Dubai to Kathmandu (11/04/19)
Travel day! Getting to the airport was super easy since I could just ride the metro straight there, but finding my gate was another issue. The Dubai airport has three terminals and two of them are accessible straight from the metro, but the third can only be reached via taxi. Unfortunately, that third terminal handles international flights so I got stuck with semi-panicked taxi ride after being bounced around between several attendants who didn’t know where my flight was.
Once I was in the correct terminal it was super easy to find my gate and about four hours later I landed in Kathmandu, Nepal! You don’t have to get a visa ahead of time for Nepal and can just do it on arrival, so that’s what I did and boy was it a struggle. There were only a few terminals open since I landed at like 9pm and it took foreeeeeever to get my documents, get them approved, get rupees (the local currency, btw its like 110 rupees to a dollar so I’m pretty sure I’m going to have an absolutely stuffed wallet since their bills don’t go very high), and then pay for the whole process in cash. But all things considered it wasn’t actually all that bad, just took a while.
My hostel for this week was kind enough to offer a complementary airport taxi, so after making him wait for an hour to get my visa, I met up with my driver and he drove me over. We chatted about travel and he gushed about how great Nepal is besides the roads. Which I can understand since they are currently all unpaved dirt without any traffic lights. (I later found out this was because the 8.0 magnitude earthquake in 2015 destroyed pretty much all their infrastructure and its being slowly rebuilt.) He also told me that Nepal is still a primarily agricultural nation so it will be very different than Dubai. Which is good, since I was honestly tired of how faceless and one-dimensional Dubai felt.
Turns out that my selection of hostel was spot-on! The owner used to be trekking guide, so once we arrived the owner and I drew up some plans for my time here. The plan is to get a tour of Kathmandu tomorrow, meet with a trekking guide in the evening, and then go for a four day trek. In total it was going to run about $700, which is expensive for me, but for 5 full days with everything taken care of and the fact that trekking in Nepal is one of my must-do’s this trip, I was happy to fork over the cash. But man, what a relief to have all my plans laid out as soon as I arrived!
We finished talking around 11pm and I was really anxious about finding a place to eat this late so I chomped my walnut-cream cheese pasta I made yesterday, used a bathroom in desperate need of cleaning, and passed out.
