Kaput!

Time: ~8:45AM, Jan. 9, 2009
Place: WWL Vehicle Services Canada, Annacis Island, Delta, BC, Canada

Lot employee: Are you the guy with the little mini?
Me: yup. the car here?
Lot employee: Yeah, but there's a problem - it's kaput!(*)
Me (fairly nonchalantly, 'cause, believe me, I've heard this before): oh yeah?
Lot employee: it's completely dead, wouldn't start, we had to tow it over here!
Me: oh that... no problem, can I have the keys please?

* - Kaput it amazingly universal. When a Mongolian mechanic, who knows you don't speak Mongolian wants to say that your, let's just say, suspension is dead, he'll use Kaput... and he'll know you'll understand.

So thus begun the mini era in North America - quite appropriate, I felt. A couple of hours earlier, I was at my hostel, the clock read 6:30 in the morning, and I was getting up, packing up the trusty toolkit, and navigating the Vancouver public transportation network to the WWL lot that was supposedly holding my car. Coming in, there was no sign of my mini, but I was encouraged to see four other mini's in the lot:

Clearly British though - steering wheel is on the wrong side!

In the office, I found trusty Gloria, who was quite busy, as expected, but had everything ready to go for me (the customs broker had earned her money), so after 20 minutes, the car had been brought around, and I was back to wondering just what kaput meant in this case.

I calmly walked out to the car and was rather pleased to discover that she was none the worse off for the month spent on a ship in the Pacific, and a week apparently spent buried in the snow here on Annacis island. The car, however, as promised, would not start. Not even close. I studiously checked the battery, jiggled all the right cables near the ignition coil, and headed back to Gloria's office, comfortable in the serene knowledge that I was now in a civilized North American country, and I could get CAA (AAA's Canadian cousin) to come out and jump start the car... or tow it, if the problem were to be something more drastic. So, Gloria got me the number for CAA, I called them, and I was told there were 31 people in queue ahead of me, and the estimated wait time was about 15 minutes. Clearly, BC drivers were looking for a lot of help with the snow. Five minutes went by... terrible elevator music blaring out of the telephone receiver. More people came by to pick up their cars and presumably drove them off the lot without being subjected to CAA's elevator music. Entering the second five minutes of wait time, I suddenly had an epiphany: in Europe and Asia, when your battery is dead, you simply push-start the car, so why exactly am I waiting for CAA to help me here?

10 minutes later I was on my way out of the WWL lot, the engine sputtering along fairly contently, after managing to recruit a passing truck driver to help give the little car a push. Gloria had signed off on the whole enterprise with a blanket "I didn't hear a thing about anybody planning to push start a car in my lot." She also did her best to explain the new procedures they've put in place for picking up cars at the WWL lot - I assured her that I had absolutely no intention of ever doing this again.

In another five minutes I was at a nearby Shell station, where I figured the car could use a little more gas and oil (yes, it still leaks oil), still sporting my French license plates. The Japanese had bothered to write all kinds of stuff on the windshield too (including my VIN number), so I figured that should probably come off too.

A familiar site - the mini with the hood propped up, but no problems here. Promptly started right back up without any pushing required either.

And all of a sudden, buoyed by a full tank of gas and an extra quart of 10w40 in the engine, I was roaring down highway 99 towards the Blaine border crossing! Quite literally roaring by the way, as after driving my BMW in San Diego and Lott's Acura in Seattle, the amount of noise the mini makes is really quite remarkable.

By 11AM, I was at the Canadian side of the border, where the customs agent had clearly never seen a Carnet before in his life. Of course nobody really stops you as you leave Canada, so if I hadn't gone out of my way to find him and give him the Carnet, he still wouldn't have seen one to this day, I suspect, but I found him, he consulted a few of his colleagues for about 30 minutes, then stamped the Carnet in all the right places and sent me on my way to America:



Well, leaving Canada was pretty easy, but the departure part of the border crossing has usually been easier than the arrival on the other side, so it was time to see what the US of A had in store for me. For the record, when the Moldovan customs determined that the VIN number in my documents didn't match the one on the car itself, I decided I needed to go back to Paris and correct the documents, instead of just driving around to another, less scrupulous Moldovan border crossing. Justification being that if I need to deal with it, might as well do it now, when Paris is still relatively nearby, as I was sure this would come up again - probably coming into Mongolia, and quite certainly trying to bring the car into the US! Suffice to say, I wasn't looking forward to having to deal with the American customs controls...

