed to the Costa Rican capital of San Jose where we spent the day combing the area before we finally got a tyre that fit the bike from possibly the only BMW garage in Central America and found a pump the next day. Believing ourselves to finally be fully equipped for any future troubles, we set off towards the southern coast of Costa Rica in search of some tropical wilderness.

As we climbed higher into the mountains, mist and rain closed in on us and the temperature plummeted. Riding higher, the bike began to splutter and eventually stopped entirely. The road was narrow and winding and the only hard shoulder to speak of was a steep grass verge. As we rolled it off the hazardous road, we propped it on the side stand and Isabel leant against it into the verge to keep it upright while Byron got to work once again, this time in pouring rain.

It transpired that our new, superior pump, c-clamp, collection of inner tubes and the rest of our master plan was now totally redundant. The HT leads for the spark plugs seemed to have been affected by the rain so we changed them and managed to get a small spark that should have got us to the next town where we could have parked up for the night. However, as Byron went to return one of spark plugs, it wouldn't screw in straight. It turned out that the tired thirty-three year old thread had finally given up, no doubt helped on its way by a shivering and frustrated mechanic.

Declaring that a piece of metal that had come loose from the thread and fallen into the cylinder had the potential to totally wreck the engine and that the spark plugs were not sparking properly anyway, Byron didn't want to risk riding the bike so we began to flag down help for the second time that week. It being freezing and wet, not too many people were quick to stop but eventually Jose pulled up in his truck. He offered to get the bike in the back but with only a thin plank of wood to guide the two hundred and fifty (at least) kilogram bike up a four foot drop the chances were a long shot. When that idea failed he suggested that we free-wheel down the road while he followed slowly to keep the traffic back. A genius plan until the road rose instead of fell. At this point it was wet, totally dark and Jose clearly wanted to get home. So he dug out a tow rope and pulled us to the nearest trucker cafe.

By absolute chance, when we got the tyre changed at the BMW garage the day before, one of the guys had passed us an emergency contact number as an afterthought, just as we were leaving. Without this number we would have undoubtedly been camping out for the night up the mountain. We managed to get through to the number and four hours later, and some considerable degrees colder, we were in a pick-up truck on our way back to San Jose. It was then that Johnny, the driver, told us the mountain we had just got stuck on was called Cerro de Muerte (Mountain of Death) and was a notorious road in the region, not only due to the hazardous road conditions but also the jaguars, snakes and tarantulas that inhabited the area.

Johnny dropped us back at the hostel that we had waved goodbye to that morning and then took the bike to the workshop. The next day we turned up to find they had given the bike it's own bench and offered Byron free reign to get to work. After changing the HT leads again and testing the spark plugs, coils and ignition circuit, we removed the cylinder head and cleaned out the plug threads inserting a helicoil to repair the damage done on the previous day. Content that there were no other apparent issues, we got set to leave.

Johnny and Adolfo at the garage only charged us for the pick-up the night before and had given us the whole day in the workshop using their tools, equipment and spares as a gift for the journey. Incredibly grateful for all their help and advice, we set off back to the hostel on a fully functioning bike.

In the morning we said goodbye to Gabriel and Magdalena at Hostel Nomadas once again and this time headed for the coast road, giving the Mountain of Death a wide berth. With the sun shining and the bike chugging along we thought we were in the clear until about an hour in when we felt a familiar splutter again. Luckily there was more of a hard shoulder to speak of than up the mountain and bright skies under which to take off the petrol tank, check all the wiring and test the spark plugs for the third time this week. Just as we were about to turn around and head back to San Jose, Byron noticed a few suspect cables. Deciding to completely eliminate any margin for a problem he cleaned up all of the terminals and re-taped the wires before giving the road south one more chance. The fix worked and we made a clean ride all the way to Uvita, near Marino Ballena National Park.

We spent the next morning exploring the nearby beach where miles of sand met dense jungle and huge groups of palm trees bent out towards the ocean. An awesome reward for the past few days' trouble however, just as we continued our exploration of the area the heavens opened, quite literally. Unfortunately they didn't close for the rest of the day or night so we made the most of the hostel's unique hammock cinema instead.

