Today was another adventure. It required a lot of patience, some luck, and a lot of gut.
I left my hotel around 8:30 to investigate the 4 shipping agencies that Omar showed me yesterday. I found out about 4 more agencies on top of that. However, only 2 of them offered shipping services for private vehicles, Seaborn Marine, and CCL. I walked around in the rain, somewhat disappointed at the limited number of options I have with me. I also called about 4 places, only 2 of which I connected with. Only 1 of them did indeed offer shipment of private vehicles. I found out about Seaboard Marine via Norton Lilly. They let me through, telling me that they have a service every Saturday. But that wasn’t good enough for me… I needed something much more quickly.
I went to CCL, a small company located upstairs of an unmarked building. There, a lady named Yocanda Smith told me about the process. The cost is all about $1100. But, she tells me, I need a particular paperwork from the city I dreaded: Panama City. I need to clear my car to leave, and there’s a place called PTJ (Policia Tecnical Judicial) where I have to file it. Anyone shipping their car, be it with any agency, will need this paperwork done. There are two ships leaving next week. One on Monday and one on Thursday. I ask her if I can’t leave on the Monday one, but she says, ‘even if you did get the paperwork in today, I would need to put the car into a 20 footer container tonight and I can’t guarantee anything.’ I call a few other places that might have ships leaving on Tuesday, to no avail. At this point, without having had anything to eat, I leave for Panama City.
I get there fairly easily, and take a few toll roads into town. I actually unknowingly get pretty close to the town of Ancon, at which point I ask and pay a taxi driver $2 to take me to PTJ. There is the main PTJ building, which is filled up with cars in front of it. But the office where I had to file the paperwork was in another blue building directly across the street. At this point, I run into a guy who alleges he’s an American citizen, and has a tattoo of Puerto Rico on his arm. He tells me he’s just got out of prison and is looking for some way to get in touch with his folks back in New York. He talks about how I’m from California so I’m real cool and he knows I can help him out. By this point, I’m just really annoyed at the number of people that have tried to help me in the marginal sense of the word only in order to beg me for money.
I get to the station with this guy, which turns out to be a mistake. They recognize him right away, and he is shunned away from the station. The girl sitting there translates to me what the officials there were trying to tell me: “Be careful with this guy, he might rob you for everything you’ve got.”
I still do not understand at this point why an entire region of people, so relaxed in their own manner of things, talk so fast. Especially given the condition that I’m a foreigner and do not speak any Spanish. If I was in the States and I didn’t speak any English, I would like to think that people would slow it down, and dumb it down for me to understand. But here, it’s almost as if they mock me and talk even faster. Panama seems to be the worst at this. Mexico was the most understanding, and it seems to be getting worse the further from home I get.
So the girl translates for me for a while. The official looks at my border papers for my vehicle and says, no I can’t clear your vehicle unless you get a new copy of this form at the local Aduana. He says that the print on the line that has the Car Manufacturer’s Name and the VIN number are different than the others in the form and that it could have been typewritten. I begin to talk in my broken Spanish about how I would like to get back to Colon, so please clear the paper, and he mocks me and says as quickly as he did before, “Oh, so now you speak Spanish very well!” I’m like, I never told you I don’t speak any Spanish. I just can’t understand it when you mix in al lthe vocabulary words and continue to talk so fast to a foreigner.
He was, for the most part, though, good at just doing his job. He says even if he passes it forward, they’re gonna push it back. And I know he’s right. He tells me to bring my vehicle around and open the hood. He comes and inspects the numbers to see if my license plate and vin numbers match. Then he gets some clear tape, pushes it against the numbers in the hood of the car as well as the side of my door, and tapes it onto a index card. After this, he says I need copies of my vehicle permit papers. I cross the major 3 lane (each way) highway to a yellow building where they have a copy machine. They don’t have change for my money, so I promise her I will be back. I offer her my license and my credit card in case she doesn’t believe me, but she refuses. I go cross the highway again to get to the station. At this point, I think I’m done… why else would they make me make copies of a paper unless it’s legit?
But they tell me that I need to go to the Aduana still to get a new copy. It’s not far, but I get lost. I drive down the street, and on the first signal light turn right. But there isn’t any signs for the Aduana. I ask a security guard that’s standing around the vicinity of where the official said the Aduana would be. I thought it was a he, but the big she tells me that there isn’t one around here. I circle around again and this time, I ask a sheriff. He tells me it’s in that block, but I need to go around the one way street.
I finally get lucky and find it. They tell me to park outside. I go in and thankfully, the lady doesn’t give me any problems. She just asks me for the original copy of the permit, which I have to go out to get. I go out and see that my car tires have gone totally flat. I’m shocked, because I had hit a few pits but I didn’t think they were that serious. I soon find out that it’s another Mercedes 300SD that I see, just in a line of junk cars. I get my original, go back and the lady hands me a new copy faster than it took for me to actually find the damn place.
Back in the PTJ office, I give them the new paper and it satisfies what they’re looking for. It takes about another 20 minutes to finish the process, and one of them walks me across the major street again to the main PTJ office, where the Secretary General will sign it off.
The problem at this point is that the paperwork there asks me for exact dates of when I am leaving. I have no idea at this point, being 4PM, whether I can get the car on the Monday shipment. I call the lady at the CCL agency, but she has already left for the day. I tell the secretary general that I will come back on Monday to finalize the paperwork. Her name’s Walkiria. She speaks in broken English to me, and I speak in broken Spanish to her. I really appreciate her effort.
It’s 4PM at this point, and I’m thoroughly tired by the events of the day. I hadn’t had anything to eat all day, and it starts to rain hard. But I don’t care at this point. I feel somewhat relaxed because I have no way of controlling the events that need to unfurl for me to leave this country and get to Colombia. I can only go along with the flow and do as much as I can as the days go by. I stop by a Burger King to get a Whopper, promise myself I will never eat at a foreign Burger King ever again, and come back to my hotel only to discover that my towel has been taken by the cleaning lady because it looks similar to the hotel towels. This confuses me somewhat because the hotel towels clearly have numbers written on them and mine didn’t. I’ll just have to buy a new one somewhere down the road.