2 March: The arrival and departure of the RORO vessel is delayed so Mr Jones is only likely to go to port on 9 February which is when we will be flying somewhere over the Atlantic. Thank goodness for helpful brother in-laws who can step in but certainly increases our stress levels ever higher
To add to the stress, we spend a good portion of the day reviewing and correcting mistakes on the shipping documentation, our patience with the shipping/forwarding agent is growing very thin!
3 March: The long-awaited customs inspection takes place and now we learn that the second inspection must still be scheduled. Based on the length of time todays one took to arrange we are very concerned that time is running out and we are not happy.
4 March: More mistakes by the shipping agent and no progress on 2nd customs inspection, tomorrow is the weekend so there won’t be any updates until Monday and the ship theoretically arrives on Tuesday. It will be a miracle if Mr J gets on the ship.
7 March – Stuart finally loses his patience with the shipping agent and gives the owner an earful, all of a sudden, we seem to have action but by end of business there is still no customs appointment and so we are forced to cancel flights (at much cost) as it looks more and more probable that Mr. J will not make this shipment. This is partly our own fault for booking flights only a few days after the original vessel scheduled date.
8 March: and out of the blue we can take Mr Jones to port despite no second customs inspection, apparently, customs accepted the first inspection photos as the evidence required for the 2nd inspection. The day ends with a very long “discussion” with the shipping agent owner who wants to charge us for “the late port entry costs” despite (in our opinion) there being a very high chance the customs delays where due to their mistakes throughout the process – she will accept no blame in the process!
11 March: Major stress at the airport as we are told you have to have a return ticket or else can’t board. Based on our knowledge Argentina does not require this (and never asked for it when we did get there) but the airlines cover their rear ends and require it. So, we scramble to purchase a ticket which we can hopefully cancel at zero or low cost in the future. Murphy steps in and the online process won’t work so we have to do one via the counter and it takes forever – thank goodness we come early to the airport.
12 March: We are in Argentina and feeling very bushwacked after 35 hours of travel, almost all of it with a mask on.
13 March: A great first day in BA, slept well last night and took off exploring this morning. So far liking the city. Had some excitement in the San Telmo mercado when a Parillo caught fire.
14 March: Horror and despair as we see the bill for roaming and using about 10mb of data equates to R10k! ……. We only put the roaming on in case we couldn’t get to purchase a sim in the airport (which we couldn’t) and while we tried for an Uber. What a total waste of money!!!
15 March: Interesting comparisons: Bread costs 3x ZA prices, wine is much cheaper and nice….
17 March: Feeling bushwacked at the end of every day, it must be how a 1 year old baby feels being surrounded by new sounds, smells and language you can’t understand all while trying to learn it and make sense of everything
18 March: Our first successful “blue dollar” black market exchange. Now we can halve the costs of most things which takes Argentina from costing the same as South Africa to half price.
22 March: and just like that our time in BA is almost up, it’s been a great 10 days and have really enjoyed the city.
23 March: We passed our COVID antigen test so all clear to travel to Uruguay. Travel is definitely more complicated and slightly more risky in these times. We had been nervous about this as needed to book ferry tickets a few days in advance and Buenos Aires definitely has a lower standard of compliance to COVID measures than we are used to in South Africa, plus we have been on many crowded subways etc.
24 March: Long day on ferry and bus to get to Montevideo but we have made it and Mr Jones sailing seems to be on track.
25 March: First meeting with clearing agent in Uruguay and first step completed, Stuart has a “certificate de llegada” (certificate of arrival) from the immigration department. The process was quite quick and painless despite everything being in Spanish.
26 March: Mr Jones is in port but unfortunately customs don’t work the weekend. Nervous times as this means he is sitting unprotected in the dock.
29 March: We have Mr Jones and nothing was stolen on the voyage (although there was clear evidence that some fingers had searched a little bit..) !!! With nowhere to assemble him we spent a busy 2,5 hours parked on the Las Ramblas with everything removed and on the sidewalk while we put solar panels, roof box etc back on.
30 March: Put the surfboard racks and boards on the roof this morning while parked in the underground parking. Also ticked off a big concern of ours – sourcing gas for our ZA bottles as all connections are different here, for our first refill it went surprisingly quickly. And then headed out of Montevideo to a campsite.
31 March: a busy day of emptying and redistributing all the stuff (tools, etc) we had hidden deep inside Mr J for shipping to prevent shipping. A bit frustrated at the end as the one solar panel bolt which started to strip 2 days ago during assembling, stripped when we attended to that as a last job, so have some cutting and “boer maak a plan” work to do tomorrow.