Plan Z - To Blighty for all participants - 3 September 2003
Trapped in the land of many waters without a boat
Bad move!
Fait acompli?
Bertha repairs - Checklist for future attention
Trapped in the land of many waters without a boat
We cleared all the insurance stuff with Margaret, leaving her with receipts and the like, and returned the remaining US dollars to her. We were in the clear to move one.
Fazi and Mansoorsí house at the Mosque was nearly finished and we spent the evening hauling furniture and boxes from downstairs at the mosque to the house. After a while I declined carrying the heavy furniture and moved on to the smaller boxes, thinking that exercise is a good plan but over doing it and getting dehydrated is probably a bad one. Poor Fazi, had got quite fed up over the last week waiting for builders to finish things. As builders everywhere they never finish things on time and with the compounding effect of ëJust nowí time in Guyana, things had not gone well. As it is she moved in with the windows unfinished and the sink in the kitchen unplumbed. We were humping stuff till late and I could sense sleep beckoning. We retired to our last night in the Tropicana.
We hung around all afternoon waiting for the insurance company to ring who apparently needed to speak to me in person. They had also emailed me supposedly but the server was down. We finally gave up and gave them the number of friends on the coast. We were finally moving on back to the Essequibo coast to get a boat to Venezuela. At last the journey could continue. We popped in to say our final goodbyes to the Baksh family, and were embarrassed when Fazi presented with some gold jewellery to take with us to remember them by. A little ring for me with two hands of friendship and a Taurus pendant for Patrick. We were touched, but felt a little guilty that they were spending money on us that they needed for their new house after feeding us and housing us for weeks. We had tried over the weeks to keep them supplied with little treats to thank them for their generosity but they slipped in the last gesture in hospitality. As we left there we were tears on both sides, and vowed not to take the ring off. Now that we have made it back I am sure we will see each other again.
The mini bus, speed boat, mini bus trip to the Essequibo coast went smoothly and a journey that normally takes three hours and more on a bad day more took just over 2. Itís all luck, and timing. The public transport here has no timetable they just go when they are full. If you are unfortunate you get on a minibus that is only just started to fill up and will circumnavigates the market for the next half and hour trying to poach customers from other minibuses. Then if you are more unlucky the Demerara pontoon bridge is open (for large ships to pass) when you get there so it is closed to road traffic, and you can wait half an hour waiting for it to close so that its open ñ if you see what I mean.
There is an added complication that in Creolese, the ìnotî is often dropped when it is implied so the expression ìbridge openî could mean that it is or isnít open and it is not clear whether the open means there is an opening or whether it is open to traffic. Hmm.Then at Parika the boats donít go till they are full so you can wait anything up to half an hour in the sun, awaiting passengers. Then the same scenario at the Supernaam end with the next minibus. So when I had given a time that the insurance should ring me, I thought it prudent to be generous with my estimate and suggested 4 or 5 hours time. Having arrived with plenty of slack in the schedule we sat ëliming and gaffingí in Deoís shop, temporary residence of Bertha, for a few hours. It was like old times ñ sat drinking in the breeze relaxing and chatting about everything and nothing. ëThe shopí had always been a place where foreigners were made welcome and at times had been known as the VSO home on the coast. Surprise of surprises the insurance rang up! And asked a whole set of questions that they must have answers to on their database. When was the policy from and to? Date of birth? Type of policy? Pre-existing conditions? (Since they now have permission to contact my Dr. back home this seems overkill.) etc. etc. I hate insurance companies (apologies to my sister, Jane). No end of time and money expended on international phone calls to find out information they should (in fact, probably do) already know. That is why premiums are so high. Rant, rant.
Being late we decided not to set about packing the bike and would take up Deoís offer of a bed and stay the night and head for Charity the next day.
