Day Twentyseven
Submitted: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 | Views: 13 | 0 comments
November 28/2009 Log entry
“The long way home”
Today we walked around Thamel and picked up a few items to take back home, a couple of shirts, stamps for Hayley, a small bag for Janice and a Lonely Planet guide book of Mongolia with a highlighter pen for the flight home as we have all been discussing our next adventure and the consensus is to investigate Mongolia.
We arranged a car from the hotel to the airport and soon we were weaving our way through the major traffic of Kathmandu just to get into the long line ups to wait in ever shrinking waiting rooms. So starts a day of travel. Kathmandu to Delhi to Brussels to Toronto with hours and hours of stopover time in between. The flight to Delhi was fine but the ordeal really started once we hit Delhi. We had planned to meet with Jocko as he was transferring to a KLM flight but we had to get our baggage and then clear customs. We could not go straight in to departures and as the army runs things here we were not allowed to enter the airport departures until 3 hours before our flight. They sent us across the road to a lounge but then the lounge would not let us in unless we paid to sit there…total bullshit. So we sat in a bit of a food court or café and played cards, unable to let Jocko know what had happened to us. We played until we got kicked out for playing cards! They sent us into the lounge again and let us sit without paying…they just wanted us out. We finally tried again to get into departures, this time they wouldn’t let Brock in with us because he did not have his itinerary printed out, even though we had etickets. He had to have someone from the airline come out to confirm he was booked on a flight. The airport staff in Delhi are totally not in the tourist customer satisfaction business. So after 9 hours of waiting we finally got in. We were able to hook up with Jocko and explain the ordeal; we grabbed some sandwiches and headed to the Kingfisher lounge for a beer with him just before he had to board his plane. Joking we decided if they asked us if we had anything to declare we would say “yes, don’t go to Delhi”
We boarded the flight to Brussels and I fell asleep before the plane took off and was able to sleep for maybe a few short hours but not very well. I watched movies, read my Mongolia book and tried unsuccessfully to sleep. 2.75 hour stopover in Brussels so we bought chocolate at the duty free. All the flights were with Jet Airways and they were excellent just too, too long on a plane or waiting in airports.
Janice, Tig and Denise met us at the airport in Toronto. Somehow I developed a very sore hip, groin about 4 hours before we landed and had to take some pain killers to get to sleep once home. Nice snacks, wine and dinner at Mom’s with a nice surprise having Buddy come home from school to see me.
Home sweet home, what a bed!
