Deane's Motorcycle Trip In SOUTH AMERICA
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Deane's Motorcycle Trip In SOUTH AMERICA |
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May 4, 5 - Vina del Mar, Chile La Serena to Vina del Mar - 275 miles |
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May 4 Today was our first day of bad weather in the whole of the last month, and not too bad at that. We've had marvelous weather on this whole trip. We started out in high fog, which turned into rain showers for quite a while. These were thunder showers, and we did have one bolt of lightning hit very close to us, only abut 250-300 yards away. It raised a big cloud of dust in the desert, along with a very scary thunder clap! Of course I waited until my riding suit was wet before stopping and putting on my rain suit. Being the optimist, I always seem to do that, in hopes of the rain quitting before I get soaked. Continuing down the coast, we were riding along some very nice beaches. As the rain quit, this was very enjoyable. Then at a branch off the main road, we went through a very beautiful section of small coves and open sandy beach. There were many large and beautiful homes facing the ocean in this section. Finally we rode into the town where we started the whole loop, Vina del Mar. Our South American Expedition is now at an end. Tomorrow we have the motorcycle papers inspected and cleared by Chile customs, pack the motorcycles in the container, and close it up for shipment back to the good old U.S.A. (We now get a chance to wash the bikes before putting them in the container. - What a mess they are. In about a month the container will be in Houston, and we will have to go there to claim our motorcycles. - (That's the way it works with this tour operator, MotoDiscovery.) The total mileage we rode on the tour was 4,776 miles, by my odometer! I didn't keep track of the distance we rode on the difficult gravel, sand, and dirt roads, but it seems like it must have been at least 10,000 miles or so!! One little amusing thing I have forgotten to report is about toll roads and motorcycles here. Generally, motorcycles have not been subject to tolls, busses and trucks are, and sometimes cars. However, particularly in Peru, but sometimes in the other countries, the way they handled this was to direct the motorcycles around the toll gate, on sort of a cow path, or whatever way one could find around the gate - between no-pass barriers or whatever. They seemed to be afraid that some one was counting the times the bar went up and down, and since motorcycles don't count, they had to limit the bar's opening and closing. Even if the gate were hand operated up and down, they still made us ride around the toll area. It was a hoot! May 5 Today was the day to load up the motorcycles for the trip home. We all rode the bikes out to the container shipping yard, with one of our tour guides gathering up our Passports, our visas to be in the country, our motorcycle papers for being in Chile, and our motorcycle titles (original; not a copy). After Chile customs going through all of those, we were given the OK to load. The motorcycles were all tied down pretty securely, and finally we had the OK to close and lock the container. With a sigh of relief, but satisfaction for what we had done, we settled in for the wait to get our airlines home. A celebration dinner and sleeping late on Saturday the 6th were all we had to do before going home. |
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