Bubble Wrap - Brilliant Packaging Material or Cheap Entertainment?

So, I know it has been a long while since our last post but now that things have settled down somewhat, I will get you caught up over the next little while. There is so much we need to chat about and we have learned a lot since our move to Roatan back in March.

After much delay, our container finally arrived in June. We had requested that it go through Florida as it would have come directly to the island of Roatan from mainland USA. I guess something was lost in translation with the Canadian Company we used as it wound up going through Puerto Cortes which is known to be one of the most corrupt ports in the world. It took three months for our entire container to clear customs and most of the delays were the fault of the Customs Authority. And you thought crossing between Canada and the USA took a long time.  And by the way, three weeks of the hold up was supposedly due to a printer not working and that they had “Information Technology working on it.” Even in Spanish, I am even more convinced that “Information Technology” is one of the greatest Oxymorons of the modern world.

Prior to leaving Canada, we had filled out a thorough inventory of all of our belongings. Well, the customs agents here seemed to disregard this inventory and had us redo it again and then asked us, the gringos, to check and make sure the Spanish translation was correct. Now, you have to understand, Mic and I are both working on our Spanish, but we are not really at the point where we should be checking the Spanish of Spanish speaking people - Just saying! 

Well, with a Spanish-English, English-Spanish dictionary in hand, we fumbled our way through it and even found a few items they had left off that were included on our master list - I guess those were just going to fall off the back of the truck. Sorry for being a skeptic, but it is the reality here sometimes.

On a number of occasions, the Customs Authority for Honduras tried to separate our 4-wheeler/ATV from the rest of our shipment as they had said we did not indicate it was a motorized vehicle. The real problem was that one of the supervisors conducting our inspection had her eye on our ATV and kept trying to separate it from our shipment. Thank goodness our broker that was on sight for part of the inspection refused to separate it as he mentioned that we would never see it again. Their final retribution that we would not separate it was that they coded it as a "toy". This classification has created other issues as you can not get licence plates for a toy so we had to have it recoded properly. But that is another story for another day as we are still working on that one.

Most of our belongings arrived in tact even though they put all of the fragile boxes under the heaviest boxes in the shipment - mental midgets! Unbelievably, there was not much breakage as I think I had bought almost every roll of bubble wrap in central BC for packing our belongings - Thank goodness for bubble wrap - great packing materials and cheap entertainment for when you do not have your cable hooked up.

The lesson learned with this experience, is that if you are looking at moving to Roatan and importing a container or shipment, ensure that your shipment goes through Florida. It will save you time and money in the long run even if it does seem out of the way. 

In the next few blog posts, I will fill you in on some of the funny, and not so funny challenges we have had just getting the container landed on site at Casa Tropical. I also have some gems from having our vehicle seized by the National Police. Be sure to keep reading over the next few days for stories that will make you laugh, cry and learn a little more about moving to a foreign country in the Caribbean. After all, All Paths Lead to Roatan, right?