Today I had a little mishap with the bike. I rode to Roldanillo, the next town over to go paragliding. Roldanillo is apparently one of the best places in the world to do it and people come from all over to do it there. So for $40 I wasn’t going to miss out. I parked the motorcycle in front of the main plaza and went paragliding. The paragliding was great, if not a bit questionable on the qualifications. When I returned my bike was gone. I did a couple laps around the plaza thinking I forgot where I parked it. The employees at the pharmacy across the street called me over and told me the police had impounded my bike for being “illegally parked.” It’s hard to say exactly what that means when motorcycles are parked literally everywhere but oh well. I then began the arduous process of getting it back from impound.

The pharmacists told me to go to the impound lot. When I got there, the police told me that I had to go to the transit office first to do the paperwork. I needed to make copies of all of my documents and take them to the transit office. But of course the office was closed until 2. So I sat around for a couple of hours and waited for it to open. At 2 I went to the transit office where they told me I had to wait for them to bring the daily report of impounded vehicles. That wouldn’t be until 3 or 3:30. So I sat outside the office for another hour waiting for the report. It finally came and after filling out a bunch of paperwork they stamped my papers and sent me back to the impound lot. At the impound lot I paid a 60,000 peso fee ($15-20 USD) and they finally gave me my bike back. Fortunately the fee wasn’t much, but I wasted an entire day sitting around waiting for the crushing gears of bureaucracy to turn.

Guess I’ll be more careful where I park from now on. The only highlight of this experience was that the pharmacists were very friendly and walked me through the whole process of what to do and continued to check in on me throughout the day to make sure everything worked out.