Successfully avoiding one monkey who jumped out of the jungle at us and a vulture that clipped Byron's head, we made our way to the border and passed into Panama. Enduring the usual three hour border crossing, which this time included our refusal to hand over a credit card before we could get our passports stamped and another refusal to show that we had five-hundred dollars cash on us (we actually didn't). We then wasted a good twenty minutes requesting, then insisting, that the temporary importation forms for the bike be amended to show that we are in fact British and not Irish. Apparently the Ireland part of 'United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland' on the front of our passports is the only word that makes sense to all the immigration officials in Central America and so the bike has been travelling through all these countries as an Irish bike owned by Irish nationals. We had been warned to get the paperwork right in Panama though or face being refused exit on the boat to Colombia, followed by a long journey back to the border that we entered at to get it changed.

Once through, credit cards and non-existent cash intact, we decided to ride straight to the city of Santiago in order to get to the port in time the next day. Not realising we had passed a time zone, the last hour of this journey was spent late and in the dark, tracking a lorry because our front light was being pushed down by the bag sitting on top of it and due to lack of road lighting and occasional immense potholes, we needed a shield ahead of us to follow. We made it for a quick stopover in the attic room of a hostel, directly beside an all night party before setting off on our way again early the next day.

By lunchtime we were sitting by a lock of the Panama Canal in hot sunshine watching an absolutely enormous cargo ship passing through. With little time to spare before our considerably smaller boat would be leaving, we raced on through the Soberania National Park and up towards the Caribbean coast. Once again the heavens opened and we soon hit an abrupt standstill at a road block. An entire section of road had washed away and there was no chance of getting through, even on a bike. We later found out that flooding has been more of a problem than usual in Panama in the last few weeks with whole villages being washed away and fears that some locks in the canal would break. We turned about, clueless what to do as our map didn't show any other roads to our destination. We stopped in the nearest rest stop where, by chance we met the captain of a boat moored in the village we were heading to. He directed us to a different road that was not showing as complete on our map so we headed off again and made it to the turn off for Puerto Lindo, the village we were due to sail from.

By now, the rain was flooding the roads and pouring down the side of them like a torrential river. Unsure how the condition would continue, we had no choice but to keep going through streaming, misty visors and roads that were more like rivers. As luck had it, the rest of the road had been paved very recently and took us winding through rural Panama to our final Central American destination.

On arrival at Hostel Wunderbar we learnt that our boat had been delayed leaving Colombia as the port had been closed due to terrible weather and enormous waves so we would have another two days to wait before setting sail, cutting the time with our friends incredibly short.

By a great stroke of luck, Guido, the owner of the hostel was able to weld aluminium so we maximised the next two days by getting the rear wheel fixed, packing and repacking with our fellow waiting passengers, waking up to the haunting sound of howler monkeys and going to sleep to the cacophony of jungle toads, avoiding the slobber of three enormous beasts of dogs and finding out if there was anything one tiny, green, orphaned parrot wouldn't eat (candle wax apparently went down a treat).

The night before we were to set sail, we took the bike down to the local village where about ten local men met us to help load ours and another bike onboard the boat. Having heard about the process from reports of other bikers, we were semi prepared for what was in store. We wheeled the bike halfway down the pier where it took at least eight of the waiting men to lift it into a waiting motorboat where upon Byron sat on it and another two guys held it in place to keep it steady. The same was done with the other bike and then the boat was slowly motored out to the waiting sailing boat.

The motorboat was kept steady at the back of the sailing boat by the free hands of a couple of men while each bike was winched onboard using the rear grab rails and the brute force of the rest of the helping men. It's fair to say this wouldn't have been our first choice for transporting the bike but short of trying to navigate a region with no roads and getting shot/kidnapped in the jungle, it was the only option for continuing our journey South overland. With perspective, it also adds good fodder to the account of the flying aga tales!

After all the excitement, during which a pair of our flip-flops had been snaffled from the pier, we went back to enjoy our last meal on Central American turf. Sitting out under the stars, we spotted what turned out to be a huge opossum in the piping of one of the hostel buildings and, not knowing what it was, we asked the owners. The 'oh no' response told us all was not well and within a split second of asking, a machete was being swung several times up in the direction of the unassuming creature, simultaneously severing the light cables.

