Notes on buying a small motorbike in Peru (as a foreigner)

My shiney new bike on the day I picked it up.

I really wanted to buy a second hand “big 4″ bike (i.e. Honda, Suzuki, Kawasaki, Yamaha) but they are, comparatively, really expensive (higher prices than the states !). I was only intending to buy a small one (125cc to 250cc) but found the second hand market almost impossible to access. What I found in the end was that, in Peru, people generally buy brand new and then run into the ground ! I saw very, very few second hand bikes, the few that I saw (3) were not in good condition and the owners wanted a few hundred bucks less than the brand new price (for a 5 year old bike !), wholly unrealistic !

And so I looked to the many cheap Chinese variants that are available brand new.

I settled for an “RTM 150 G”, the second cheapest bike I could find at $672. RTM (or "tecnimotors")  claimed to be the No1 seller of Chinese bikes in Peru, 9% of all bikes sold (that has to be reassuring).

http://www.tecnimotors.com/

The buying process was quite straightforward, I needed a Peruvian address (I used my hotel´s address without the first line (name of the hotel)). I was told I needed a “Carnet de Extranjería”, I thought I´d try my luck without, and was successful (the Carnet normally costs $50 and at least 1/2 a day´s bureaucratic effort). A ”Noteria” (lawyer) has to contersign the contract between the “Garage” and myself, he asked for the “Carnet de Extranjería”, but settled for my passport instead. There was a delay of just 11 days for SUNARP (Peruvian vehicle registration authority) to produce the “Tarjeta de Propiedad” (which, fortunately, they sent straight to the garage) and I was all set. Actually, I wasn´t ! only the AAP (Asociacion Automotriz del Peru) can produce the number plate, and because of a 3 day national holiday, that was a further 7 day wait.

In Peru you need SOAT insurance (statutory 3rd party insurance) for a Peruvian registered vehicle, they ask for it at every police check point. Annoyingly, this is cheap for cars and expensive for bikes. The standard is around 550 to 650 soles for a year (approx $200) for a bike. I went to "La Positiva" in Lima and got 3 months for 300 soles ($ 105), they would not give me any less time, I only really needed about one months SOAT.

That’s all there is to say except when I tried to leave Peru ! Foreigners are not allowed to leave Peru on Peruvian plated vehicles without posting a “non-returnable bond” (an oxymoron surely?) of around $300. I did not want to pay that much for a piece of paper I´d never need again ! So I bribed my way out at the border (Yungayo), which cost me $38 (and a very sweaty 2 hours !) one day later.

The rather beautiful part of Lima where the garage was...