First a brief description of the visa process. Most of us don't bother to get Nepalese visas before we arrive in country. That said, imagine a big load of tourists arriving all needing to get a visa. There are now visa kiosks for the convenience of the incoming tourist. The machines scan your passport, take your photo and spit out a receipt that you then take to the visa payment desk, then to passport control. Sounds pretty smooth right? Olay, now envision several hundred people lining up to use these five machines which only work part of the time. So after you stand in line behind someone whose passport doesn't get read by the machine and they keep trying to make it work you walk to a table where there is a pad of visa forms you can fill out by hand and then go do the pay the fee part (another line) then go to the actual visa window where you stand in one again. It is a painful process that encourages frustration.
After the visa process comes baggage claim. We made the assumption that by the time we finally got through passport control that our one checked bag would be waiting for us. But the off loading process was really just getting started and so while David waited for the bag Marty stood off to the side with our carry on luggage. We then waited and watched to discover in the end that our bag had missed a connection. There were a handful of us in this situation and everyone starting from BWI was missing luggage. Below is the baggage claim area of the airport.
Our friend Earle was to meet us but after waiting two hours he gave up and returned to the hotel. We grabbed a taxi and made it to the hotel on our own. It was now dark, sunset was long past.
There were several notable things on the way in. First, all buses had more folks on their roofs than we were used to seeing. Yes, in the past we had seen lots of people on bus roofs when we traveled outside the city, but not in the city. Fuel is in short supply now, so there were long long lines at the gas stations where there is a limit of 10 liters per car! Imagine if we were to experience those limits in the US, what it would do to the ability of everyone to move around or even get products to market. (Last night's dinner was eaten in a restaurant that had run out of most of beers shown on their menu.). We hear too that propane supplies have been problematic; restaurants have been challenged in cooking for their guests.
Being evening time when we came into the city, we saw little actual earthquake evidence. Tomorrow we hope to get around and get a better idea.
We went to dinner a little ways from the guest house and unlike in the past the small streets in the old part of the city were not clogged with cars and motorcycles. Mainly only a handful of cars and cycles. Th exchange rate is about 100 Nepalese rupees to one USD. So things are reasonable. We probably only spent about $15 for our dinners and a big bottle of beer.
One casualty of the trip has been our kit of charging cables...telephones, GoPro camera, and Marty's FitBit cable. It wouldn't be so bad except that the cables for the phones were for ALL our phones, both our travel phones and US ones. Don't know where it was lost, but think it was in Philly. Oh well, it adds to the adventure...right?
This morning (Thursday) it is raining. Sometime around 4:00 it started raining lightly and then the sky just opened up and it has rained quite hard off and on for about three hours.
A note on the house building we will do. It may be that we will be lucky to get one house done for a variety of reasons. We will wait to explain this until after we have seen what they are doing and can better visualize and understand the logistical issues as well. Getting supplies is a problem and we are not sure how long that will continue.
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