Slow boat from China

Earlier today I checked with the Chinese supplier to see if there’s any news on the shipping of my mini excavator and he told me that it has now been shipped. I asked how long it would take for it to get to Marseille as I need to start making arrangements to clear it through French customs and pick it up from the port and he said it would be about 50 days.

I was quite surprised by this as I thought it would only take something over 20 days, 30 at most, so I thought I’d do some checks. The port closest to the supplier’s factory is Qingdao and when I did a detailed search I found that all of the shipments from there go first to Singapore and then the long way round to Marseille via the Cape of Good Hope and not via the Suez Canal. That means they take quite a bit longer.

On delving in a bit more deeply I found that it takes 7 days 20 hours to get to Singapore, 5 days 6 hours to make a ship to ship transfer, then 33 days and 23 hours with 2 stops in Spain to get to Marseille. This means that the shortest shipment time is 47 days 2 hours and the longest 52 days 23 hours, thus confirming what the supplier told me. So that’s it then. It’ll be another 7 weeks, say end of February, before it even arrives on French soil and then there’ll be a delay of another few days for it to clear customs before I can collect it. I guess I’ll just have to be patient until at least the first week in March in that case 🙁