After we decided to start island hopping through Indonesia, we ultimately decided (and committed) to ship our motorbike from Dili, Timor Leste or Darwin, Australia. There wasn't much information about shipping but we had heard of a few people successfully shipping. The shipping companies were not very responsive via email so we decided to punt trying to organize it until we arrived in Dili.
East Timor is an odd/fascinating place...
Quick history blip: Timor Leste was colonized by the Portuguese so one of the two main languages is Portuguese but once they gained independence from Portugal, Indonesia occupied their land. The Indonesians did not help the country, rather they tore it apart with violence (killing and sexual violence), slavery, and other horrible things. In the late 1990s, the UN helped back Timor Leste in essentially a revolution and in the end, they gained full independence from Indonesia in 2002. The Indonesians burned and destroyed their cities so the country is still in the process of rebuilding.
Present day: The country feels very, very 3rd world with very little infrastructure between cities/villages. Everything is quite expensive for what you get and their local currency is USD (odd). We would pay around $8 for a meal that wasn't very good and when comparing it to Indonesia, we would have paid around $1.50 for something similar.
Back to the bike and shipping- after chatting with a few different shipping companies, we decided to go with one called ANL, they had the best price and easiest process. The morning of cleaning and putting Domino in the container for shipping, our bike wouldn't start so we tried jumping it 4 times and it still didn't work. The ship yard was about 3 miles (5 km) away so we decided to push it since organizing a tow would take much longer than pushing it 3 miles. We accepted we would have an exhausting day and started to push. After pushing the bike about a quarter mile on dirt roads with multiple bumps and humps, we spotted a mechanic shop and decided to try to jump it one more time. Thankfully, it worked! We don't really know what is going on with the bike but thankfully it started and we could easily get to the ship yard so we could start cleaning and load the container!
Throughout the day, we cleaned every inch of Domino. We took off the wheels to scrub every inch of them, power washed and scrubbed the entire body, scrubbed individual screws, cleaned the inside and outside, and did it all again because Australia is very very strict about bringing in a speck of dirt since they do not want to bring in any bio organisms that are not native to Australia. The photos below are our journey throughout the day of prepping and dropping off Domino.
Right before we started pushing the bike to the shipping container yard:
Emptied the gas tank completely and disconnected the battery so that we could ship as "non-dangerous goods":
Power washing everything multiple times:
Soap, scrub, rinse, repeat (Austin's shirt got smaller and smaller throughout the day, haha):
Our container, yahoo!
Shifting containers around (can you see Domino in the container?):
We had to switch containers because our initial container was a little dirty, we did not want to risk the Australian's saying it was too dirty because then we have to pay an expensive fee for them to clean it in quarantine:
Cleaning out the container itself:
Success - all clean and ready to go!