We were packed said our goodbyes and headed to the end of the road. From Charity onwards thereís river and sea traffic only. Now we had being reliably informed that although most of the traffic to Venezuela from here was illegal and carrying contraband there was also a steady stream of legal boats, travelling down the Pomeroon river on to the Atlantic and back up the Orinocco. So we were prepared for a 2 or three day wait. Charity - no news of a boat - back to Anna Regina and customs office - the legal boat went yesterday! Luck was not with us. But the kindly lady gave us a couple of phone numbers for people who may be taking that route. One, Big Bird, the fish man, would normally be going in a couple of days but there is a family wedding and he wonít be going for a fortnight. The one that went yesterday will be making another trip in 2 and a half weeks, all other boats will be going from Parika (is if you remember on the other side of the Essequibo river). It was not going well at all. We returned to Deoís and passed the time of day till an appropriate time to go for the big ferry across the river at 3am. During the night at Adventure stelling (a stelling is from Dutch, as they used to live in these parts, and means a wharf) people while away the hours playing cards queuing for the boat, so we headed down early to find a little quiet spot and hopefully get some kip.
Our ticket in hand we drove onto the stelling to get away from the thumping music to take a nap. Unbeknown to us there was a small boat leaving at nine, and after a rushed phone call to Fazi and Mansoor we took our chance to get to Georgetown with enough time for a nights sleep. On the boat I felt guilty that the Baksh family would have to wake up to let us into the mosque grounds, at about 1am in the morning, when normal bedtime in about 9.30am, I also felt that we were being quite presumptive just turning up. We planned just to set up the inner tent as a mosquito net and sleep with the workman in the unfinished guest rooms. Typically, even though we bowled up in the middle of the night they had already set up a bed in the downstairs of the mosque. Somehow it felt a little wrong a pair of heathens like ourselves sleeping in a mosque. Luckily for me I slept through the call to prayer at 4am. You donít get much more heathen than that!
Phone calls on Saturday, to find other boats out of Guyana, reached a procession of dead ends. Ring again on MondayÖ We only take bulk cargoÖ The person you need to speak to is busyÖ We had broadened our list of options to include Panama, or anywhere in Central America or Venezuela. There were lots of ships to England or the USA, but nothing in the direction we wanted to go that would take anything less than a full container load.
I was really fed up. I was loosing all enthusiasm for the trip, we couldnít seem to go on and we didnít want to stay. In theory we were meant to be meeting our friend Chris in Venezuela a couple of weeks ago and getting into Mexico for November to meet my sister. It was all looking impossible.
We looked into a truck to take us to Lethem ñ it went yesterday! It would go again in a week, and with 1000 extra miles to cover to Caracas. With the bike shortened from the accident, first gear very dodgy and bleeding oil from every orifice from the road into Guyana, Pat understandably did not want to put Bertha through excess mileage, with no hope of a BMW dealer till Panama. I donít know what happened to my Karma over the last couple of months, I wish I knew what I had done to deserve this. We were trapped! Frustrated isnít a big enough word for it maybe:- despondent, vexed, de-motivated, defeated, drained of solutions better describes it. It seems that the gods were conspiring against us. Why, I do not know.
Personally I felt so confined, I felt tempted to go anywhere, just to get back on the road. The only decent road out of Guyana is to Surinam, in the opposite direction to our route, but we would be back on the road.
There was nothing we could do on Sunday, so it was just another day hanging aroun feeling that we were getting nowhere fast. Instead we tried to make ourselves useful around the mosque to occupy ourselves and to pay some rent in kind. So Pat set about mopping floors, I was scrubbing sinks. This was all very well but it wasnít sorting out our immediate problem of how to get out of Guyana.
I was as frustrated as Hippy. What we had really needed was an easy off after getting back from Trinidad. Instead, everything was conspiring against us. As we spent a couple of restless nights in the basement of the mosque, I got to do a bit of thinking. By the second morning, it seemed to me that the only sensible thing to do was to return to England ñ a direction we knew there was plenty of shippage. Rather drastic, you may think.
