“Pitsia?! Where’s Pitsia?! I’ve never heard of Pitsia… Scheps, where’s Pitsia?!”
“I don’t know!” Emily’s grandfather said in the background despite him knowing that we were heading to India, but somehow not registering the confusion Emily’s grandmother was experiencing.
Pitsy in Yiddish means small or tiny.
In the end, Emily had a perfectly intelligent, lucid conversation with her grandmother except that her grandmother worried about how we would fare in the strange, unknown, tiny country we were headed to….
On that note, we headed to the Kathmandu Airport to go to one of the largest countries on Earth – now known as Pitsia.
Emily cried on our ride to the airport – sad to leave Nepal. I reassured her we would be back. Perhaps with llamas. You never know. But one way or another, this isn’t our last trip to Nepal.
But there was no time or room for tears at the Kathmandu Airport as we waded through a sea of bizarreness. It started with an exuberant airline worker who approached us as we headed to the ticket counter. He ushered us to the front of the line, started tagging our bags and had them on the belt in less than a minute. He wanted a tip, of course. But fine. Apparently, being white let us – to our chagrin – cut in front of everyone.
We then decided to change our remaining Nepali rupees to Indian rupees, only to discover that our meagre $32 USD worth of rupees bought out all the remaining Indian rupees the bank had and we needed to get USD for the rest. Why? The Indian Reserve Bank cut off foreign exchange with Nepal. They don’t want Nepali rupees, so they no longer supply Nepal with Indian rupees.
Upstairs we went with our carry-on to clear immigration and security. Only an angry American man was throwing a fit at the Nepali immigration workers who wouldn’t stamp him out without the man completing an embarkation card – just like everyone else.
“Your airport doesn’t provide a pen! I can’t even find a pen! And I’m going to miss my flight! Don’t you understand?!” The spectacle ran for awhile during which time we filled out our cards and dealt politely with the immigration people.
It turned out we were one day over-extended on our visas. So, Emily just charmed the Immigration officer in Nepali – discussing our visit and recent marriage. He didn’t even pay attention to the papers he stamped as he chatted it up about Nagarkot and Emily’s Nepali language instruction.
That’s when we hit “security”. Nepal’s airport isn’t internationally certified. Undoubtedly one factor is that their bag x-ray machines are from 1975. They also don’t scan the items you take out of your pockets such as cameras, wallets, keys, change, earphones… You just put those on a table where they can eye them. No matter what, the metal detector goes off – so they pat you down and call it a day.
Because the x-rays are insufficient they then require everyone to have their bags searched by officers. My inspector just looked through the external pouch of my backpack and felt in the main compartment to make sure my clothes were indeed clothes.
Emily, however had a woman who was very interested in Emily’s cosmetics and nutritional supplements. She found the idea of fish oil capsules interesting and wanted to discuss what each thing did. This wasn’t careful interrogation – but sheer curiosity. Since Emily spoke Nepali, bag search became “girl time”. Meanwhile Emily was horrified as the woman handled her fish oil supplements, squeezing them with her fingers – amazed at the texture.
Once we cleared “security”, we hit the gate area – which consists of a large room filled with long benches of metal seats. Perhaps 200 or more people sit en masse in rows like giant movie theater. Around the upper windows, we noticed real-live monkeys who lived on the airport roof. Joti and I have so much to discuss….
The “boarding gates” are just glass doors which lead through a glass-walled hallway to another set of sliding glass doors where one boards a tarmac bus to get to a plane. The boarding process involves a man yelling “JetAir – Dehli! at the top of his lungs and then people hoarding the gate as if they were trying to get to the last helicopter leaving Vietnam.
But the factor that makes the Kathmandu departure experience a combination of memorable and horrifying is how the entire terminal smells like Nepali sewer. The restrooms at the far end of the boarding area emit a smell that could be sold as a biological weapon.
Women used the scarves of their saris to cover their noses. People who boarded Gate 2 – right next to the men’s room – gagged. I deeply wanted to donate bottles of Clorox for them to our down those toilets. It was perhaps the most disgusting smell of the trip.
Then we found out our plane would be delayed. It started as a 45 minute delay and ended up as a two and a half hour delay. Why?
JetAir – a relatively new and very nice private Indian airline which competes with Air India – had a delayed incoming plane from Dehli. Our plane arriving from Mumbai would arrive sooner. Only, 74 of the Dehli-bound passengers had a connection to a flight to London-Heathrow and JetAir was holding the London flight waiting from the plane from Kathmandu. So, they sent our plane to Dehli to rescue the anxious passengers and had the Mumbai passengers wait.
A two-and-a-half hour delay is normally not a big deal, especially when you have no connection to make. But noxious fumes and lack of places to sit or work were an issue. So, Emily pulled out her Nepali charm and got us into one of the boarding areas where the were a few seats, less noise and no fumes. Only it was an area that in any other country would have been secured. We had no business being there except that an airline worker liked Emily.
