
This is the Agata M, the vessel that we used to ship our vehicles. This is a picture from the web; we never actually saw it.
$166 per mile. That’s what it cost us to ship around the 30 miles of road that hasn’t been built between Panama and Columbia. Oh, and not to mention two weeks of time. That includes our airfare, hotels we stayed in along the way, and the loads of restaurant food we’ve been eating. So it could be done for less, but any way you cut it, it’s a significant portion of our trip expenses.
But it’s over. We got our van back yesterday and all is well. The only thing we lost is the two $5 convex mirrors that I had glued onto our regular mirrors to help with the van’s giant blind spots. I’m perfectly happy replacing those. Heck, maybe I’ll see a guy on the street selling them, and I can buy back my own mirrors!
But that’s skipping a whole two weeks, so on to the pictures! We flew from Panama City to Medellin and spent a day sightseeing there before flying to Cartagena, where our car was due to arrive.

This giant gut bomb is called a Bandeja Paisa. Guaranteed to fill you up, and it was actually pretty tasty.

Our flight from Medellin to Cartagena left at 6am. It being a budget airline, we got to walk about a kilometer across the tarmac in cold fog to reach our plane.

The old town part of Cartagena is beautiful with narrow cobblestone streets and colonial architecture, all overlaid by oppressive heat and humidity.

Our first hotel featured rock-hard beds and not-so-great internet, so we found an apartment on VRBO, and moved on up to this dee-luxe apartment in the sky. It’s a lot more comfortable than the hotel and only a block from the beach.

We shared a couple of nice meals with folks who were also shipping their campers on the same boat as us.

I spent a lot of time with Andre, Jean-Yves, and Luis over the course of the three full days it took us to jump through all of the hoops required to get our vehicles back. They all shared French as their mother tongue, but graciously spoke English most of the time to include me. Luis, from Andorra, spoke fluent Spanish which was a great help in navigating the shipping and customs bureaucracies.
Wonderful photos!
Glad that the sbipping went well, have fun on the Southern hemisphere!
You made it lots of fun and memorable ! Your pics are great and representative of what we are experiencing, living and now sharing together. Thanks for the souvenirs and keep on waiting. Can’t wait to follow you.
We definitely would like to meet up with you again soon!