So, it all came down to this. I turned the key, watched the dash lights come up and listened for the faint whine of the ABS. “It lives”, I said, then smiled at Jo and pressed the starter. The engine cranked, then caught, then died, then caught, then grumbled and finally banged into life. We were dehydrated and hot but suddenly we were happy. Suddenly, we were really off on another adventure.

We had spent hours walking the little city of David to find the office to sell us the insurance we needed before we could reclaim Elephant but, once we had found the place, buying insurance had been simple. We then spent hours mucking about in offices at the Aduana (Customs), but everyone was friendly and helpful and the Elephant was recovered without drama and at a very reasonable price. Even fitting the new battery we had purchased in Panama City was straightforward but tedious in the hot mid-day sun. But being a little tedious is fine by us when we get what we need.

With Elephant running, we still had one more day in David to get sorted. Elephant needed new engine oil after sitting for eight months and I left Jo to do some route planning and went looking for a place to do the job. A few questions later I got directions to a workshop on the outskirts of town where the owners rolled a bike they were working on off one of their hoists to give me somewhere to work, then promptly lent a hand to get the job done.

We changed the oil in the engine and final drive, fitted new spark plugs, then I stripped off the front brake callipers to replace the pads. It was then I discovered that the pads, pads provided  by the “world renowned” BMW experts at a specialist shop in the UK, were the wrong pads for this bike. The callipers and old pads went back on along with my grumpy face, but not for long. In the big scheme of things this was a minor issue. We will find more pads somewhere before we run out of brakes and the friendliness and helpfulness of our hosts deserved more than my ill humour.

The next morning we spent a few hours in a gentle comedy of errors trying to remember how everything packed onto the bike. We then donated the two suitcases we no longer needed to carry our riding gear to the hotel staff. We had bought them in David eight months previously to get our riding gear home so they were back to where they belonged with a few air miles logged.

With everything in place we rode off on a short shake-down tour. Our destination was the town of Boquete located at about 1100 metres altitude and about an hour from David. It was high enough to keep the temperature cool and the rain constant but this was a pleasant change from the stifling heat of David.

The town was originally settled by Swiss coffee growers, although a later wave of Yugoslavs added a little twist to the ethnic mix. These days, it is a place for Americans to buy or build holiday homes or seek refuge from whatever it is they are avoiding north of the border. We had a couple of days in the mountains and probably could have stayed longer but the task this week has been to test Elephant and revive our travel routines. We packed, rolled off the mountain and headed down to the coast.

A short tour of the Azuero Peninsula on the Pacific southern coast confirmed that Elephant is running well enough but is in need of a throttle body balance and adjustment so we pushed up into the mountains closer to Panama City and found digs in the town of El Valle. El Valle is a classical “hill town”, a place where the wealthy have a holiday house in the cool mountains away from the torpid climate of Panama City. It is a good place to end our shake-down week and take a day to make some final adjustments to Elephant.

On Tuesday we ride back to Panama City to find some brake pads before riding south to San Blas, a rendezvous with a sailing ship and a passage to Colombia. It seems all good to us.