Day: November 16, 2008

Kind of a wasted day today… in terms of the trip’s progress…
Woke up really early and did laundry at the hotel near the airport we stayed in last night and then we hung around the hotel until check out time since it was raining.
We came into Panama City under mild rain and went to a Radisson Hotel since the guide book said it was the “party” hotel of Panama but they had no rooms. They helped us find another hotel – quite hard since all the hotels were fully booked or outrageously expensive. They finally found a hotel that was so cheap we got suspicious about it.
As we were taking off to check it out the rain started coming down hard again so we decided to check out the shopping mall in front of the hotel and eat a little…
We checked back into the Radisson just in case they had a cancellation and we were told that usually they keep 5 rooms open for emergencies and that the manager was playing by the book and not letting us take one of them… BUT if we waited until around 6pm they would most likely have a cancellation and therefore a room for us.
I went back into the mall to play some video games… hehehe…
I came back and we had a room 🙂
Very nice hotel…
No videos or photos today…
Hopefully tomorrow we’ll be able to ship the bikes… we’re going to Bogota regardless of when the bikes go… we can leave the bikes at the cargo company no problem. So at least we’ll get out of all this rain and be in Bogota which I hear is quite interesting… Any tips?

Just chillin' today… still at the airport hotel uploading videos and
replying to emails…
Going to get another hotel soon and go see the Panama Canal… a
little bit of rest.
Tomorrow (Monday) we'll start the attempts to go to Colombia again…

Just found this image on my iPhone… we asked where to go at night in
San Jose, Costa Rica and the told us to go to a bar that sounded like
"motorcycle"… when we got there we saw that we had misunderstood the
name a little… quite clever 🙂 The bar itself was so so… some
crazy custom choppers but not much else going on…

A couple of videos and photos have been uploaded – check below 🙂
Still not up to date with them 🙁

Ufff… what a long day… 11pm and at a hotel close to the airport.
After about 2 hours in the Cargo Terminal we were told that there was no space for the motorcycles on today’s flight – and the next flight goes out on Tuesday or Wednesday with a slight chance of it being on Monday…
So the information we had previously was not totally incorrect – there ARE flights every day – but not flights that they allow motorcycles on.
So on Monday we’ll call the sales supervisor and try to use our charm to convince her to put the bikes on the Monday flight.
The reason for flying is that there is NO ROAD between Panama and Colombia! It’s called the Darian Gap. It’s the missing link of the Pan-American Highway – ecological, political, and probably guerilla/farc reasons have prevented this road being built.
In the meantime we will do some laundry, visit the Panama Canal and wait I guess 🙂