The van is tied down inside a 40-foot long orange container somewhere in Puerto Manzanillo, and we are sitting in the airport in Panama City, waiting for our flight. It all went well. Boris and the rest of the port guys were friendly and full of questions about our honeymoon, and we didn’t get mugged in Colon like all the guidebooks said we would. All in all, a successful day. Plus, we got to see the inner workings of a huge port city. It was surreal. I’ve never seen such huge machinery. Odd to think that this is how most things get from place to place, and that most of the stuff in your house has probably been inside a container.
And maybe best of all, we took a taxi ride from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, across a continent!!
Here is a summary of what we did to ship the car. The process seems totally impenetrable at first, but is actually pretty simple. The hardest part is finding a shipping company.
Here are the steps:
1. Arrive in Panama City, spend a few hours talking to Evelyn at Barwil Agencies, conveniently located on Balboa Avenue, near Avenida Federico Boyd. If you’re coming into Panama from the west, it’s just past the yacht club.
2. Go to the police stations, where they inspect your car. Then go the Secretary General’s office, to get the PTJ (policia technical judicial). Then go to the customs office where they will stamp your passport so you can leave the country without your car. Get lots of official stamps. This takes about 3 hours, and according to Evelyn, is best accomplished in the morning.
3. Go to the bank and get cash or a cashier’s cheque to pay Barwil because they do not take plastic. We got cash advances on two Visas from HSBC, just around the corner from Barwil, because ATMs would not give us enough $ all in one day.
4. Go back to Barwil with your paperwork and your wads of cash. Spend another hour or two, emerge with your Bill of Lading, maps of the port, instructions, and Evelyn’s cellphone number in case of emergency. They also let us use their computers/internet to book our flights online.
5. Wake up early to drive to the port, get there as close to 8am as possible. For us, this meant something like 9:30, but whatever. The container wasn’t ready until 10:30 or 11:00 anyway.
6. Go to the Barwil office in Manzanillo (finding it is a whole other saga – imagine mazes of containers stacked so high they make Mack trucks look tiny, with honking horns and people milling around everywhere). There was no sign on the highway, we just went towards the first big cranes we saw from the highway. Get your container number and seal (a weirdly delicate doodad made of plastic and metal – it’s the equivalent of a wax seal, and serves only to prove that the container wasn’t opened while it was being shipped. We also put our own padlock on the container to make extra sure it isn’t opened). The seal number is on the bill of lading and it must match.
7. Take your paperwork to the customs window at the port. Collect many more stamps – several for each of the 4 copies of Bill of Lading. This is the window where all the drivers are loitering, left and around the corner from where they issue visitor badges. Take ID other than your passport in exchange for an ID badge.
8. Go to the next window (Almacenaje), pay $9 if you’re lucky, $105 if you’re not. Don’t ask us the difference. We were lucky. Neil, an American moving to Venezuela, wasn’t. More later on Neil’s amazing stories about Venezuela, involving bags of gold nuggets, guns, and drug smuggling.
9. Get car checked by K-9 security guy (he just peeked inside and said ‘nice’).
10. Have a lovely lunch at the port’s restaurant (thanks, Neil) because all the port employees are having lunch, too, so you might as well, because you can’t get anything done for the next hour.
11. Wait around a bit more.
12. Meet Boris, a very friendly port official. Drive out to another port office, lost in a maze of stacked containers and the biggest machinery I’ve ever seen. Accomplish something totally mysterious. Drive onward with Boris.
13. Arrive at your container!! Ours was orange, and 40 feet long (Barwil didn’t have a smaller one available, and this one cost the same). Check the container number, make sure it matches your paperwork. Drive the car in, watch as port employees nail wooden blocks to the floor of the container to hold your car still during shipping. Be amazed that the wooden floor of the container is made of huge planks of wood more beautiful than the floors in your house, probably teak or mahogany. Watch as the port guys tie your car down with string (see photos).
That’s it!! The whole stuffing procedure took most of the day. We left Panama City at 8am, arrived in Manzanillo at 9:30, were finished with stuffing by 2:30, and at the Panama City airport by 4:30.
We highly recommend working with Evelyn Batista at Barwil. She was incredibly efficient and helpful. We originally wanted to ship from Costa Rica via RoRo (supposed to cost $500), but that proved impossible. If you are trying this in the near future, head rrrrrecto to Panama City and contact Evelyn. Our container ended up costing $1550, which is more than we wanted to spend, but it didn’t break the bank, so, o well. All of the other travelers we’ve met along the way have turned up at Barwil, leading us to believe that they are currently the *only* way to ship a car past the Darien Gap.
Overall, the process took us 2 weeks. We e-mailed Evelyn on Friday Feb 23, she replied the following Monday, and had quotes and dates for us by Thursday March 1. We drove to Panama City over the weekend, met with her on Monday midday, did our Panama City paperwork on Tuesday, stuffed the car on Wednesday, and will be in Quito Friday night if all goes well. The van should sail on Friday, too, and should arrive either Monday night or Tuesday morning in Guayaquil, and we should be there to meet her (Guayaquil port has no free days – they charge you for every day your car is waiting for you).
We found a newspaper in the Barwil office that listed a bunch of other shipping agents that we hadn’t been able to find previously. Here are some of them. This list is totally unscreened – we don’t know where they ship to, or if they ship cars, or anything – but they’d be worth checking out if you’re trying to ship a car.
www.anchorpanama.com
www.agenco.com
www.steamshipsagent.com
www.euro-line-logistics.com
www.boydsteamships.com
www.cbfenton.com
www.hamburgsud.com
www.crowley.com
chinasshipping@csaca.com
www.coscopan.com
www.cma-cgm.com
www.maersksealand.com
www.molpower.com
www.norton-lilly.com
www.panalpina.com
www.seaboardmarine.com
www.servinaves.com.pa
www.unigreen.com
www.italialine.com
1 comment:
happy shipping! hope that la tortuga makes it safely to the next continent.
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