Nepal

Nepal 5: Lost Ticket

Daniel 2 Comments
Disembarking at Delhi Airport

[This is a chapter from my travel book. There are lots more chapters posted on the blog, but if you’d prefer to read them all at once, sign up for my e-mail newsletter and I’ll be sure to let you know when they’re available in a condensed form!]

I spent about 30 minutes sitting there, blackly depressed and feeling sorry for myself.

Eventually, I realized that although fate had intervened to bring me here, it probably wouldn’t magic my boarding pass out of thin air at the last moment, the way it had snatched a ticket home from me.

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Nepal 4: Delhi

Daniel 13 Comments
Jet Airways Boarding Pass

You don’t need to go through passport control when you just have a layover in a foreign country, so I never technically entered India.

After you’ve seen enough of them, all airports kind of start to look the same. Same bones: check-in, security, passport control/immigration, customs, a pickup area bustling with taxis and touts… by the time I showed up in India, after five months of travel, I was thoroughly unimpressed with airports.

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Nepal 3: Hong Kong to Delhi

Daniel 8 Comments
Air India

[This is a chapter from my travel book. There are lots more chapters posted on the blog, but if you’d prefer to read them all at once, sign up for my e-mail newsletter and I’ll be sure to let you know when they’re available in a condensed form!]

I had a ticket onwards to Nepal, via Delhi. The five hours between when my girlfriend’s plane departed for home and mine left felt interminable. Yet, sitting in a shocked stupor, it also felt as if things were moving very swiftly. Nothing made sense.

I was a human robot, less than a lost child. I could not have thought for myself or made any decision other than to continue down the path I had set for myself a few days ago: I was going to Nepal, and Holly was going home. What had seemed to make so much sense in the weeks leading up to our parting now felt all wrong.

But she was gone, and I held tightly to two tickets: HKG to DEL, and DEL to KTM. The idea to buy a ticket home didn’t even enter my mind. I was utterly incapable of independent thought. So I sat, and I waited, and I boarded the plane to Delhi.

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Nepal 1: A Hotel Room in Hong Kong

Daniel 22 Comments
Hong Kong Skyline

 This is essentially a book-length travel memoir which I’ll be feeding out over the course of the next year (sign up for email updates when a new chapter is posted). Working title is “In Praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness” but it’ll probably change. Everything in here is true. A few minor details may be changed in order to accommodate the fallibility of memory, protect identities, or improve narrative flow, but that’s all. It’s a pretty good story with a solid emotional core. I hope you get something out of it.

In Praise of Character in the Bleak Inhuman Loneliness

journeys in Nepal

This is one of those stories with no clear beginning, and no clean end. But it begins, best I can tell it, in a hotel room in Hong Kong. 3:30 A.M.

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