Bikes and Walter

How to get your motorcycle to Chile? It’s very simple. You just have to wish it by all your heart and you should have nothing to lose. We had agreed all the things with a freight forwarder in Russia, brought our bikes to the port of Saint Petersburg, did customs paperwork there, and only after that bought plane tickets for ourselves. We were impatient to be in Chile on New Year, and according to the original plan, a container with motorcycles was supposed to arrive in Iquique, so we bought tickets to that city and planned to ride the whole country from north to south. But the plans had changed. The freight forwarder informed us that the bikes will not arrive in Iquique on January, 10th; instead, the container will come to San Antonio on 28th. Well… We still flew to the north, and our trip without bikes from Iquique to San Antonio was a nice experience, but was marked by constant waiting and missing our two-wheeled friends. Everything was cool, everything was great, but it’s just not possible to travel without a bike 😀

After a few days in Santiago, we finally met Walter personally – the motorcyclist with whom I have been communicating via couchsurfing. He doesn’t have a bike at this moment, but he traveled a lot in Chile before and he can tell endlessly about it! Walter plays trombone in the band called La Sagrada, and he has a wonderful family. Walter is the eldest of four children: he has two sisters, Angela and Daniela, 16 and 24, and his brother is nine-years-old artist Augustine, what a child! There are also two dogs, Brugge and “just a dog” (I forgot the name!), mum Carmen, grandmother Leila and father of the family Louis. I haven’t seen so a lot of energy, warmth and love in foreign houses for a long time! We spent two or three (or four?) days with them, learned how to eat raw minced meat with tasty beer, visited the local freight forwarder for transport documents for a container and after that headed to San Antonio to wait for the ship.

During a few days we spent in San Antonio we drank a lot of wine, had grilled meat, cooked wonderful soup Paila Marina, swam in the ocean, sang songs with guitars and had fun all together when Walter’s sister came for a weekend with her friends. It was a nice time!

Our ship arrived on January 29th. We left the port on our motorcycles on the 31st. And I cannot imagine how the whole thing would be ended if Walter would have not helped us! He harnessed for us with his Spanish language and was fighting with the bureaucracy of the port terminals, customs, agriculture ministry, and did a lot of paperwork to help us. The best person in the whole of Chile! 😀 We could not even imagine how many subtleties we were going to have to handle just to open a container with motorcycles and finally to ride them! And we also had no idea how much all port procedures would cost us. We had planned it will be 300-400 dollars, as we were told in Saint Petersburg, but everything turned out to be much worse and we paid about 1100 USD in the port. We had to call our friend in Russia to help us with money and we also emptied our credit cards, but well, the result is: our motorcycles are with us! In total, shipping the container from St. Petersburg to San Antonio cost us about 3300 USD; if someone needs information, how it works – contact me, I’ll be happy to share it 🙂

After the port, we rode to the supermarket to buy meat and wine for a small party, which was necessary after so lot of port challenges. On the supermarket parking, we met the same person whom we have seen earlier that day in the customs office. He had a motorcycle helmet, too, and his clothes reminded motorcycle gear – and he didn’t look like Chilean. Well, now it came clear that he is Korean traveling around the world with his scooter! Having started in Korea, he crossed  Mongolia, Russia (shame for me: he traveled in Russia more than I did!), Europe and intended to send his scooter from England, but… When I was there with my FZ-1 in summer 2016, I was lucky: the crimes associated with motorcycles had not yet gained momentum after the adoption of the new law, but now the situation is terrible there. In short, his scooter was stolen in the UK. But he did not despair! With the help of crowdfunding, he raised money for a new one and sent it to Chile by sea. That was his answer to the question about his British license plate.

Hey Yunguho! I hope you are fine 🙂

So, we managed to take the motorcycles out of the port… But this was not the end. Remember, I told that we sent our too heavy and warm things from Iquique by mail? We were told then that they will be kept in the post office of San Antonio for 30 days, so we did not worry about the whole thing at all. But no. Our stuff arrived in San Antonio in the mid-January, and ten days later they were already sent back to Iquique! And now we were standing in the post office having a question: what to do? There are our riding jackets, my jeans, riding shoes… all the gear! Our helmets, Tim’s riding jeans and boots were in the container with the motorcycles, and I had nothing. Now Walter was fighting with the post office, and they promised to help us, but we had to wait. What to do? I pulled on Walter’s gear and we all three headed back to Santiago on two bikes. By the way: there are only a little more than a hundred kilometers between San Antonio and Santiago, but in the latter, the climate is completely terrible – a fierce heat! And in San Antonio the weather is cool and it is close to the ocean.

In Santiago, we came back to Walter’s house, packed what we had and headed to the mountains – just we two, me and Tim, to have a small ride before the beer festival in Santiago: sure, La Sagrada was in that festival! We passed Friday traffic jams and already at midnight, we were riding a gravel road which began after nice paved serpentine. There was a cliff on the right and a lake on the left, but it was very dark to see anything so we just kept riding. I was already tired and thinking “where is the road here?!”, and finally, we found a suitable place for our tent and stopped there. There was a horse neighing and a small stream was making noise, and the stars… a lot of them! It was the first time for me to see the Milky Way so clearly!

As it turned out the next day, we missed pretty nice landscapes in the dark. We spent some time in the morning riding that beautiful area and decided to go down: up there, on the height of only 2600 meters, was no Internet. But it turned out to be not so easy to leave the mountains because the road there is like Bolivian death road, and at some places, it was impossible to pass for two cars. There was a traffic jam! 😀 The situation was settled with the help of Tim and my motorcycle: Tim and one local guy rode to the end of another tail of the traffic jam while I was chatting with an Italian traveler from Germany.

Finally, we left the mountains. After refilling our water bottles at the waterfall, we continued riding and arrived at the coast of a river streaming down from the mountains. Oooh, this cold water just five meters from the tent, what a joy!!! It was possible to wash oneself in that river, and this was an incredibly pleasant procedure after a whole day of dust and small enduro adventures! “I know a short way” coming out from Tim’s mouth is now turning to be a meme 😉 But the main thing is about adventures, not about comfort, right? 😀

The beer festival in Santiago called (surprisingly) Santiago Beer Fest was held on the next day. We woke up, packed the stuff and rode back to Santiago, where we quickly changed our clothes and set off for the festival with Walter’s sisters. I don’t want to say anything about beer at the fest, it wasn’t that good, but La Sagrada was very impressive! These guys are making very good ska music, and their show is very entertaining and… well, you have to see them live! We got tired pretty soon and it was time to spend our last night in Santiago. The next morning we got a message from the post, which informed us that our stuff is waiting for us at the post office in San Antonio, and we had to hurry. We rode to the center with Walter on two bikes, got to Lira (which is a motorcycle street), bought all the necessary parts and things and said goodbye. Walter, I will miss you so much, you are a wonderful person!

Walter is on the left with his shiny trombone 🙂

The moment when we finally got our stuff from the post and I put my gear on… I was feeling so happy! And we finally felt free and independent. We had everything: motorcycles, tent, everything for camping, all the gear – we were ready to go! The only thing we didn’t have was money 😀 It was almost two weeks to our salaries, and after all the port charges we had just some pennies on our credit cards. We decided to ride as far as possible with that amount of money and headed south.

Burned in the mountains 😀