Peenie Wallie

Last night, we lost power in the entire town. So in the morning, when Immigracion says that they are having computer issues and can't stamp our passports, I'm not surprised. This whole third-world downward spiral thing gets old very quickly. But I find Greg and Jenny, and we walk around the town to gather information to help us escape this situation.

Now, we walk around, and the game is really an information game now. You go around, talk to everyone you can.
Try to work out the information on the boats. What boats are available. How are they loaded. When to they leave. Where do they go.
So, we spend the morning, walking around town. Trying to find people that speak English, as that makes it much easier.
There are so many options, but it's hard to know which one to go with.

Basically, we walk around the small harbor town, interviewing captains and examining boats.

One guy says he can fit all 4 bikes on his one boat, and take them from Sapzurro to Necocli. (Necocli is just a place that the smaller boats go because it's closer, but then you have to ride your motorcycle illegally through Colombia down to Turbo.) We ask to see his boat, and then he leads us down to this little dinghy on the beach.

My concern is that the smaller boats are not safe for crossing this gulf to either Turbo or Necocli. I'm like..."I'm not doing this". I would rather just push my motorcycle off of the pier myself than watch them try to load 2 KTM 1090's, a smaller KTM, and my 2017 Honda Africa Twin from a concrete dock down into a small dinghy by hand in the rough seas of December. (December is the month that marks the end of the rainy season, but it's also the month that marks the end of the calm seas. Now, December - March, the seas are very rough in the Carribbean.)

But I'm not putting my bike onto the little death traps that the local capitans claim they can cross over the gulf in. It's at least a 7 hour crossing. So, this is just not something that I'm the least bit interested in considering. When we all took the little dingy boat ride yesterday from Sapzurro to Capurgana, I thought that i would die. They just shoe-horned us all into this little boat. Then, he just runs roughshod over the ocean, slamming from wave into wave, spray going all over. It was a miracle we made it to Capurgana without dying. In the United States, someone would be in jail if they operated a boat service in this manner.

To think that now, I would put my motorcycle on the same sized boat, and ride for 7 hours across to Necocli is just delusional. That's not going to happen. Not a snowball's chance in hell of that happening.

There are other options. The other larger boats are cargo boats ("carga"). These boats are much larger, and appear to be capable of crossing over to either Turbo or Necocli, but I my understanding is that these boats only go to Turbo.

There's a large carga boat that will come in the afternoon at about 2:00 p.m., and maybe we can get on that one, and it will take us to Turbo. The trick with the carga boats is that they won't take people on them. Ever. They're not licensed to carry people, and these are licensed commercial vessels. So, their captains don't want to risk carrying people when they are not supposed to be doing it. Instead, we would ship the bikes on the carga boat across to Turbo, and then take a separate boat over to Turbo. In this case, the bikes are loaded and unloaded just by having a few strong men grab onto them.

There's always a discussion of the associated cost, but I just stay out of this. I don't care how much it costs. I just want to get out of the Darien Gap and back to civilization.

Ideally, of course, eventually you find a local person that speaks English and Spanish, and they help you through this nightmare. And finally, that's what we find. A girl named Elaina that's from Buffalo, but speaks fluent Spanish and lives here. We're down at the embarcadero, and somehow she now is helping us sort everything out. It turns out that her uncle has a boat. We're trying to work out which boat to get on, and it looks like we're going to be able to take a carga boat, but the one that comes today at 2:00 won't come today, it seems. So, we'll be here for a few days. The next carga boat might leave on Tuesday.

Immigracion releases a busload of immigrants from Africa and the middle east, and they walk off into the jungle. This is how they're getting to America, apparently. They're releasing them into the Darien, and they just work their way north until they reach the United States. Apparently, this is sort of how it operates. They were allowed into some country, and promised permanent asylum/citizenship after 6 years, but then there was an election, and they never got citizenship, so they're all making their way up to the United States through the Darien Gap. Great. Big surprise.

So, it looks like we're sort of pinned in Capurgana, Colombia for the forseeable future. Our bikes, of course, remain back at Sapsuro, Colombia. Now, we need to call the hostel and ask them to wash the bikes with a hose to get the salt off of them. But, we can't really even remember name of the hostel we left them at. It was such a blind rush. But our new guide tells us she knows which hostel it is, and she calls them to explain we'll be stuck in Capurgana for a

As fortune would have it, it turns out that Elaina and her husband have a restaurant/bar just down the beach and why don't we walk down there now? And of course, I'm all in.

So we walk through the cobblestone streets about a block or two and now, we're at some sketchy building. But then, when we climb a flight of stairs, we're in an open rooftop bar looking out over the beach and the carribbean. Nice. Well played.

We order lunch and I order some Coca Colas (no tengo sin calorias). At some point. Elaina comes back to us and says that since we didn't have our Temporary Vehicle Import permits canceled when we left Panama, that this is now going to be an issue. I'm not clear that this is true, however.

Misc Notes: Fritz put the catamaran on the reef first. Then, he tried to pull the catamaran off of the reef with the ferry. Then the ferry went on the reef, and it stayed. Each boat cost about $360,000.00. He bought the one boat from Canada.