End of the Road, our Cherokee continues on a boat

Shipping a car out of Panama is quite an experience and we needed more patience than for the other border crossings...

Step 1 : find a freight forwarder or a shipping line who is willing to handle non commercial business. We emailed 25 different companies and called about 10 of them... we got only 4 real quotes !

Step 2 : Once the arrangment made with the freight forwarder we had to go to the Panamean Police (they have to make sure this is OUR car and that we did not go through any accident or traffic violation), and then go to customs to declare that we would leave the country without our car.
In theory this could take 1 hour if a) there was no line, b) people were not trying to get money out of us by keeping us waiting longer than necessary, c) if offices were not closing between noon and... 2:30pm and then closing again at 4pm..., d) if customs would not make typos on our documents, e) if they did not ask us to start again the custom process because of this...
It took us the whole day, running back and forth between different departments... but hey, apparently it can be worse !

Step 3 : driving the car to the port and putting it IN the 20' container. This was quite fast and easy compared to the previous steps. We had to go through customs one last time (the one at the port for this step), went through a quick custom inspection and then DROVE the car INTO the container. I am not sure how they strapped it... I'll just hope there own't be too many waves on the ocean between Panama and Guayaquil!

It is weird to be left alone without our car... Now we need to walk / wait for the bus / take the bus / find a hostel... sleep in a real bed but were other people have been sleeping in... yuck... ;-)

Last step in Panama : finding a plane for us to go to Ecuador. Thanks to our miles we manage to book a flight to Quito for the following day. This way we will have a few days to visit Ecuador on our own. We will take the bus down south towards Guayaquil and be there before the ship arrives as it appears that it is even more complicated to get the car out of the port... some tourists had to be escorted to the border as they did not have Carnet de Passage... and guess what ? we do not have it either (and it is impossible to get one in the US) !

So let's meet in Ecuador to find out how we are going to make it !

Last steps in Central America

Not only a platform to transit to South America, Panama is also a wonderful country (ranked number 4 in the best places to retire to...).

For those who are not crazy about the sea and the heat, Boquete is perfect with his relatively cold weather and surrounded by nice mountains and volcano views.
For the other ones, there are plenty of beaches along the two coasts which are not far away from one another (that`s why the Panama Canal is in Panama, otherwise they would have construct the Panama Canal in Nicaragua...)



Loads of surfing spots, swimmable beaches and bay to sail...


P.S: As you guessed, this is not Stephanie!

Panama city is a very fast developping city which is called the Miami of the South.

We also unfortunately had to deal with the administration to ship our car to Ecuador (there is no road between Central America and South America) and spent the last few days to sort out all the neccessary steps.

We will drive our car into a 20' container which will be hopefully placed on the good vessel leaving on Sunday and arriving the following Thursday in Guayaquil, Ecuador.



We will take a flight to Quito in order to visit a part of Ecuado by foot before we get our car back .
More details to come soon.

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