Has anyone know the cost of shipping from cancun, mexico to LA - we are in an unfortuante situation where we has lost one rider due to medical reason and have an extra bike we need to get out of mexico. Anyone want to buy a good 95 honda xr650l, we are starting to get desperate.

Two suggestions:

1) Contact a household moving company such as Allied Van Lines, etc. (read today that Allied Van Lines shipped 8,800 motorcycles in North America last year), and;

2) Try to find a charter air carrier that flies from LA to an airport near where your motorcycle is. Then call them and ask what they would charge to bring the motorcycle back on a standby (space available, not time critical) basis. The price might be surprisingly low - it only cost me US$ 900 to ship a 350 kg Honda ST1100 from Canada to France this summer, by air.

If the airline you find flying that route has widebody aircraft (e.g. B-767, DC-10, A-330), then the bike could just be strapped on a simple wooden pallet and shipped like that. You'll need to have less than a gallon of gas in it, and the battery disconnected. If they only fly large narrowbody aircraft (e.g. large single aisle aircraft, e.g. A-320, B-757) you might have to take the front wheel off, to get the overall height low enough that the bike fits into the plane. If they only fly smaller narrowbodies that are not designed to handle palletized cargo (e.g. DC-9, B-727) you might be out of luck.

Used motorcycles are classified as 'dangerous goods' for air freight, but there is a very straightforward set of instructions for both you and the airline to follow that explain how to pack it. It is packing instruction 900 from the IATA DGR (Dangerous Goods Regulations) book.

Just a postscript - considering that the bike is 7 years old, and a dirt bike, and you are not in a hurry to get it back - why not just contact any commercial trucking company that serves the Cancun - Southern CA market, and ask them?

If you are going through the yellow pages or some other business directory in search of a trucking company, look for a company that uses the letters LTL in their advertisment - this stands for 'less than truckload', meaning, they consolodate smaller loads from different shippers together. You would need to get the gasoline out of it, but you probably would not need to worry about the battery.

I'm interested, please send me a mail to paul.mont@infinito.it with all details and price. Thanks !

If it's still for sale, after almost 11 years, imagine how desperate they now must be....