Well, I wanted this to be a blog about my motorbike trip in South America but I still don’t have a motor bike and I’ve been here a couple of weeks now so I should try a bit harder. I decided to wag school for the week and head up to Barranquilla for a day, which is a two hour bus ride north from Cartagena. It has a population of over a million people and apparently more motorbike shops. The bus leaves every half an hour in both directions and costs about $10.00. A twenty seater bus and not too old. I got there about 9:30 and started walking through the list of moto shops on google. I ended up going to about 20 shops and doing nearly 30,000 steps.

It has a bigger city feel about it and was quite nice to walk around. The shops were bigger and so were the speakers outside the door but still not many big bikes. A few more big road bikes but I’m after an adventure bike. With my bad spanish I normally have to say an enduro bike so they understand what I’m looking for. There were a few other brands as well and like anything new and shiny, they all look appealing. I was slightly tempted with a second hand Royal Enfield Indian Himalayan Scram 411 (which I think is 450cc) with low kms that I saw in one shop. It was comfortable to sit on, was already set up for touring and they have a good reputation and the price was really good but it was still a bit bigger than what I wanted.

I just walked from shop to shop in a big loop back to the bus station. I somehow missed the main Honda shop (I visited a couple of smaller ones) so I had to double back to find it. Google doesn’t do a bad job, but it sent me to a closed down shop with no signage that definitely wasn’t a Honda Shop. As I was peering in through the shutters a guy on a bike pulled up and asked me what I was doing. He actually lived there. He turned out to be a nice guy and in spanish he explained to me that it was the Honda shop years ago but now the main Honda shop was now out in an industrial area about 5 kms away. Too many steps for me. He said he could flag down a taxi for me, which he did, and negotiated the price and I was on my way. Or so I thought.

My spanish is good enough to be able to tell the taxi driver that I was looking to buy a bike and he said the place I was going was too expensive and said he knew of a better place. Much cheaper. And he turned off the main road. I genuinely think he thought he was doing me a favour. But with a bit more poor spanish and probably a bit of insistence in my voice he turned around and got back on the main road and google and I tracked our path out of town to the Honda Dealership. He was correct. It did look expensive.

As we pulled up the guy who I’d met at the old Honda shop and had organised the taxi was there waiting for me to make sure I arrived safely. Do I look that vulnerable? He’d ridden there on his motorbike. We went into the shop and they only had a couple of bikes but one of them was the Honda 300. Finally I got to sit on one. It’s interesting over here. They don’t do test drives on new bikes and the price is the same no matter where in the country you buy it from. We had a two minute chat with the salesmen which lasted about 15 minutes in spanish and I feel I learned a bit but still not sure if I want the Honda 300 which is about $11,000 or the Honda 190 which is $6,000. I have to think about the resale value and ease of resale when I get back in 12 months. They both seemed to think I’d still get a good price for the 300cc as long as I looked after it, even though I would clock up about 50,000 kms. But they thought that distance is a lot for a 190cc bike and not as saleable. But at that sort of price I think I could almost walk away and leave it.

We left the showroom and I was going to walk to the bus station but he thought it was too far and too dangerous on the busy highway so he flagged me down a taxi and negotiated the price and gave him the location and then gave me his WhatsApp number so I could message him when I arrived there or if I had any problems. Which I did. A enjoyable day but still no motorbike.

I think I need to go to Medellin.