Ralex International Corporation is an air and ocean freight forwarder that serves customers in the Caribbean and Central and South America. A freight forwarder helps a customer by arranging to move goods from one place to another easily and quickly. Unlike APL, which has a fleet of ships that travel all over the world, a freight forwarder such as Ralex does not provide the ships, trains, or planes that actually move the goods. Instead, a freight forwarder makes all the arrangements to ship the goods, working with shipping companies such as APL or with airlines to keep the goods moving.

Ralex specializes in moving perishable goods (such as food) from one place to another by air, making it easy for a customer to get valuable food products to market. Ralex will also pick up goods from a customer's factory or warehouse, store them in its own warehouse if needed, take care of all the Customs paperwork needed to get goods past the borders of another country, and even deliver the goods to their final destination at a warehouse or a store.

Reinol has worked in the freight forwarding industry for 12 years, and has handled thousands of different shipments. He negotiates contracts with ocean carriers (such as APL) and with airlines to carry the shipments his company handles. He travels around the region to meet with his customers and make sure they are receiving good service. And he meets with people who might become customers, to explain what Ralex does and why freight forwarding could help them.

As you can probably imagine, Reinol's job is filled with challenges. Each shipment must be carefully tracked and managed, but even then something can always go wrong… and then, it's Reinol's job to fix it!

A few years ago, for instance, a famous hamburger company in Chile was doing a promotion in South America. The company had asked Ralex to ship the buns for its burgers, five full containers worth. The vessel the buns were on was supposed to arrive in Valparaiso, Chile, by December 30th, but due to bad weather in Peru the vessel was delayed. This created an enormous problem, and could have put the company's whole promotion in jeopardy. After all, how could they sell their burgers with no buns?

Luckily, Reinol was able to step in and help. He had carefully tracked the containers and knew exactly where the hamburger buns were the whole time. Since the buns would not be able to make it to Valparaiso by ship on time, Reinol thought, maybe he could get the buns there by another method. That's just what he did!

He arranged to have the five containers full of buns unloaded at Iquique, a port located close to Peru. From there, the containers were hauled by truck to Santiago, Chile. The buns arrived in time, the burger promotion was a success, and the customer was happy with the service it had received.

That's all in a day's work for Reinol. It's just a good thing he knows the ports in Central and South America so well. Can you locate all the ports named in this article?