Shout out to the folks at Overland Embassy

Overland Embassy is a company that specializes in shipping logistics, repair and travel support, especially for overlanders. They've helped many overlanders with shipping their vehicles, particularly from Panama to Colombia to get around the Darien Gap, but also shipping to the United States and Europe from Panama, and other routes. They also have a convenient campground with great amenities (like a nice shower!). The folks working at Overland Embassy, Alejandro, Darwin, Maria and David, are great. Very friendly, very helpful, and very enthusiastic about supporting overland travel (and over-water).

I arrived early in Panama City because I wanted to make sure about a date and container buddy for shipping the truck to Colombia. Thus, I spent a good deal of time at the campground (in between excursions around eastern Panama). I met a lot of nice people at the campground. It was a good opportunity to learn about the experiences of others. The people I met included many couples, some couples with young children, a nice couple on motorbikes from Belgium, and a group of four guys from Estonia who were making travel documentaries for Estonian television.

The process to ship your vehicle from Panama is rather involved, but Overland Embassy is very helpful in preparing information to help you along. The first step is to go to the police inspection station. I arrived at 6 in the morning (February 23rd) to make sure I was at the front of the line, which starts at 7 am. The person working did not speak English (and was rather gruff), but a Panamanian-American guy from San Diego named Victor was very nice and helpful to me. They check all your paperwork and your VIN, then tell you to return to an office across the highway at 1 pm. I had enough time to go have a good breakfast, then returned to the office across the street and waited, and waited, and waited... Finally at 5 pm, they came out and told me and my container buddy, Randel, that they were still waiting for a signature and return tomorrow morning at 8 am. We returned the next day and after another hour and half of waiting, got the necesary paperwork for shipping.

My container buddy (person with whom you share a 40 ft container) was a nice guy named Randel. Just by coincidence, he was from Peedee, which is a town of maybe a few dozen people just about 15 km from Philomath where we live. He had been living for about a year in Panama and was hoping to buy some land and move there, but the bureaucracy was too much, so he decided that he would move to Paraguay instead, where the process seemed much easier.

Loading day. The next step was to drive the vehicle into the shipping container. Early in the morning on February 28th, Alejandro led a convoy of vehicles from Overland Embassy to near the port in Colon, where I drove Hank into the shipping container, disconnected the battery, made sure they fastened him down well, wiggled out the side, locked up the door, and wished him well.

Thirteen days later I opened the container in Cartagena, Colombia, and gave Hank a big hug. With all the loading and unloading and paperwork, it takes a while. The shipping date was March 5th. He arrived in the port at Cartagena on March 8th. (Sheri and I had a nice vew of the port from our hotel.) We opened our shipping container on March 12th, but it took another three days for the paperwork to get the temporary import permit and insurance before Randel and I could drive our trucks out of the port. A big thanks to Ana, the shipping agent on the Colombian side, for her help on importing our vehicles.

12,217 miles down, 6,280 miles to go (if I take the shortest route - unlikely)