That worked for about 45 minutes until the terminal manager caught us and sent us back to smell hell.
When they finally called boarding for our flight, we were at the dreaded Gate 2. The smell was overpowering. Just as our part of the boarding hoard made it to the gate, the boarding was called off due to a mechanical problem. Twenty minutes later and we braved the fumes again. I was desperate to make it through. Desperate.
Luckily, we were rewarded not only by better air beyond the gate, but business class seats. It turned out the plane was almost full, so they bumped-up only the foreigners to first class. No Nepalis or Indians – just whities. It took us until we were all boarded to figure out what happened, and we felt bad. Emily contemplated giving her seat to a Nepali. But the call of a comfortable chair and the movable monitor overpowered her.
It was almost mostly a pleasant three-hour flight to Mumbai except for an Indian man in the front row of first class got into an argument with the flight crew and eventually the captain. He was upset about the delay and more importantly, upset that when they served the food he wanted that the design of the chair forced him to lower his foot rest. Why couldn’t he have his feet up and eat? It was apparently the crew’s fault and despite the crew’s most professional handling of it – the man went on arguing for over an hour.
The successful Indian businessman sitting next to me was appalled. He also told me all about Mumbai, places to see in India and the phenomenal progress India is making. His biggest pride – that India is investing massively in education so that they can not just develop industrially, but will have an educated population capable of high-level work.
He believes India is the rising star of the world and will surpass China. Education will cause corruption and economy woes to eventually come into line. He was passionate, happy and energetic. So, that was fun. He also gave me advice on how to get an air-conditioned taxi to our hotel at an affordable price. He was dead-on too.
Arriving at Mumbai, the airport was new, nice and nothing like Kathmandu. We zipped through the terminal to passport control where we walked right up to a counter. The immigration officer was receiving his chai from a chai-waller at the exact moment we approached, so he asked the boy to get us tea as well. We enjoyed delicious masala tea while he scanned our passports. It all seemed to be very first-class.
Until he looked at our stamps from when we changes airlines and went in and out of Delhi last month. India has a new travel visa regulation that foreigners on tourist visas must remain out of the country for two months between visits to India. However, this isn’t meant to prohibit people who may enter and exit neighboring countries in the course of a travel itinerary. The law is at best gray. We knew this going in – so at the Indian Consulate in Istanbul, we asked the visa officer for a double-entry visa, which he happily granted us.
All of this confused our hospitable immigration host. He left to talk to someone about it, came back and told us it would be fine, but that we would need a re-entry permit and to come with him. Yadda yadda yadda….no one in the immigration office really knew how to handle the situation with this new rule and the double-entry visa other than the top-boss.
The top officer explained to them that it was fine and that visiting neighboring countries wasn’t an issue. We filled out some forms about our visit plans, they stamped a bunch of things and made a “log entry” and sent us on our way with their warm wishes for our pleasant journey and honeymoon year. All of the officers were at every turn pleasant and luckily, seemed to feel it was really their own confusion that was the problem.
By the time we got out of the airport it was 6:23 and we were supposed to have landed at 3:00 originally. We were ready to head to our hotel and get dinner – Emily was starving.
The taxi ride took just over an hour – but it was an amazing hour. Mumbai is nothing like we had imagined. It’s FAR better. While there are definitely places that are rougher and poorer, it’s far more paved, orderly, clean and developed than either of us ever imagined. In fact, it reminds me a lot of Bangkok – not first world by any account, but not dirt-poor third-world either. It has the full-spectrum of poverty and wealth in a city that seems to be more developed than not.
Our hotel is a little plain, but more than adequate – and VERY clean. Internet is high-speed. The shower is fantastic. The people couldn’t be nicer or more helpful.
Dinner was its own phenomenon. We went to the restaurant two doors-down at the recommendation of the front desk. For $3 an entree, we had the most phenomenal Indian meal I’ve ever had in a VERY nice restaurant with incredible service. All I can say is paneer (curd cheese) stuffed with cashews in a cashew sauce.
At lunch today, we tried another place down the street – very modest and hum drum. Also phenomenal for less than $2 an entree. The restaurants use filtered water. I also noticed the smell of chorine in our tap and shower water – which means it’s treated. I didn’t expect that. It certainly wasn’t in Kathmandu.
We are in a town far more to my liking than I expected. It has a waterfront I can’t wait to explore. It’s tropical warm. The city is shockingly developed. The taxis are cheap. The food is so far phenomenal. And I’m writing this from a cafe in a mall that shames the Beverly Center with incredible WiFi throughout. Who knew?!
All I can say is that we have landed in Pitsia, a totally different world from Kathmandu – except for the saris – and I can’t wait to explore it!
Jai Ho!
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