Vancouver, eh?

On to the downtown customs office... Located at 333 Dunsmuir Street, or halfway to being ominous. It rained in Vancouver on Tuesday, so umbrella or not, I was a little wet by the time I got there. Juan called to say she was running late because of the rain - I didn't bother asking why, but another 10 minutes passed, and she arrived. I had my precious Carnet de Passage and we had a Canadian customs agent to speak with, who was a little excited because he hadn't done a carnet import in a while. And then he proceeded to stamp the carnet in all the right places, talk to some people, write a few things, and promptly hand the carnet back to me along with a sheet of instructions for how to pick up the car... I mean, really? I was all geared up for this to be harder somehow. Well, no complaints, but we are not there yet - have to call the lot to schedule the pickup. I call, speak to a frienly lady named Gloria and she tells me... that the two snowstorms, Vancouver has just had, dumped more snow than they know how to deal with, so my car us buried in their lot and will not be available until Friday. But, but, I need the car before then? Can I come by your lot and help you shovel the snow? Please? No, you may not. Well, it was clearly going to be too easy if I could just go and get the car, so I, all of a sudden, had two extra days to go sight seeing in Vancouver.

Early January isn't exactly peak tourist season in Vancouver, so my hostel (seemingly populated exclusively by the Aussies and the Irish) had no trouble letting me stay a couple more nights. Wednesday was your standard dreary, cold, depressing January day in the Pacific Northwest, so I grabbed my umbrella and headed off to play tourist at nearby Granville Island

Where I wondered through the market

And took a tour of the Granville brewery... which ended with a few beers, of course. (the lager they brew with White Chocolate is really good by the way)

Then I headed off to a bar nearby to watch a Duke basketball game... and have a couple more drinks. And in the evening, it was off on a pub crawl, courtesy of my hostel, with my newly found Irish and Aussie friends. Considering that I had ended Monday night with a pub crawl as well and Tuesday night at Yuk Yuk's, a comedy club (very funny, by the way - I recommend!), which also served drinks, I was starting to think Vancouver was turning me into a lush. Perhaps this explained why there were so many Aussies and Irish here... On a side note, I don't want to say Vancouver is seedy... but, well, the area around Davie St. where I was staying, is a little seedy. Well, not quite Sydney's King's Cross, Paris' Monmartre, Tokyo's Roppongi, or Bangkok's anywhere seedy, but let's put it this way: if the Guinness book of records has a category for most shops dealing in lingerie, exotic toys, and erotic videos per city block, this area of Vancouver would win hands down!

Thursday rolled around. Snow was clearly melting in the city - I tried calling Gloria in hopes of some confirmation that the car would, in fact, be released tomorrow. She didn't pick up the phone. Without much of anything else to do, I headed of for Stanley Park to play tourist for another day, figuring it might also be wise to stay away from pubs for a day. Arriving in Stanley Park held an unexpected surprise for me: it was still bitterly windy and cold, but not only was it not raining, the skies were actually considering clearing up:

Mountains still hiding behind a mist of clouds

A rather dramatic background behind a lighthouse at the corner of the park

One of the major attractions of Stanley Park is the collection of totem poles, coming from the native Indian tribes of British Columbia. I liked this one best...

Escaping from the bitterly cold open spaces of Stanley Park, I made my way further into town towards Canada Place. The weather turned downright pleasant as the day went on - my umbrella was actually starting to just become a nuisance...

North Vancouver, flanked by snowy mounntains across the bay. Whistler's in that direction too.

And the sails are part of Canada Place - a convention center (I believe) built for a World Expo hosted by Vancouver in 1986.

A port's a port - a bit reminiscent of Vladivostok, Russia and Yokohama, Japan, both on the other side of the Pacific.

