Please respect our intellectual property rights. Do not distribute any of these documents, or portions therein, without the written permission of Robert Higdon or the Iron Butt Association.
Written by Robert Higdon
I never got his name, but the guard at the Salvadoran border southeast of Jutiapa, Guatemala wanted to know a lot about me. After he was through his preliminary inspection of the bike and its contents --- three 45-liter Givi saddlebags, a couple of tank panniers, a tank bag, and a big duffle --- the stuff spread out over eight acres of ground. I'd told him I really wasn't toting drugs or guns; now he knew.
Then it was the paperwork. Passport, visa, bike title, driver's license, even the yellow fever card. In thirty years of bouncing through international borders no one had ever asked me for that one. He noted that there was no cholera vaccination. We went round and round about that for a while. He asked for the registration. I handed it over. The man wanted to bust my chops. That was clear.
He checked it against the title and looked at me. Then he squatted down and looked at the VIN stamped on the downtube of the frame. Something felt as if it had begun to crawl up the back of my neck.
"No," he said, rising.
"No?" I said. "Que es eso?"
He waved the registration card contemptuously and handed it back to me, a crummy piece of paper no bigger than the deuce of clubs. I stared at it. He was right. Two numbers in the 17-digit VIN had been transposed. It didn't match the title, the frame, or anything else. No one had ever looked at it before. I stood there, helpless.
Some delicate negotiations ensued. We never actually reached the stage of discussing money because I wasn't thinking of bribes at that point. I was thinking of maybe forty other borders I was expecting to cross. And I was wondering what had happened.
I packed up everything and turned back to Jutiapa. Along the way I understood what had gone wrong. When I'd originally titled the bike in the spring, I was issued a generic Washington, D.C. license plate, a title, and a registration card. Then I'd gotten the bright idea to stick an "AMI" vanity plate on the bike. In August the plate application was approved. When I picked up the new plate, it came with a revised registration card, including transposed numbers apparently punched in by a $2.00/hour clerk in the Department of Motor Vehicles. I'd never looked at it, probably the only thing I hadn't inspected eight different times.
Several futile long-distance calls back to D.C.'s DMV told me what I'd known anyway --- I was going to have to return the bike to D.C. for (another) inspection and to clear up the problem. It wasn't going to be solved by international phone calls or sorrowful pleas for help. In my town you're lucky if the 911 operators aren't smoking crack.
Now what? Although possible, it isn't likely that I can recover in time to make it through South America before the end of February. So it looks as if I'll have to pick up the trip in Europe next spring, then head east from there. From Australia I could ship the bike to Santiago, Chile or Buenos Aires a year from now, then ride north to finish the trip.
I'll summarize what else happened --- the usual closed borders, being held hostage in a rebel road block in Mexico, an illness that I thought was going to hospitalize me, all of the stuff I'm used to whenever I get anywhere near Chiapas --- in a day or two. My heart isn't really in it right now . . . After what has amounted to a two-month, 10,000-mile training run, the consolation is that it might have been worse.
I could have lost the yellow fever card.
© 1995, Iron Butt Association, Chicago, Illinois
Please respect our intellectual property rights. Do not distribute any of these documents, or portions therein, without the written permission of Robert Higdon or the Iron Butt Association.
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