Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu is universally recognized as one of the worst major airports in the world. It is little more than a large brick shack, dirty inside and out, and staffed by surly, unhelpful agents who aren’t much better than the TSA.
Apparently, if you arrive during the day, the visa hall can back up for hours, all chaos and cutting in line. Luckily for me, we had to be one of the last flights in that day, as the airport was deserted.
As my layover in Delhi drew to an end, I worked my way back to the gate. It had filled up significantly since I had last been here: full of hippies and fortune-seekers looking to find inner peace in the high mountain sanctuaries of Nepal. Backpackers, families, mountain climbers— these were my people. Still, the nervousness was starting to set in.
I spent last weekend at Arise Music Festival, a 3-day event held in the foothills near Loveland, Colorado. (That’s where the purple teepees you might see in the sidebar were).
Arise was a great time, full of great music, good vibes, and plenty of regenerative yoga. The vibe at Arise is pretty crunchy: old hippies and young fair-trade folks, slinging their ideologies amidst a crowd of dreadlocked dealers slinging their own cures for the ills of the world.
So I was walking around the festival, looking at what the vendors had on offer, when I saw something familiar.
I’d seen these scarves before. I’d bought the one in the middle in Thamel, the tourist district of Kathmandu, as a souvenir for my sister.
These, as you can see, are $12.
When I finally got to the counter, I told the agent I’d lost my ticket.
“What’s your name?” he asked, bored.
I told him, and he handed me my original boarding pass. Someone must have found it and turned it in.
“Try and hold on to it this time,” he told me without inflection.
I took it without further comment.
[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.
thisisyouth 