We've bought a campervan!!!

Yay!  We bought the Fiat Ducato!  We asked Mario to make Salvatore an offer thinking meh, and somehow Mario convinced him to accept!!  I literally (ha Marcus!) can't believe it.  Mario had put our offer forward last night and told Salvatore to sleep on it.  This morning he was on and off the phone to Salvatore for about 2 hours until about 9am, when he finally told us he'd managed to persuade him!  He says one of our big advantages was being able to pay up front, whereas he'd normally expect to be paid in a couple of instalments.  

Cue about 5 hours of stressing over how to get the money over from the UK asap.  Luckily, Salvatore was happy for us to transfer to him rather than have us get the cash out.  But we thought a money wiring service would be better than simply doing an international bank transfer, as the exchange rate would be better.  Unfortunately it turns out no one deals in Chilean pesos, so we'd have to send sterling and leave the exchange rate up to the Chilean bank.  That's how our own bank does it, so we just did the international bank transfer.  For info, we use First Direct.  They charge £25 to send the money and we had to call them over the phone to do it, we couldn't do it over the internet.  Their call centre is open 24/7 anyway, so we had no problems - Salvatore even let us use his office phone to make the call!  He was also able to find out what exchange rate his bank would use, so we could transfer a precise amount.

Salvatore was also happy to transfer ownership to us straight away, despite not having the money yet!  It's a bit more complicated here than sending off a slip of paper to the DVLA.  We had to go to a notary to set up a contract agreeing transfer of ownership.  

This involved Salvatore getting together a load of documents including one saying the vehicle has no outstanding fines and another confirming he is the owner.  We also needed to present a passport and a Chilean tax number which we got when we first arrived (RUT).  Unfortunately there was a discrepancy whereby the notary couldn't confirm on the computer system that Salvatore had paid the import tax when he brought the camper over from Germany.  So we need to go to another notary tomorrow (Thursday 26th) to complete the process.  He's shown us the paperwork that says he did pay said tax, so we're not worried about that.

Another minor hitch is that the equivalent of the DVLA here has been on strike for about a month already, so we can't actually get the documents confirming we own the vehicle yet.  (The Registro Civil also processes passports etc, meaning Javier can't leave the country until god knows when because his passport has expired!)  It also means we need a letter written by the notary and signed by Salvatore saying he authorises us to take the vehicle out of the country - so we have got three embossed, stamped, signed and fingerprinted copies of that!

Tomorrow morning it should officially be ours!

Paul took the opportunity to confirm that the permanent bed is long enough for him.

Salvatore has invited us to have lunch with him tomorrow once we've got the paperwork done.  Then Mario has offered to take us shopping for all the bits we need - kitchenware, bedding, a hydraulic jack and that stuff you inject in to a flat tyre so you can still drive on it!  And he's going to fix a couple of little things that need sorting, and teach us how to change the fan belt!!  Honestly, we have been so spoilt by Mario.  I have no idea how we'd have bought a campervan without him.  Paul has already said he would not recommend going through the process to anyone!