Judging this a good time to hit the sack, we went to sleep and woke up early the next morning to the aftermath of an unplugged, switched-off TV that had seemingly spontaneously combusted in the wooden building where the rest of our fellow passengers were sleeping. Utterly confused as to whether this should be taken as as a good or bad sign before a five day voyage at sea, we all quickly chose to forget the incident entirely.

With everybody onboard, the bikes secure and covered in tarpaulin and with sea-sickness pills to hand we left Puerto Lindo, imagining ourselves to be a gang of pirates heading for the wide open ocean. Within ten minutes of leaving, we were both hanging off the back of the boat hurling into the deep blue sea. It transpired that we had taken the motion sickness pills a little too late. Ten hours of strenuous vomiting and concentrated attempts not to move a muscle or utter a syllable for fear of aggravating the situation, we anchored in calm water for the night beside the San Blas immigration island. Exhausted but utterly relieved we sat for the evening under a clear, star filled sky and then slept like babies.

The next morning we realised it was only down to the kindness of our fellow passengers, Andrew and Fanny that we had survived the previous day at all as our useless, pot smoking captain and first mate had done approximately bugger all to assist. Luckily the next couple of days were spent cruising around the San Blas islands in calm water, swimming, snorkelling, attempting to fish (it became clear there were no fish in this part of the Caribbean ocean), meeting the indigenous Kuna Indians and hunting for coconuts.

The San Blas are a group of over 370 small islands that sit off the East coast of Panama in the Caribbean and belong to the Kuna Indians who inhabit about forty of them. One is so small it is literally a patch of sand with one palm tree whereas others are home to up to six-hundred Kuna. The Kuna is a tribe originally from Colombia that was driven towards Panama over five-hundred years ago, during the Spanish invasion. They lived for years in the jungle area of the Darien Gap but disease and limited trade drove them off the mainland and out to these islands about two-hundred years ago where they discovered fresh water rivers, trade opportunities with passing ships, fishing and freedom from the diseases of the jungle. San Blas was declared an independent state in 1925 and gained legal independence from Panama in 1938. Tourists were only permitted to visit from the 1940s so it was a privilege meet the people on a few of the islands, but also to swim out and explore totally uninhabited islands too.

The two days spent in this area of the world were some of the best of the trip and became an absolute break from the modern world - although we were greeted on one island by a guy carrying a portable speaker that was blasting out death metal music, this was out of the ordinary as most of the elder women maintain the traditional Kuna lifestyle and dress and the men continue to hunt and fish in carved-out-tree-trunk canoes.

We soon discovered a key secret to their success and survival was their savvy business acumen. The women would often be out at sea, paddling up to passing boats of tourists selling jewellery and painted coconuts, the men would appear from nowhere and charge a dollar for every coconut you found or managed to hit down, one really hospitable family charged our captain to cook us a meal using the ingredients he had given them, the tribal chiefs were currently in the process of negotiating five-hundred dollars for the removal of each palm tree that was currently growing on the Panamanian immigration island runway and apparently an abundance of weed and cocaine was available, should you request it.

Sadly our two days in the area passed very quickly but ended perfectly with a swim out from the boat to a totally uninhibited island where we spent a good few hours searching for coconuts and attempting to climb trees or knock them down before hacking into them with pocket knives. That night we had our last meal in calm waters, under a ridiculously starry night before setting sail when we would supposedly sleep through the night and get used to the motion of the boat. Safe to say that although we had quelled the sea-sickness by taking tablets way in advance, the motion of the boat in a semi-conscious, half-asleep state conjured up fears of every possible catastrophic scenario at sea. At one point the boat bent so far over towards the water that the entire contents of the boat, including us in our beds, went flying into the bulkheads. Although our crew had shown themselves to be socially useless, they did prove themselves to be pretty decent sailors that night, despite the copious amounts of weed they consumed and lack of any navigation lighting on the boat.

The next two days were spent above deck listening to terrible Puerto Rican hip hop, concentrating hard not to green out again, explaining the histories of each nationality and language onboard (Swiss, Irish, English, Guyanan, French and Colombian, making for some interesting talk), spotting dolphins that came once everyday to swim alongside us and searching desperately for sight of whales and mermaids.