Not far from Canada Place is the gaslamp district, which houses this steam-powered clock. Shhh... it's not actually steam-powered anymore... but it was at one point... and didn't keep time very well when it was...

Vancouver is, of course, set to host the 2010 winter Olympics, so I clearly have a knack for visiting cities prior to them hosting an Olympic event, as I've been to Athens in 2002 and Beijing just this past June. The Olympics bring a lot of construction going on full bore all over the city in each case. Combine that with Rome gearing up for the millenium celebrations when I was there in the summer of '99 and I've seen a lot of landmarks under construction. In Vancouver, it wasn't so much the landmarks under construction, as lots of brand new, shiny, glassy buildings going up all over the city:

I found this row of gleaming new towers oddly reminiscent of the ones Lott and I saw in the Berzengi district of Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan last summer... Moving on...

I duly declined the invitations to go out for a few more drinks that evening and went to bed relatively early. A little before 7 Friday morning I was to be up and navigating my way along Vancouver's public transportation network towards the customs lot holding the mini hostage, in hopes of rescuing her and heading back down to Seattle!

The calm before the storm

So, going back to December... when the storm was clearly approaching, and the storm was going to be centered on the mini, which was making its way slowly (as it turned out, very slowly) across the Pacific to Vancouver. Once the naval journey finished, I was going to have to go and pick it up and deliver her to Seattle and this would involve a) getting the car through Canadian customs, b) getting it through American customs and officially importing into the US, c) driving the final 150 miles from Vancouver to Seattle. That was clearly going to be the storm, and I was rather dreading the upcoming experience, but in the mean time, I had made it back to the US for the first time in over 6 months and was busy catching up on my rest and relaxation:

Starting with two weeks in San Diego - Torrey Pines reserve on the Pacific shore pictured here

I thought it was kinda cold in California, especially at night, but still a pleasant change from Japan... so, I could have done something sensible like head straight South to a warm place such as Costa Rica, but instead, I went North to Seattle to welcome in the New Year:

Fireworks at the Space Needle, while at a party at the Pan Pacific hotel. Lott's already covered a lot of this here...

And to go snowboarding for the first time in 10 months - Brodie cutting through the snow seen here. Snowboarding was OK (just bitterly cold that day), playing hockey for the first time in ten months was a bigger challenge as it turned out...

Also in Seattle, friends:

Iris and I went up to Queen Anne, where there's apparently a great overlook point for the entire downtown

Also... a bunch of you guys here in Seattle have had kids while I've been gone. Sam and Erin (and Jade), Brodie and Heather (and Quinn) here. Cat and I obviously didn't get that memo...

Ok, so Quinn's not really in that picture, so there he is now!

Jason and Myriah with baby Flynn... the kids don't seem to be getting simple names like Alex and Dave anymore, so I sure hope I'm spelling all these names correctly...

Even people who had moved away from Seattle (but were back to visit), namely Sara and Goose, were getting on the kids bandwagon! Talya hanging out with Theo here - he'd used french fries to get in her good graces the day before


So, in the end, I ended up spending about a week in Seattle dashing madly back and forth trying to see people here and trying (mostly in vain) to figure out just when the car was going to arrive in Vancouver and how long it would be after that before I could pick it up. On the 1st of January, Lott took off for Costa Rica, and the rest of us were excessively jealous, because a couple days later, Seattle got hit with snow... again:

Theo examines the state of things outside his house

And on Monday, the 5th, I finally got on an Amtrak bus and headed up to Vancouver to get the car... toolkit in hand, since it is, after all, the mini and expecting it to make the drive from Vancouver to Seattle without any breakdowns would clearly be foolish!

Four hours and one confused Canadian customs agent (apparently "I'm going to Vancouver to pick up my 27 year old car" isn't a common reason for visiting Canada) later, I was in Vancouver, which greeted our bus with plenty more snow, sleet and cold. I really, really wish I had thought to grab my camera when we passed a pair of absolutely massive snowmen on the way in - I'm guessing each had to be at least eight feet tall, or the biggest I'd ever seen. Alas, no such luck, so here's a picture of Vancouver's Granville island, thoroughly covered in snow instead:

At this point, I was starting to seriously wonder how well the mini handles in the snow... and whether or not that is a question that a single other Mongol Rally team has ever had to ponder...

