PowerCycle

I have some great advice if you are planning on mailing anything to Guatemala via regular post–DON’T! It’s now 19 days since the tracking info on the USPS site said my bike rack left the States. My good friend Marten has been a massive help and was able to pin down where my rack is (he speaks excellent Spanish which makes things much easier).

International mail delivery here works like this: package heads to central processing facility in Guatemala City… yeah, that’s pretty much it. The actually delivery part never takes place. Nothing is sent on to the chump waiting for his package letting him know there’s a holdup, nothing is sent to the shipper and nothing is updated on the web sites of USPS or El Correo (which is actually a Canadian company contracted to handle mail for Guatemala).

So Marten was able to discover that the rack has been sitting in Guatemala City for 8 days now. The post office guys here didn’t really know why it’s there and didn’t seem too interested in helping. We think, and this was confirmed by locals in the know, that they want someone to go there, open the package and show them what’s in it so they can figure how much to charge for an import tax. Because actually delivering it and collecting the tax then would just be stupid I guess.

Because the package was addressed to someone else I can’t even pick it up, the person whose name it’s in would have to. I hardly know the guy it was sent to so I can’t very well ask him to take a 4 hour bus ride to Guatemala City, risking life and limb, to pick up a package for me. This is where I have to say more nice things about something than I ever had to before in my life. Marten is taking a 4am bus tomorrow morning to get my bike rack from Guatemala City. Yes, he is that awesome. Matthew, the guy who I had it shipped to, wrote a letter of authorization saying its OK to give the package to Marten and he gave him his passport as further proof that it’s OK. Regardless of this actually working or not I’ll never be able to thank him enough for this. I could get the same letter and go but trying to accomplish anything at the post office with my limited Spanish would be hopeless.

I’m going pretty crazy sitting here for over 2 week now. Today was especially bad. It’s rare that I get into such a bad mood. Hopefully in 2 days I can be back on the road. The only thing that got me through this was getting to hang out with Karin and Marten and my new friends Matthew and Nancy.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 29th, 2010 at 11:43 pm and is filed under Leg 2. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.