Team Westy Maintenance

So we were driving up this shelf road over a high mountain pass in a nasty, driving rain. It was one of those places with wind so strong the rain falls up instead of down. There is a place like this on Monarch Pass that my skier buddies will recognize.

And then, the oil warning buzzer sounded. Not much room to pull over, but we managed to tuck in. Mike checked the levels....all good, right where they should be.

We had just recently changed the oil and we had switched from synthetic to semi-synthetic. Was it that? Was the oil pump bad? Was it the beginning of the end? Bad engine=trip over.

And then the buzzer stopped. And then it started. And stopped.

We were close to San Isidro (Perez Zeledon to the locals) a mid-sized city we’d been through on earlier trips. It is the gate-way to Parque Nacional Chirripo and just an hour to Playa Dominical; for these reasons and it’s plethora of services, it’s a popular area for gringo retirees.

We set up a home base near Chirripo and started to attend to some issues that had been pending. In addition to the oil buzzer, we’d noticed that Chettie had lost a fair amount of weight so we sought out a good vet, something not known in some of the regions we had traveled. And, my hair was in need of some serious attention.

First, Mike consulted the Bentley and then online with the Samba. Samba legend, tencentlife, says assume the warning system is working and check the oil pressure. To be safe, we had the oil changed again….but the buzzer still sounded intermittently with no seeming rhyme or reason—sometimes in heat, sometimes in cold, under a load, or on flat ground.

We found a good VW mechanic and he and Mike tested the oil pressure. Fine. Best guess is that it is an electrical problem or a bad sender and not an oil pressure problem. It buys us a measure of peace of mind but the buzzer still sounds at odd times.

The vets at Los Alamos run a great clinic that was cleaner and more professional than some of the clinics I got my rabies shots in but that’s another story. They did some blood and fecal tests and determined that Chettie had hookworms. While we noticed she had lost weight the scale indicated since the start of our trip she had lost no less than 16 pounds. She was all ribs and hip bones.

She got an injection and almost immediately started putting weight back on. We’ve also noticed Mike has lost some weight, and hook worms are contagious to humans, so we’re keeping an eye on him. He says to cut him off when he hits 175 pounds—a weight he hasn’t seen since high school. Hey, who hasn’t wanted to drop a few pounds while still being able to eat cookies, chips and ice cream? We call it the hookworm diet. Kidding aside, we’ll keep an eye on him.

And I got a great haircut and color at a hip salon.

We stayed in the Chirripo valley for 4 nights and moved to another, less visited, valley just south of San Isidro for 3 more nights. Here, in one of those interesting twists of timing we met Marcos, a gregarious Costa Rican who immediately befriended us.

He invited us to his house for coffee and then to hike with him towards the south boundary of Parque Nacional Chirripo. We met some of his family, had coffee and orange bread with his wife and father-in-law and hiked to a hidden waterfall with his brother-in-law and nephew.

Marcos is a ring-leader, most happy when keeping many balls in the air. He is full of life and made us feel so welcomed. He understood when we told him we understand more when people speak slowly and we spent a whole day speaking Spanish in a way that helped our skills tremendously.

With all team members whole again and some good R&R under our belts we continued south east, still following the mountains and sleeping as high as possible. We stayed a couple of nights in the San Vito area and then made the border crossing into Panama.

We’ve been in Panama a little over a week. We spent some great time on both sides of Volcan Baru, camping first on a farm high on the less-developed western side and then at a German-run pension/hostel in the more tourist/gringo outpost of Boquete on the eastern side; both were beautiful in their own way. You can probably guess that we liked the western side better for its lack of tourists and more ‘real’ atmosphere.

We then made our way to Panama City and spent several days making arrangements to ship the van to Colombia. We found a nice, well located B&B/hostel with friendly staff and killer air-con to use as our home base while in Panama City and also spent some time being tourists visiting the Canal. We went to a vet and got all of Chettie’s papers updated and she is hookworm-free. Put Mike on the scale at the vet and his weight is holding steady.

We ship the van on Wednesday March 24th and will then fly (with Chettie) to Cartagena and pick up the vehicle on the 25th or 26th. Or at least that’s the plan. As always on a trip like this, there are many moving parts and plans can change for any number of reasons. Send us good thoughts as we work through this phase of our trip. We are really psyched to get to South America.

I am sorry about the lack of pictures....we´ve stayed in places that specifically say they have internet but in reality they have only heard of the internet.....and if there is a connection, posting pictures is clearly beyond the capabilities of the equipment. Our hotel in Panama City that we loved, says they have internet but it wasn´t working the whole time we were there.