Tuesday morning, I met Juan, the customs broker who was helping get the car into the country and we headed off to the downtown customs office to figure out the fate of the mini. By now, I'd been to customs offices in welcoming places like Russia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Kosovo, Mongolia, and Japan (among others), so I figured I'd been through quite a bit with this car, but this was the first customs stop in North America, a place where most people don't just drive from London, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. What did I get? A bunch more pictures... so it'll go in a separate post, coming soon... so stay tuned!

Las Tortugas y Parque Nacional Rincón de la Vieja

The beaches around Tamarindo host leatherback turtles in the winter.  This largest species of turtle crawls ashore several nights of the year, digs a nest deep in the sand, and lays a clutch of eggs.  The explosion of development in the area - and the accompanying light and noise pollution - have been discouraging turtles from laying eggs so the Ticans founded Parque Nacional Marino las Baulas de Guanacaste as a safe haven for the turtles.  For a mere $25 you can have a guide take you out on the beach and see the action. 

We had arrived at the visitor center at 10pm and sat through a short informational movie and then found out the catch - the leatherbacks come ashore within three hours of high tide and on Friday night, high tide was at 1am.  So we settled down with a deck of cards and waited until 12:30 when word quickly spread that the turtles were here.  The five of us piled into our tiny Suzuki Alto and held our breath as we drove over some big bumps to the beach.  After a short walk/run through the sand we came upon the leatherback.  She had dug a 65 centimeter deep nest and was busy laying eggs.  After 45 minutes or so she was finished and started packing sand around them. 

In a day or three, the biologists will dig up the nest and move the eggs to a more secure location so dogs and the like don't dig it up.  And hopefully in a few weeks little baby turtles will climb out and make their way to the sea.  Photography is banned during the laying so I can't share any photos of the night, but I can recycle a photo from my trip to Thailand two years ago of hatching sea turtles.

 

On Saturday we bid adieu to Olivia and on the trip to the airport Bailey practiced his Mongol Rally defensive driving skills.  A cop pulled him over for driving 80 kph in a 60 kph zone and said there would be a 20,000 colones fine which could be paid in cash or at the bank.  Bailey said he'd rather pay at the bank, and the cop replied it would cost 30% more.  Bailey countered with "The rental car company said don't give cash to cops."  But this conversation was in Spanish (he's the most fluent by far of all of us) and for cash he meant to say "platas" - silver or change - and actually said "platos" - dishes or plates.  Well the cop didn't exactly know what to do about being bribed with crockery and just let them off without a ticket.  Score one for not being gullible tourists.  If only Russian police were as compliant!

On Sunday Bailey, Mattson, Ellen (a Washingtonian who coincidently ended up in my Spanish class) and I headed for Parque Nacional Rincón de la Vieja.  It's one of over a hundred volcanoes in Costa Rica and slightly less active than Arenal.  On the hike up, we found a bunch of trees that were fun to climb.

As well as numerous armies of ants marching across the forest floor.

After 5 km of hiking we broke out of the clouds and were treated to a spectacular view of the surrounding countryside.

Continuing up we followed the sign for "Crater Activo" and headed for the rim.

When the weather turned a bit sour - strong winds driving raindrops hard into our faces.  Some of us brought jackets and long sleeves.  Others of us improvised.

Finally we reached the crater's edge where the warning sign said we could stay for 15 minutos before we might succumb to "los gases pueden ser toxicos." We tempted fate for a full 20 minutes to get some shots of the bright blue boiling caldera lined with yellow sulphur and venting gas.  The clouds made photos a bit tricky and as always the memories are more vivid than the jpegs, but they turned out alright.

On the way back down we stopped to soothe our tired feet at the Rio Blanco.

Which quickly devolved into swimming and cannonballs!

Now we're back in Tamarindo for the week - getting up to watch sunrise from our surfboards (it coincides with high tide) and studying our Spanish on the veranda while watching our resident iguanas - Snowball, Snowflake, and Ice Cube.