The reasoning runs along these lines. Weíd decided to carry on with Hippy still not 100 % certain of what her medical problem had been ñ this could now be looked into further. Bertha (his second wife ñ how islamic is that) can have all of her ills treated back in Blighty, too. Some of our documents including our health insurance run out shortly and renewing them would be a lot easier back ìhomeî. Weíd planned to go home in December anyway for Estherís wedding and to see the family for Christmas. Everything was there telling us that now was the time to take a time out. Weíd have to ship the bike from Colombia to Panama and fly to England and back, anyway. If we go back for a few months we may even be able to work and earn some cash so that the trip back will not be so much of a money haemorrhage. I am sure that a couple of days doing supply teaching work will be enough to inspire me to carry on travelling ñ maybe I should request the worst classes to guarantee success. But there was a part of me that was upset that after the stress of deciding whether to return for my illness or not, deciding to continue and now we are going back anyway.
The only question that was to be resolved was how much the shipping and flights would cost. After working out that Bertha can fit into a 2 cubic metre crate and discovering that for once there is a sliding scale of shipping charge, the price dropped from a possible 375 dollars to an actual 170 dollars. This is a damn site cheaper than other shipping charges weíve been quoted (250 dollars from Colombia to Panama alone, for example) and hard to ignore. Maybe it is all kismet, after all. Flights, although not cheap, were bearable. With prices accepted, all that was left to be achieved was the construction of a case for Bertha. And Guyana has some very fine timber, oh yes! Personally I was planning to make the crate of purple heart and selling it back in the UK and making a profit on shippage. Unfortunately purple splits if you hammer it together and weighs a ton.
So, Plan Z as Helen puts it, is to return to England very soon, work our buts off for a few months and return to Guyana in the dry season when the riding down to the south should be less fraught than the last time we saw it. On reflection, this puts us back into a sensible timetable for tackling N America (without this break we would have been heading up the West Coast of the states in Jan, Feb, March which seems utter madness). Clouds, silver linings, ends well and all that.
Catch you on the flip side.
Currently there are about three options being juggled in the air. I am failing to sleep, thinking this is all fine and dandy but I only have the clothes that I have been travelling with for the last 2 years to wear to work. This, as you can imagine would be OK if I was a drama teacher but not so good for a psychology/maths teacher. I have other clothes but they are all buried in heaps in the Watsonís cellar. Where will we live? Both our properties are tenanted. All offers gratefully considered. Until the bike arrives by ship we have no transport? And it is no good for me commuting anyway. Just some of the practicalities that are stopping me from getting to sleep.
Well I suppose if we wanted life to be simple we would have stayed in England.
Bertha repairs - Checklist for future attention
Front end
Straighten frame
Fill and ream steering bearing recess
New steering head bearings
SH/New stanchions
New stanchion bushes and seals
Straighten/SH/New front wheel spindle
Straighten/new front disc
Calliper dust seal
Calliper mounting bolt
Engine
Cam chain
Oil pump internals?
Exhaust/Inlet guides and valves?
Push rod tunnel grommets
RS plug caps
Starter brushes
Alternator brushes
Clutch case plug
Oil cooler
Filters for above
New K+n
Clean carbs thoroughly
Jets and needles
Check big ends
New oil pressure switch
Spare throttle cable
New clutch cables
Clutch
Clutch operation switch
Clean/grease
Align
Thrust bearing
Lever bearing
Spare cable
Gearbox
New!
Replace lever pivot/lever
Rear drive
Check swing arm bearings
Check shaft
Replace pin in shock absorber
Service shock absorber again?
Check/replace final drive bearing
Replace final drive main seal
Wheels
Front true/replace more spokes
Rear inspect/true
New front tyre
New valve stems front and rear
Electrics
Check through all wiring/reshroud
Clean and seal terminal blocks
Replace alternator feed wires through to ignition
Replace headlight feed wires back to harness
Replace with higher watt indicators
Socket for 12v gadgets
Battery plug
Check what is needed for skoda (emergency) voltage regulator connection
Rear light wobbliness excessive?
Clean/lubricate speedo cable