Doesburg to Kathmandu

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Starting at the station in Arnhem (many thanks dad!), we boarded the nice smooth ICE train to Dusseldorf. Getting into he right carriage (No. 24) was no problem - finding seats 111 & 113 was! Try walking the train one end to the other with it travelling 152km/hr and with backpacks on your back!!! Just like Jan always says "You never get lost when you're with me, you just see a lot more!" I missed the seats first round and didn't bother looking at the seat numbers the second two rounds until Jan stopped at a pair of seats and said "Why don't we just sit here now and worry about finding the right seat in a minute" to which I replied "But these are our seats" - Seats 011 and 013!!! Seats 111 and 113 just don't exist - not even on the tickets! Jan's first boo boo and our first big laugh!!!

Arrived in Dusseldorf train station no problem, then got into the train to the airport no problem but when we go to the airport we still weren't at the terminals!! What now?? Easy - just take the sky train and into the terminals no problem. Off to the hotel and THEN we found out that if we'd caught a different train, we would have arrived quicker and right at the hotel door!! The Hotel wasn't what we paid for but much better than expected and included FREE mini-bar ;-).

Finding dinner in Dusseldorf airport - not so easy! To paint the picture, Dusseldorf airport is 3 stories high and each floor is a 10 minute walk or more from end to end. We arrived in the middle level (Departures(?)) and the first question we asked each other was: "Where is everybody?" It was almost deserted and only one restaurant open at 10:15 at night. The restaruant wasn't much chop so we decided to look further. We went up one flight to find a stack of closed travel agents and two closed restaurants! Finally made it to the lower (Arrivals) area and found all the people and were saved by McDonalds!

Next morning we were rudely awoken by the wake up call at 04:30. We were up, showered, dressed and at the check-in desk for the obligatory 2 hours before the flight but no people manning the check-in :-(. When they did arrive we were the first to check-in and last to be ready. Why? Beacuse I didn't have a visa for Helsinki - never occurred to me that I might need one and had checked every other place! Not to worry - Dutch residency permit came to the rescue!!

It was all smooth flying to Helsinki where I had beautiful views of the autumn pine trees in all their glorious colours and Jan had great views of all the beautiful blonde Finnish women!! (Have to admit - they were beautiful!). Short wait there and then off to Delhi, with another smooth flight (but not much in the way of entertainment!!). During the long wait in the Delhi airport transit area we made friends with Nepalese people returning home to visit family and an American guy travelling with his Nepalese wife who he met in a bar in Chicago after his first trip to Nepal, it's a small world. Finally off to Kathmandu, it was another smooth flight. We had all the entertainment we could manage but not enough time to watch a complete movie as the flight was only one and a half hours.

So now we have arrived in Kathmandu. At the airport there was a nasty surpise, the visa price was much higher then we were told beforehand. Instead of USD30,- it was now only USD100,- (since July 16th). But lucky us, the good part was that we were placed in a special and much(!) shorter waiting cue to get our visas! GVI met with us at the airport and dropped us of at the hotel after a short touristic tour through Kathmandu. So all's well there and the hotel is clean and the staff are very friendly.

Oh and a good tip, be careful about tipping! You might be ripped off.

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