The sensation of being out on the open sea came as a surprise to all of us who had never undertaken a sea voyage of this length before, let alone on a forty-one foot sailing boat. Aside from a token tanker and one small but suspicious motor boat (we had no idea how it had got out that far), we could see nothing but deep blue water in every direction for most of the day, giving the bizarre sensation of sailing on a huge, round dish of water from which we would never move from the centre.

Shortly before we had Colombia in our sights, the sea calmed down so much that the captain heeded to our pleas for a swim and dropped the sails in the middle of the open ocean. We promptly all dived in without putting the ladder down only to realise Lake was the only person left onboard who could now save us. Despite not being able to swim, he obviously wasn't happy about this new responsibility and dived in after us, fully clothed! After a short while of being in such deep, open, shark-jellyfish-whale-and-every-other-dangerous-marine-life-infested water, a few of us realised the boat was also now drifting and didn't waste time clambering back onboard using the shoulders of the other more daring souls who savoured every minute.

We arrived in Cartagena that evening and went through the whole process of unloading the bikes, in the dark again. This time though our captain (who was still smoking a joint) had only arranged for a dingy to transport the bikes plus two friends to help lift it meaning all the other passengers could not leave until they had helped too. Against all logic, the same winching/manually lifting method was a success again, although our heavier bike had to be taken to a nearby beach where the air was let out of the dingy so the bike could be rolled onto dry land, then lifted over a small wall with the help of three passing policemen who luckily, asked no questions about paperwork or where the bike had just come from.

Quick to get back to his joint and his girlfriend, the captain left us there on the promenade at 11pm at night without paperwork or passports to go and find ourselves food and a bed for the night. After riding around in circles for a while Lake, riding the other bike, got pulled over by the police and, having no paperwork to show them and then learning that it was illegal to ride a bike in town after 11pm, found himself buying the group of policemen burgers and drinks to avoid a trip to the local nick. We were lucky to avoid the same predicament and eventually found a place to get a room and stash the bike. Lake later caught us up after a bunch of locals had turned on the policemen giving him a hard time and we all went in search of food, dodging the call girls and the offers of quality cocaine along the way. By the time we actually slept it was past 3am and our heads swayed like the waves the entire night.

The next day, after much bullshit from the joke of a captain, we eventually got our passports and paperwork back and Byron and Lake spent about three hours sorting out the temporary importation paperwork for the bikes. Isabel finally caught up with her friends, Abby and Alice who had come out to meet us and had by this point already been in the country for over ten days. On the whole, a grand day was spent in Cartagena on solid ground catching up with all our friends, old and new, and uniting in our discontent with the captain and his first mate.

Sadly the time with Abby and Alice did not last long and a full two days of chatting without pausing for breath later, they were on their way back to Bogota for their flight back to snowy England.

That night we explored Cartagena with the Swiss couple, Markus and Fanny from the boat to see the Christmas light switch-on (surreal to see snow-orientated decorations in a town where the temperature is plus thirty degrees), watch a symbolic horse race of hundreds of thoroughbred steeds being ridden through the small cobbled streets by very well dressed, Panama hat toting Colombian farmers, ventured behind enormous wooden doors where we learnt the huge bolts keeping it together would once have been made of gold, into one of the most amazing hotels we've ever seen, then finally to the main square to a music festival where we watched an awesome, Caribbean-Latin instrumental band perform.

So we find ourselves in a new country, on a new section of the continent, in unusual, thirty-degree December heat, now waiting for Isabel's parents to come up from Bogota where they are currently staying with her brother's in-laws who are Colombian. The saga continues as we and the bike remain (just about) in one piece!



Scroll further down for more photos.

---

Comments

[Rachel]

Loved this post
Hi guys, really enjoyed this post. Although the San Blas islands look lovely Pete and I are really glad that we are not doing the boat ride as we get so seaside! Think the girls would go a bit stir crazy after 5 days too eh? We are back in Tulum in our fave hotel for 2 nights before we fly home on Weds to the sleet and snow....erk! Looking forward to the next post and hope the bike behaves better in South America... Rach

[marty]

WOW
been following your trip best of luck for the finish trip