is going to be loaded into one of the many ships responsible for shipping thousands of cars around the world in one go. But it took far longer than expected due to the world’s shipping ports being busier than they can handle.

My Honda Beat awaits in Washington State for me to give it a big hug and load it onto a trailer. Its trip across the Pacific Ocean went off without a hitch aboard the roll-on-roll-off vehicle carrier ship Figaro. It left Japan and arrived in Washington right on time. Now all I have to do is pick it up .

My Suzuki Every, on the other hand, is taking far longer. I finally got a solid booking for the ship that will be carrying it and the paperwork that I need to file to warn Customs of my impending kei van invasion.

The export company that I’m working with for the import of my Suzuki, , attributes the delay to the blockage in the Suez Canal, the pandemic and shipments from China making an extremely busy shipping season even worse. Let’s break down these factors.

The pandemic changed the way that people shop. Instead of going out to the local shops to buy goods, people are buying them online. This has led a surge in shipping across the board from postal and Amazon to ocean shipping. Companies that imported goods from China were seeing a bottleneck because manufacturing facilities were shuttered, Quartz . Now, with manufacturing facilities back open and demand soaring, competition to get goods on a ship and across the ocean is fierce. As the New York Times , demand is outstripping the capacity for global shipping to keep up. Shipping experts are alarmed, from the Times:

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Lars Mikael Jensen, head of Global Ocean Network at A.P. Moller-Maersk, the world’s largest shipping company. “All the links in the supply chain are stretched. The ships, the trucks, the warehouses.”

But what does cheap goods from China have to do with cars? Japan Car Direct told me that China is also exporting so many new vehicles overseas that there just isn’t much space on ships for little used cars from Japan like my van.

Then the ‘Ever Given’ got stuck in the Suez Canal, throwing a wrench into an already overloaded system. Now, ships are piling up at port faster than they can be processed and that companies are getting crafty and using airfreight and rail transportation where possible.

In the case of my little Suzuki Every, it took nearly a month just for a shipping company to accept a booking. Then the van ended up missing the boat because there simply wasn’t any room for it. Now, a month after that fiasco, my van finally has a spot on a ship.

It sets sail on the Höegh Trapper on May 19. That’s the giant roll-on-roll-off vessel up at top. Then, hopefully, about a month later I get to pick it up in Baltimore, Maryland.

What this also means is that I now have the documentation that I need to make sure Customs is happy. When the forms are accepted, you’ll get to read exactly how I did it!

Let this be a warning. If you want to buy a car from Japan right now, you may have to wait even longer than you expect.

More on auto shipping from G/O Media’s partner:

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