Everything is just a little harder when you're in a foreign country. Going to the grocery store, the laundromat or the gas station all present their own challenges at first, but eventually you become accustomed to how things work. Getting in a car wreck and dealing with the aftermath are in a league of their own. We've been navigating the mysterious world of Mexican car insurance for the past couple of weeks and I think we're finally getting somewhere.
We've been trying to get our hands on this magical piece of paper called a “Sipac”. It's what you hand to the repair shop that authorizes them to do the repairs and they know they'll get paid for them. The insurance adjuster for the other driver (who was determined to be at fault) gave this piece of paper to our adjuster. Knowing that the repairs could take weeks, we asked him if it would be possible to have the repairs done in La Paz as opposed to Ensenada. La Paz is much warmer this time of year and close to nice beaches. We figured it wouldn't be a bad place to be “stuck” for a while. He told us this would be fine and that he would arrange it so we could show up in La Paz and have the repairs done.
We took our time, not wanting to rush through Baja, but we stayed in contact with both insurance companies along the way. When we got to La Paz a few weeks later it took us several days to even get someone to meet us in person. That is when we found out that that magical piece of paper should have been given to us in the first place. Instead it's sitting 18 hours away, somewhere near Ensenada. Surprisingly, our insurance company offered to overnight it to us. It was a Friday, and they said it would get there Saturday, but things tend to move a little slower down here, so we were skeptical that it would even show up by Monday. And it didn't. We had been staying at a really nice RV park in town to be close to the insurance office, but at this point we were fed up and needed some beach time. With Christmas coming up that week we figured that even if the sipac did show up, nothing would happen until the following week anyway. So we headed about 30 minutes out of town to Playa Tecolote.
Tecolote is a long stretch of white sand and beautiful blue water with a few restaurants at one end and plenty of free camping at the other. It was just what we needed to sooth our frayed nerves after a fruitless week dealing with insurance companies.
