In Santiago, looking for some help with bike purchase
 

Hey guys,

Just arrived in Santiago, and want to start the process (as outlined in a couple of threads) of buying a bike here. Probably sticking with the Honda CGL 125 (I know, I know, "real" bikers are now shaking their heads...) - cheap to buy, easy maintenance, I'm not very experienced with bikes at all ...etc. I would love to go to 200/250cc but prices seem to jump a lot doing this, or the options is a far less reliable Chinese bike, or second hand with no guarantee of reliability (and as I said, I'm not very experienced with bikes).

Anyway, with my Spanish not being the best I would love to find someone local who could help me out with all that I need to do, happy to pay for their services ...etc.

Anyone know of anyone, or maybe a bike shop that helped them out a lot?

Cheers,
Dave

Dave,

what are your plans? do you just want to use the bike in town and in the surroundings of santiago, or do you intent to travel and leave chile with the bike?

If you want to travel, you can buy my kawasaki KLR650. I bought the bike brand new in Calgary in october '11. the bike has now 29.000km on the counter is in perfect technical condition, equiped with ortlieb softbags, additional tools and spare parts etc and is ready to go. The bike has a canadian registration and if you take the bike with you out of the country you don´t have to deal much with any paper work. you will just get a notary document that you are the new owner and will export the bike, that´s it.

to be honest, I would trust that used KLR to travel arround the world, but I would be affraid to visit really remote places with a cheap chinese bike. I don´t know the price of the chinese bike, but I will leave you my KLR for a good price which you can expect to get back any time when you sell the bike in the US or somewhere else, after finishing your trip.

best regards
Christian

Plenty of folks have flown into South America to buy a small motorcycle for touring. Here are a couple of good threads to get you started:

http://www.horizonsunlimited.com/hub...santiago-45637

http://www.horizonsunlimited.com/hub...le-chile-45175

Yep, know of those threads, I would just feel more comfortable if someone with more Spanish than I was helping me out.

Hey deeve I am actually struggeling with the same problem as you have. Let me know if you make progress If you want we can meet for a coffee/beer to check things out together. However my spanish is bad as well. See you

Chris, you must have noticed how old this thread is??

And I did manage to purchase a bike with minimal Spanish, and wrote all about it here: http://www.horizonsunlimited.com/hub...hile-non-63372