Lost at Last

As requested, here is the financial summary. I’ll preface it with a little information on our spending habits for the trip. We stayed in hostels when we could (and they weren’t too grim) but we also splashed out on nice hotels. We ate almost exclusively in restaurants and we didn’t make any attempt to do so frugally. We flew the bike when it needed to travel and didn’t mess around with sea freight. I did a lot of the work on the motorcycle, but not all of it. We started with much of the gear needed for the trip but also bought a fair amount of high-end stuff. In general we were conscious of spending, but gave preference to efficiency, convenience, and comfort. It was the vacation of a lifetime, after all.

* Gas/Food/Lodging also includes miscellaneous day to day expenses like park fees, tolls, etc.
* Gear is just the new personal gear we had to purchase for the trip.
* Transport is shipping for the bike and flights for us.
* Motorcycle is accessories, prep, maintenance, and repair costs – I had the bike already.

Statistics:

distance traveled: 17203 miles
gas burned: 502 gallons
highest altitude ridden: 16,388 feet
days riding: 71
days resting: 44 (includes two weeks trapped in Panama, one week post-trip in BA)
crashes: 4
tip overs: 4
bike blown over by wind: 1
flat tires: 0
cops bribed: 1
ran out of gas: 2

Lost:

• Long-sleeved T-shirt (Trevor)
• Nalgene bottle
• Chapstick
• Lens cap for camera
• Mini tripod for camera
• Wool hat (Nina)
• 8/10mm open end combo wrench
• Chilean electrical plug adapter
• 10lbs (Trevor)

Broken:

• Umbrella
• 2 x luggage straps
• Givi top box mounting plate
• Givi top box shell
• Caribou luggage right side breakaway lock
• Caribou luggage left side mounting rack
• KTM tank bag side pocket (ripped)
• KTM tank bag fastener
• Mountain Sun tank pannier fastener
• Tire pressure gauge
• 2 x Camelbak bladders (leaks)
• Small camera
• Nikon telephoto lens (still mostly functional)

Acquired:

• Chapstick
• Umbrella
• Guatemalan shawl (present for a friend)
• 2 x cotton t-shirts from Hostel Bekuo in San Jose (Thanks Storm!)
• Replacement Camelbak bladder
• 2 x rain ponchos
• Ladies’ stocking (for filtering fuel)
• New webbing to fix luggage straps
• Anti-fog spray
• Replacement Alpaca hat (Nina)
• Replacement lens cap
• Replacement small camera
• Chile plug adapter
• US plug adapter
• Argentina plug adapter
• 18lbs (Nina)

Bike maintenance:

• 3 x oil and filter change
• 2 x front and rear tires
• Fuel filter replacement
• Air filter replacement
• Water pump rebuild
• Replace sheared sub frame bolt
• Straightened front rim
• Scheduled full service (change all fluids, etc.)

Wish we’d brought:

• Waterproof snap camera (e.g. Olympus Mju 1030 SW)
• Ambient temperature gauge (that actually works – our cheapo unit was wildly inaccurate)
• Cheap rain suits (instead of waterproof liners)
• Extra laptop
• Wide-angle lens

The final hurdle of our journey was shipping the bike home from Buenos Aires. Following the recommendation of several people, we enlisted the help of Sandra at dakarmotos.com. Sandra is a wonderful person and was very helpful answering our questions and assisting with the logistics of shipping. She found a shipping agent and got us a reservation. Over the next few days we completed a scavenger hunt across BA for some things required for shipping – notarized photocopies of all relevant documents, USD 1600 in cash (harder to obtain than you might think). (As it turns out, these are not actually necessary. See the end of this post for some shipping tips.)

On the morning of our appointment we rode to the airport and who should we run in to but Brendan. We had met Brendan briefly several weeks earlier on route 40 in Patagonia. He was riding his KLR from British Columbia to Ushuaia and coincidentally was shipping his bike back at the exact same time as us.

It was nice to have someone to hang out with while dealing with shipping. While talking, we discovered that Brendan had ridden for a while with two other sets of riders that we had met at different times – Pierre and Celine who we met on the street in San Jose, Costa Rica and Martin and Lorena who we met in Mendoza, Argentina and then later visited in Necochea, Argentina. Small world.

After waiting around for hours for a palette to be delivered for my bike, we eventually got to work and broke the bike down to be secured.

At some point, Nina got bored and found a little friend

Our shipping agent, Sergio from Navicon, handled all the paper work and a customs agent asked me a few quick questions before the package got wrapped up.

After 17,000 miles, Katie M’s work was done and we waved goodbye to her as she was whisked away on a forklift.  We accompanied Sergio to the office to pay and jumped in a cab with Brendan back to city.  Mission accomplished!

