Panama - loading the car

The focus for this week has been preparations for the shipment of the car to Colombia. We are using a specialist agent to assist us, and after the loading of the car into the container this morning, we are very happy that we made that decision.

The first step, obviously once we obtained the temporary import permit (TIP) papers at the border, was to do a police inspection. This involves going to one police office (very early in the morning, we were there before 7am) to check all the paperwork (ownership papers from Costa Rica, the TIP and insurance papers from the border, and passport copies for the owner), and then go across the street to another police office to finish the process. This was to get a separate piece of paper with a special stamp and a signature, that we are allowed to export the car. This process took the whole day on Monday, we left the second office at 4.30pm. Patience is a virtue, they say.

The second step was to go to Colón. The shipment leaves from Colón (near the Atlantic end of the Panama Canal), and arrives in Cartagena in Colombia. This move was on Tuesday, and on the way there we went to the agent office to pay for their services. While we were in the agent office to pay, we got confirmation that the loading of the car into the container was going to be the next day (Wednesday) starting at 5.45am. We stayed overnight in Colón, and met with the agent representative, and the owners of the car that share the container with us, bright and early on Wednesday morning.

A fun coincidence is that the other couple shipping together with us is a previous acquaintance from our trip in Guatemala. We met them at a hotel where they just stayed a night to rest. They are from Switzerland and Thailand, and they are driving around since a couple of years back, starting from Alaska and now on their way to the south tip of South America.

The loading of the car went smoothly, and the paperwork was completed early. The agent took us all back to Panama City, and the cars are both in the container waiting to be loaded on the ship. All we can do now is wait, and get ourselves on a plane to Cartagena. The arrival is some two weeks from now, around 30 May.

Some photos from Colón. We have learned that there are some sectors that we nicely cared for, but the city center was a strange experience.