Day 10: Secured

I am very, incredibly, totally secured.  This morning we left early for the airport in Pokhara for out first flight, back to Kathmandu.  Other than the hotel giving away the taxi we reserved, everything went surprisingly smoothly.  We got checked in, went through security, and soon we were on our flight.

The flight had some of the best views of the Himalayas we have seen, since we were above the clouds.  Unfortunately, My seat only had part of a window, so I could not get a picture.  Arrival in Kathmandu went very smoothly.  We got our bags and out to the taxis without anyone trying to carry our bags for money.  Since our flight was not until 4:35pm, we hired a taxi for a few hours to take us to find some internet and some lunch.  The first internet café we went to had no internet…odd?  Oh well, on to the next.  Nope, no internet there either.  Finally we told the driver to just take us to the big Radisson hotel, which was happy to give free internet to us, even though we were not guests.  Paying the driver was rather interesting.  His original price was 2500 rupees, but we negotiated him down to 2000 rupees, then as we were dropped off, he tried to convince us that we had agreed upon 3000 rupees, despite the fast that he started lower.  This is the way it almost always works over here.

We took a of our taxi's license plate, as he had our bags and we didn't want him to drive away, and we thought memorizing it may be difficult.

After several hours there, we had to head back to the airport to get checked in for our next flight.  As we entered, our bags had to be scanned and us patted down.  We got checked in, went through immigration, and then to security.  At security, our bags were scanned and the security guards patted us down.  Our bags successfully scanned, they then had to be hand searched and stamped as cleared.  We then waited in the terminal for our flight to board.  Our flight was soon boarding, and on our way out of the door, we were patted down and our bags searched.  Finally through all of that security, we boarded a bus and headed for our plan, where stairs were set up.  But wait, at the bottom of the stairs was a small shack where we were once more patted down and our bags searched.  Finally, our flight was boarded and we were off to Delhi.

We landed in Delhi around 6:00pm, with our flight to Hong Kong scheduled to leave around 11:30pm.  We planned to get our next boarding passes and head to the Cathay Pacific lounge.  When we got to the desk we were told that no one from Cathay was on staff (really?), and that we would have to wait until 8:00pm to get our boarding pass.  We sat in the boring room with nothing to do but write blog posts and eat our snacks.  Sure enough, at 7:30pm they came and got our information and told us to wait about 30 minutes for our boarding passes to be printed.

The arrival hall goes on forever.

Finally our boarding passes were ready and we were show through security and to the lounge, where I am now.  In a couple of hours, we will head to our gate, likely be secured again, and fly on to Hong Kong.

With all of this down time, I have put together a pretty neat compilation of my photos in Google Earth.  If you download this file (here), and open it in Google Earth (it should by default), then it will show all of my photos and where they were taken.  As you zoom in on India or Nepal, you will see all of my photos.  If you keep zooming in, you will see exactly where each was taken.  Clicking on each picture gives you a better view as well as the date and time it was taken.  The blue line you see is the path I took throughout each day, either walking or driving.  Unfortunately, it seems to have connected the ends of each day, so the long straight lines are not the path I walked, but rather the end of one day’s path connecting to the beginning of the next day’s.