A few notes on shipping for anyone else doing it:

- You are probably best off dealing directly with a shipping agent. Sandra uses the most conservative, most restrictive set of shipping requirements in order to guarantee there aren’t any problems. This will cost you extra time and money. At her direction, we found a notary and paid for notarized photocopies of all our documents. Brendan just brought the originals to the airport and his shipping agent (All Cargo) made copies on the spot. The shipping agents we dealt with (Navicon, All Cargo) spoke excellent English and were extremely helpful, so unless you are shipping a bike in to the country or you can’t be present for shipping, there isn’t really a need for an intermediary.

- Break the bike down. Assembled the bike would have been a 500 kilo shipment and would have cost USD 1600. Broken down it was a 300 kilo shipment and cost USD 1200. Pricing is complicated and probably even varies by carrier, but you will almost certainly save by breaking the bike down. The packers at the airport were extremely helpful with this.

- Explore payment options. We spent a lot of time, effort, and bank fees getting US dollars to pay for shipping (we were told this was required). It turned out pesos would have been fine as well. A bank transfer arranged in advance would have been even better.

I won’t lie to you.  I’m totally phoning this one in.  We’ve been in Buenos Aires for two days and the trip is officially over.  Nina has been nagging me like mad to catch up with the report so she can post penguin photos.  It doesn’t help that this is about the boring ride up route 3 on the eastern coast of Argentina.

This is the first section of the ride that was truly tedious.  It’s all paved, flat, monotonous and windy.  It has none of the remote, desolate, majesty of western Patagonia or Tierra del Fuego.  It doesn’t help that the bike is running like crap and stumbles badly above 60 mph, limiting us to a painfully slow cruise.  I feel like Han Solo making the jump to light speed – “Don’t worry.  She’ll hold together…(Hear me baby?  Hold together.)”.  I never thought I’d welcome gravel, but a 2 km construction diversion actually provided some relief from the boredom.

Later the coast came in to view.

A welcome stop at imaginatively named Beautiful Beach rounded out our corker of a day.

We had trouble finding a place for the night in Comodoro Rivadavia.  None of the more affordable hotels had parking.  In the end Juan Carlos Guazzone spotted us sitting on the street looking at a map and enquired if we were looking for lodging.  Conveniently, he owned a hostel across the way and had a courtyard to pull the bike into.  Juan Carlos turned out to be a fantastic guy.  We broke his lock when we came home drunk and got the key stuck trying to let ourselves in.  Upon seeing the locksmith there the next day we tried to pay him for the damage but he was having none of it and instead made us a cup of tea to send us off.

Which brings me to my closer for this lame duck post.  Tea.  Or more specifically “mate”.  The Argentines are mad for it.  They drink it out of Hobbit-looking carved wooden cups with elaborate silver trim.  It is brewed in the cup without a bag and drunk through a long curved metal straw that acts as the filter.  They drink it constantly.  Every gas station has a hot water vending machine and every Argentine has a thermos with them.  At all times.  We met motorcyclists carrying thermoses.  Bicyclists have special thermos slings!  Discarded, broken thermoses litter the roadside in the wilds of Patagonia.  It is a national obsession.  As if that wasn’t weird enough, you also share a mate cup whenever feasible.  Families, of course, share a single cup, but so do office workers or even acquaintances on a motorcycle tour.  There is one cup and usually someone in “charge” of it.  The person in charge collects the cup when it needs refilling or when someone has had it long enough.  They then refill the cup and pass it on. People get the cup for a few minutes before it moves on.  Imagine sharing a single coffee cup at work – as I witnessed 5 customs officers doing at the Chile/Argentina border.  Our mate pic was provided by the owner of a surprisingly modern mate cup.  Most of them look like they are inscribed with “Property of Bilbo Baggins”.

Next up…Penguins!

I’ve heard it said that the last leg to Ushuaia is boring misery and that the town itself is a dump. I believed it and convinced Nina of it, too. It didn’t lessen our desire to drive to the southernmost city in the world, but I did figure it would be kind of a “check” experience – we’d tap in, turn around, and head back.

Wrong.

Tierra del Fuego kicks righteous ass. There are hundreds of miles of gorgeous rolling nothing occasionally punctuated by estancias so remote they make you lonely and cold just looking at them.

We found a burning lake. “Land of Fire” indeed!

Then after the perfect lead up to the end of the world, the Andes give it one last “Hurrah!” and you are back in the mountains.

These mountains are only about 2-3000 feet high and are perennially snow-capped.

The only down note is sight of the dying trees. Here and for thousands of miles to the north almost all the trees are dead or dying from a parasitic moss. I have never seen anything like it.

We stopped outside of town for the obligatory sign picture.

The weather had been threatening and occasionally following through all day, but as we came in to Ushuaia it really unleashed with a cold, driving rain and properly ripping wind. Welcome to the end of the world!

It cleared up about 15 minutes later and we got our first good look at the town.

It’s fantastic! I fired up an end-of-the-world cigar and we strolled the promenade drinking it in.

The town itself is the perfect mix of old fishing village and lively tourist destination. There are fantastic restaurants, falling-down shacks and everything in between.

I had perhaps the best piece of meat of the entire trip that evening.

Far from being a let-down, Ushuaia turned out to be a fitting end to an epic journey.