I maintain that sea shipping can be done for a good price. A have read posts of riders that paid more than $1k to ship from South America to Europe, but they got white gloves treatment. Someone crated the bike and managed all of the details on both ends.

Sure I would buy if the right opportunity presented itself. That is all about timing. Delays can be expensive, unless you can hang out in a city like Santiago for a few weeks. Sounds great to me...but no I can't. More likely I would rent or (yikes) take a tour. But it would have to be a pretty cool outfit to get me signed up.

Here is a sample of a tour that got my attention, until I started to break it down. The tour that is organized out of Colombia, 45 days from Medellin, thru Valenzuela, dip into Brazil, then north thru Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana...back into Brazil, across the Amazon, then a tear a long stretch of the TransAmazonia, to the TranOceania, into Peru, Ecuador and back to Medellin. Sorry for the run on sentence, but that is how it should be described. ~14000 miles, average of 311 miles per day, in Latin America! If you bring you own bike and pay for your own gas, and that price is $266 per day. The operator provides a guide, breakfast, lodging and any water crossing costs. There is a chase truck I think, but that is likely a joke unless you rent one of their bikes. Screw that. Screw tours in general. Why would anyone want to subject themselves to that kind of schedule, pay those prices and not enter the Dakar?

I took the Stalhratte from Cartagena, Colombia, to Jamaica for 7 days, 27 days in Cuba, finally getting dropped off near Cancun, MX. The cost was based on the number of days on the boat, included food for me and transport for the motorcycle, ~$1550.00 in the spring of 2013.

I took the Stalhratte early in the trip from Panama to Cartagena, for ~$950 (me and moto.) I imagine cheaper arrangements can be made out of Colon, but I was on a bit of a schedule that time. Next trip I will definitely consider shipping by sea from the US to the starting point of the adventure in South America. Or I might ride Central America again, then ask around the docks of Colon for a budget open cargo boat going directly to a major port in South America (not one of the local cargo boats that stops at every village along the coast!)

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Peter B
2008/09 - NJ to Costa Rica and back to NJ
2012/13 - NJ to Northern Argentina, Jamaica, Cuba and back to NJ
2023 - Peru, Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia...back to Peru.

Blogs: Peter's Ride