Arenal

Life is tough when you're living in a Costa Rican beach town. During the weekdays you're expected to be around to head to class or "work remotely". So after a scant day in town, we decided that it was the weekend and we had no obligations - we should head for the hills! We piled into our tiny rental car and headed to our first stop, Lake Arenal. We had a scenic lunch with a quick photo op while the wind whistled through our hair and headed to the many wind turbines on the hills above. Apparently this is the kiteboarding and windsurfing capital of Costa Rica.

We continued around the lake's edge, passing all kinds of retired hippie havens - coffee roasters, yoga classes, pottery studios et al. As the turns got sharper, the pot holes got larger and more frequent. Bailey did a valiant job dodging them, probably training for next year's Mongol Rally. We turned off the paved road into Parque Nacional Volcan Arenál where the park ranger promptly told us they were closed for the day but we could drive a bit down the road to the puente for a better view. Fortunately Mattson and I had had enough Rosetta Stone Spanish to figure out that meant the bridge - where the sun burst through the clouds which hid the top of the volcano.

We thought we could see steam rising off the volcano and figured that was a good sign, so we pushed down the dirt road towards the Volcano Observatory and Lodge to have dinner and hope the clouds would clear. With a bit of time to kill we wandered the grounds, checking out a museum about the volcano, climbing around a waterfall and having a shot of guaro - a local spirit distilled from sugar cane.

After nightfall the volcano did not disappoint. Numerous times streaks of red lava shot down the sides of the mountain. They were too unpredictable to get pictures of unfortunately. After dinner we headed to La Fortuna for the night, where we found reception at our hotel had closed, but they left us a nice note, and we still got a room for the night.

In the morning we awoke early for a canyoning trip with Puretek. Canyoning combines hiking, rappelling and a bit of water into a really fun morning. We rode a mini-bus out of town and transferred to the bed of a pickup truck (with benches) to base camp where we suited up. Attitudes ranged from "I can't believe you boys are making me do this."

To "Dangerously Over Confident"

Note: Subject not wearing rappelling harness.

Our first stop was the 165 foot parallel rappel next to a waterfall. My theory was they made the tallest drop first as both a confidence booster - If you can do this, the rest are cake! And a safety measure - If you panic and start to free fall, they have lots of time to stop you before you hit the bottom.

The little orange dot on the left is me. The little black dot on the right is Mattson. (Click the picture to be awed by the full size version)

Fortunately we all fell into the former category, and the next three waterfalls and a single dry rappel were an amazing time. Sometimes you got to go straight through the waterfall.

And other times if you were careful, you could mostly stay dry. The camera(wo)man had a tough time debating between no flash, dark blurry photos and flash photos that made all the mist in the air sparkle like diamonds.

One of the nice things about doing touristy stuff is that you meet other tourists and they can tell you which of the many things on your list are actually worth doing. We got a stellar recommendation to head towards "La Catarata de la Fortuna, a sparkling 70m ribbon of clear water pouring through a sheer canyon of dark volcanic rock arrayed in bromeliads and ferns," to quote Lonely Planet.

You approach the falls from the top of an even larger canyon, so they don't seem that large, until you try to go swimming in the huge whirlpool a their base. The spray leaping from impact reaches 20 feet high and the waves we're bobbing in are 2+ feet and impossible to swim against.

After doing some training swims - against the current just below the falls - we started to head home. We had been planning on visiting one of the many hot spring resorts around along the way. Another fellow canyon-er had mentioned that if you walk just a bit downstream from one of the resorts, under a bridge, and befriended a local, you could sit in the same water for free! Not quite sure which was the best part of the experience: 102° water rushing by and massaging away your cares, friendly locals sharing their secret spot, or the case of Bavaria Brewery's finest dunkel - a local brew no less!

Actually I'm pretty sure the best part was that the water did not smell like sulphur - unlike hot springs in Washington state and New Zealand. So we got all the benefits and none of the awkward smelling ride home!

Tired but happy, we rose Monday morning for our first day of Spanish class (humbling), first surf lesson (cautiously optimistic) and one of many spectacular happy hour sunsets in the month to come.

On Tuesday we awoke bruised around the lower ribs and quickly learned it's the second surfing lesson that's the humbling one.