Day 1 - Highlights
- UAE to Nepal (By air on Air Arabia, 4 hours flight)
- Overnight at Kathmandu
- Lost our luggage and then found it later at night
- Essentials purchased that we couldnt find in UAE
- Bazaars and shops are total rip offs
- Bargaining at its peak
- Next days flight to Lukla only got finalized close to mid-night
Detailed Unedited Entry for Day 1
DAY1 - Desperation
Our adventure has started as the check-in counter at the airport just told us that my friend who is traveling on a Pakistani passport cannot board a flight to Kathmandu without a visa. My research clearly stated that it is possible and all the more there wonât be any visa fee for SAARC countries residents. We are being sent to the managerâs room, we enter there and see a young man sitting behind the counter I started to talk to him in general and created some connection with him before telling him the problem, it always helps. Then was the time to tell him the problem and thatâs exactly what I did. Once told he promised to help us out. He came out with us to the counter and spoke to many people and finally checked us in provisionally, and told us to wait for one hour for clearance. Now we are roaming around at the airport confused. However the wait was not long as someone came and told us to come and collect our boarding pass and go through the check in. We are sitting at Caribou coffee now and are enjoying our cappuccino, excited about our trip. After that we walked through the duty free shops and just bought a chocolate box for our guide in Nepal. Since we are traveling on a low cost career, there are no meals on the flight. Therefore we have bought the biggest burger McDonaldâs offers and that is in our day pack to enjoy it onboard.
Stuff carried along (I'll post the list later on)
Flight announcement came and now we are sitting in the plane waiting for it to fly. Flight is on time and has left without any hiccups. It is going to be a four hour flight to Kathmandu. We will reach there by 1:30pm to have the rest of the day for us to shop for some essential items that we couldnât buy in Dubai. Itâs been two hours on the flight so we are having our delicious burger with coke. Everyone seems to be envious of us as they are either not having anything or are stuck with ordering the Pokka readymade noodles from the flight attendants. We have finished eating and are waiting for the flight to reach KTH. After some time we noticed some beautiful scenery on the left hand side, luckily we are sitting on the left hand side of the plane and will be enjoying this Himalayan scenery till we reach KTH. Clicking loads of photos after changing the regular lens to the 300mm lens on my SLR. Iâm sure that the mountains visible are very high probably all the 8000ers Nepal has but am unable to name them in my pictures. Iâll have to ask some expert for that.
A smooth landing and here we are in the terminal welcomed by a very nice and graceful lady. She just took our passports and is guiding us everywhere, from filling forms to taking us to the right counters. I was right as they are not charging any fee for SAARC passport but are charging $25 on my Canadian passport. Smooth exit to the luggage room which is totally jam packed and is quite chaotic. After waiting for 2 hours we just discovered that the luggage on the belts is from yesterdayâs flight due to some hiccup it didnât come with the flight. So we are in line for the receipt of not receiving our luggage. The guy is telling us to check at 10:30pm on the next flight and hopefully our luggage would be there. This is not a good start for us as we are flying to Lukla tomorrow morning to start our hike. Just got the file number and left the terminal where we are welcomed by Thakur our guide.
Enjoying our cofee
Find the mistake!
He took us to their old Toyota Corolla 1998 model. We are going towards the hotel now. It is a bad traffic time as all the streets are crowded and traffic is jammed. After an hour we are finally in our room at Thamel Eco Resort. Thamel is the set of streets and bazaars where most of the tourists stay. All the shops try to rip off the poor travelers and everyone knows it. It all depends on how good a bargainer you are to get the best possible price for anything. There are statues of Goddesses and other holly stuff for Hindus and Buddhists. Other than that we noticed the most prominent statues every shop carrying are the Kama Sutra. I donât feel right about it though and consider that vulgar to be openly sold and displayed at almost all the shops.
Anyhow the hotel is nice and has a small garden in the center court. That is the only Eco thing about this hotel but the rest is just like any other hotel. We were happy to come to this one to support the Green concept; at least we did our bit.
Here Thakur revealed that his company has not been registered and he just has a website, however we needed to register our Emergency Travel Insurance with some company as that is the requirement of Columbus Insurance (UK) in case they have to arrange our pickup from the high altitude if need be. So we asked him to take us to his other company (through which he usually works) so that this problem could be sorted out. He seems to be reluctant but agrees to do that finally. We are sitting in his company office filling in the details etc. We requested them to arrange the local SIMs and credit for us to be used in our stay in Nepal. This is done and the insurance is registered as well. We are in the streets looking for the required stuff going from one shop to another. Everyone is a rip off and give highly inflated prices. Shopping is done and we are having our first meal with Chana Masala and Daal Bhat (famous Nepali food that they have every day for lunch and dinner) in a restaurant named as Mac Donald.
Thakur was renting some dirty sleeping bags for us but we just told him to get better ones. We shopped around and have found brand new sleeping bags on rent less than the price he was paying at the previous shop. So both the parties are happy with this arrangement.
We are sitting in the hotel and trying to sort out the misunderstanding Thakur has create about the total payment. Luckily I brought the emails conversation print outs with me and that has cleared the air. Thakur is doing some drama of âOh I gave you the wrong price etc.â, this is making us really confused and unhappy. But we have limited numbers of days and we canât afford to lose even one day. Hence we are sticking with Thakur even if we donât want that any more; otherwise we could have gone to find some other company and guide. We have just paid him so that he could get the dollars converted into rupees.
Now it is time to go to the airport to try our luck for our luggage, Thakur left for his home. Taxi is arranged by the hotel staff, they are really nice and smiling people. Normally it is Rs300 one way but it is night time and it is âThamelâ so we are paying Rs 1200 for the return trip. We found our luggage at the airport right away. We are very happy and are all set to go to Lukla next morning. We called Thakur who told us that he has cancelled our flight; Iâm very upset as he didnât ask us about it and I explicitly prompted him not to make any changes in the plan until we call him at night. He promised to get back after reinstating the tickets. We are very confused and angry right now, and are getting obstacles one after another. We received his call to get ready 6am as everything is in order after 30 minutes.
Back in the hotel and are charging our camera batteries etc. and are excited about our flight to Lukla the next morning. Everything has fallen in place after a bit of hiccup.
By the way Kathmandu and Lukla are considered to be the most dangerous airports in the world due to their difficult locations and track record of failed flights. Many people have lost their lives at these places and this thing was making our families nervous when we started our journey.
