Day 169 (11km): Sorting out the bikes

We had made arrangements to phone BMW to see how the bikes were doing. We had also asked them to quote us a price for new rear tires (ours are dead) and sprockets and chains. So when we phoned we discovered that sprockets and chains would cost $450 CAD (each set) and the only tires they had (Anakee 2s) were also a whopping $400 CAD each. That just won't do.

We got them to complete the service on our bikes but we're going to source our parts elsewhere. We phoned another moto shop and they could only get us street style tires as well (super expensive). They told us that Northern Argentina wasn't getting any tire deliveries so tires were hard to come by. Weird. So we gave up on tires and focused on chains.

Our bikes were going to be ready for pick-up today so we took a cab back into town to the Honda dealer where we were going to buy chains. The ones they had in stock were 200 CAD each. The Honda dealer was a block away from the tiny moto shop we had stopped at yesterday so we did some checking around before caving for the expensive chains.

Before the familiar moto shop there was another tiny moto shop. Alberto stopped in there and I went to the one from the day before, called Motos Parra Team - Jose V. Zapata 344. He had two chains the size we needed but with more links than we needed. He also had tires the size we needed and with a tread pattern we liked. They are random no-name tires from Thailand but I'm sure they'll get us back to Peru which is really all we care about. The other shop Alberto was at could get us Pirelli MT60s but at over $200 CAD each that was crazy. We can buy those same tires in Peru for $50 CAD. So we went with the two chains and random tires from Motos Parra Team and our total came to $265 CAD for everything, almost half the cost of one tire from BMW. While the random tires did seem a bit more expensive than I would normally pay for a no-name tire he had them in stock and our tires are bald. Beggars can't be choosers. The guy who we talked to in the shop has an Africa Twin and he uses the same tires on his bike. That was good enough for us.

So we took off in a cab with our new found goodies to BMW. We picked up our bikes and drove back to Carolina's house. All in all, a surprisingly successful day.

The only reason we brought our bikes into a dealer is because for the 30k service the front fork oil needs to changed. This is something we weren't going to do on our own. Everything else is irrelevant cause we got new engines just a little while ago (plus all the other stuff we can do ourselves anyways). When we picked up the bikes we discovered that nothing was even done with the front fork oil. Whatever, I'm really sick of dealing with BMW dealers in Latin America. We asked them about our weird sounding engines. The mechanic thinks a chain in the engine wasn't tightened properly when they were installed. It's not critical so we can have it looked at by qualified people in Canada.