Climbing down across a staircase...
Tribhuvan International Airport - The entry point to Nepal
07.05.2011
As a traveler it was usual to me to see almost all of the passengers trying to come out of the flight through the just opened door, just like that they were praying to the god on all the way long during the flight not to crash. Mostly they might be in a rush to get customs clearing done quickly. But never mine I'm gonna stay there for 1 month, I was pretty sure that I could get the customs clearing done before than that...
Once I reach the flight door, instead a terminal as i expected,staircase fitted on an indian TATA lorry was waiting to land us. There are no terminals in the air port. All my friends who were trying break the flight door, were waiting in a terminal bus....
The wind went across me was so cold. It was driving me down across the memory lane of Nuwara Eliya, Sri Lanka. Which is one of the coolest places in Sri Lanka.
Inside of the airport was made of bricks and was so cool without any A/C, arrival lounge was having few counters and I guess visitors from SAARC region are allowed to enter to Nepal free for the first time. All other passport holders have to make payments according to the number of days that they wish to stay. Chargers are shown in a white board written by hand in blue ink. 30 days - 40 USD.
Hinidi and Nepali languages are used by the airport officers and its your talent to communicate with them correctly and get things done.
If you are a non-SAARC passport holder there are 2 applications to be filled at the airport counter. One for the immigration, which is big and have more than enough space to fill your details and the other one is for visa, which has very less amount of space to write in.
Entire visa process is manual. Our details are gone to their CR books. Once the visa is given, you can collect your luggage from the first floor. Customs officer will make sure that you are not taking any others luggage.Once you collect the luggage and pass the customs officer you can exchange your USD or GBP into Nepali ruppess (NPR) also can purchase a sim card on NCELL from the airport for 100 NPR.
After that the next challenge to find the place which you need to go and explain that to the taxi driver in Hindi...
Posted by Digitalwalker 07:05
