Day 54 – Ibarra to Quito

Day started well with the hotel guys cleaning our bikes and us getting Marc’s starter to work.
We looked at the starter and the wire casings were all melted leaving the metal exposed and thereby shorting the circuit. We put some electrical tape around the wires and it fired up!
On the way though, the problem came back to haunt us. We were on our way to Quito’s BMW dealer anyway to have it checked out.
The ride was beautiful though not as nice as yesterday’s and full of tolls, which equated to nearly perfect roads.
We completely missed the line of the equator – we wanted to stop and take some pictures but we just kept going – wanted to have a picture of me with a foot on the Northern hemisphere and the other on the Southern 🙂 Next time I guess!
In Quito we got the BMW dealer quite easily – it was right on the main road before getting into town.
They took us in and told us that it would take an hour before the mechanic could look at it.
In the meantime we went into town to look for a guide book – the one we had mailed to us keeps on getting delayed – or we are too fast for the mail service here… we just found out that it arrived in Medellin today! One week late…
The town was nice, we had some lunch and after being misdirected SEVERAL times we found the book store with the tourism guide for South America. We still cannot figure out why we left the US without one. We had one for Central America but not for South America… go figure.
When we came back to the BMW dealer we found this:

From Motorcycle NY to SP

HAHAHAHA – just kiddding!! This is NOT Marc’s bike 🙂 Feel sorry for the owner of this one though!

“Come back tomorrow afternoon to pick it up” they calmly said.
“No – we need it today! We are on a trip and we need the motorcycle!”
“Ok – maybe tomorrow morning…”

After some hours of hanging around and making sure that the mechanic was working on it we saw that we would have to stay a night in Quito. As we were about to leave, to our surprise the mechanic said he had fixed it!
They told us that the guys in Costa Rica who installed the starter had not isolated the battery cable properly so it was touching the casing of the starter and thereby shorting it out and melting all the wires. So it was not a problem with the “German Engineering” but human error really… even more frustrating I think because it could have been avoided.

It was too late to hit the road so we came into town to find a hotel… we stopped in one hotel, but it was full…
As we mounted the bikes to go to another one Marc’s bike did not start…

We found a hotel (Nu House) and will go back to the dealer tomorrow morning 🙁