Is That A Nepal I Can See?

Why? Just why was there a bleeping noise emanating from the TV? Oh yes, I remembered… we had to get up and make sure that we didn’t have a repeat of the Terracotta Warriors day when we overslept massively. It was 4:00am and we needed to get our stuff together and be checking out by 4:45am. This shouldn’t have been a problem, but the girl on the 24 hour check-out desk was clearly sound asleep when we rocked up and sparked her into consciousness. She somehow got the bill wrong so had to re-do it which took up valuable minutes. We had pre-booked a taxi for 5:00am and needed to make sure that we got it as there didn’t seem to be much out and about on the streets of Xi’An at that time in the morning.

We got the taxi with time to spare and bombed through the empty streets on our way to Terminal 3 of the airport. It was a new airport and thankfully not too busy at that time in the morning. No problems with tickets or security so we headed through to the waiting lounge where I managed to catch a few z’s before we boarded the plane. The plan was to listen to a few tunes and maybe catch up on my book but we both spent 98% of the journey sound asleep. In case you were wondering, the other 2% was eating the snack laid on by the airline.

Nice new airport......nice!

We had a lay-over in Kunming airport for about 4 hours whilst we waited for our onwards flight into Kathmandu. The bonus of the wait was that I found an almost fresh deck of cards, but the 7 of Diamonds is slightly marked, so it will serve as an emergency deck as and when mine finally disintegrate through over-use.

We landed in Kathmandu and adjusted our clocks accordingly – bizarrely, they are 5 hours and 45 minutes ahead of the UK, so as not to confuse them with India who are 6 hours ahead. We had to get our visa for Nepal on arrival in the airport and it took me three attempts to complete the document, mainly because I couldn’t spell my own name (I was still half asleep). Then we had to queue up and pay $25 to the visa man and then return to the back of the queue to go to the visa issuing officer who was sat next to the money collector. It was madness and took ages before we finally got through and claimed our bags. We were getting picked up by the hotel and there would be a chap waiting outside for us with a sign saying “James Gray” which made us feel like celebrities.

It was a bit of a melee outside the airport but we found our guy and made our way to his taxi. As we did another chap picked up my bag and carried it to the taxi where the driver was waiting. They dumped the bags in the back and then told us that the driver worked on tips and we needed to pay him now, in English money. We made our excuses and jumped in the taxi. They were still trying to get us to pay the man as he began to drive of, with the doors of the car still open. It was only about 20 minutes to the hotel but it took about an hour or so, due to a manic traffic jam at a cross-roads just down from the airport. It was hot, dusty, loud and we were knackered so it was a blessed relief to arrive at the Peak Point hotel just before 6:00pm.

First impressions weren’t great as it was down a back street and we were given a double room instead of a twin, but for one night we didn’t mind – they would be sorting out the deluxe twin for the next day. So, unable to fully unpack or get a wash on the go we decided to go out for a wander and see what grub we could get, whilst being wary of the dreaded First Night syndrome.

The "balcony"

We found a place that seemed just what we were after, if a little on the pricey side of things, but this was our first night so we were used to taking a hit in the wallet. The music wasn’t really suited to the place, a non-stop drone of background trance music. As we tucked into our Gorkha beers (with unknown alcohol quantity) we waited for our pizza and pasta to arrive. James’s pizza was first, after a lengthy wait, and I continued to anticipate my pasta with gusto. I would have to wait a little longer for my dish as after about 5 minutes after James had begun to devour his nosh there was a power-cut. We had heard that these were pretty frequent in Nepal but didn’t think that we would get one within the first couple of hours of being there! A great cheer went up as all the lights went off, but I remained quiet and rolled my eyes in the dark – this had the feel of the time in Krabi when the gas bottle ran out before they had cooked my meal. Thankfully the lights came back on quickly, presumably from a generator round the back, and my teeny tiny bowl of pasta turned up shortly after. After they tried to add on two coffees (that we didn’t order) and then added the statutory 10% service and 13% VAT charge we were ready to get the heck out of there and choose a better place for our next time out in Kathmandu.