Look, look, looook……. a new map of all our favourite bits of South America! Zoom in, scroll around, click on the links! If you’re itching to find out how we came to have such a fab new South America highlights map on our website, and how Cuthbert came to have such beautiful new brakes… read on below 🙂
New Brakes and More Parts
New brakes surgery in the campsite work-shop
Okay… we know… it’s been a bit quiet on the blog front recently. We’ve been holed-up in Medellin, Colombia for a whole month now. Regulars may recall that over two months ago we ordered some spare parts from Iveco for Cuthbert maintenance. Well… the parts arrived in Medellin two weeks late, but at reasonable prices – the same as we would have paid in Europe with no shipping or import fees added. Can’t complain!
Down-town workshop
At a great campsite of Al Bosque just outside Medellin, Marcus cracked-on with the truck maintenance, so Cuthbert is now the proud owner of new front and rear brakes (discs, pads, drums and shoes), new universal joints in the front axle, new front shock-absorbers, new bushes in the rear anti-roll bar and a new aircon condenser. Phew! The work was relatively straight-forward (well… straight-forward if you know about that kind of stuff 🙂 ) but there were a few of the old bits that refused to come apart. Our 4 ton jack/press couldn’t press the hub from the wheel bearing. So we borrowed a 10 ton jack/press from another overlander, but that wasn’t up to the task either. We ended up spending three days schlepping swivel-hubs and nefarious truck parts by bus and taxi to a workshop down-town Medellin; a 100 ton press finally did the trick!
New Map and More Time
Meanwhile… there’s only so much shopping and sight-seeing to be done in Medellin… so I did a bit of messing around on our website and found a WordPress plug-in to create this rather stylish new map. Given my limited IT skills, I’m rather proud of this! It has icons, links, photos, videos and all-sorts!! Please have a zoom in, scroll around, click on the links and let us know what you think… always room for improvement 🙂 (credit for the snazzy little icon designs goes to Maps Icons Collection, https://mapicons.mapsmarker.com).
What else? Oh yes… we also used our time in Medellin to extend our entry-permits and the vehicle temporary import permit (TIP). Colombia gave us 90 days on arrival which has almost expired, so now with the extension have can stay another 90 days. The personal permits were pretty quick and easy (once we had mastered the compulsory on-line application process), but the TIP took a whole week to arrange. Good job we weren’t in a hurry!
Anyway… now that we have almost become permanent residents of the Al Bosque campsite and familiar faces in the local hostelry, it’s time to move on. Just got to decide where to go now…