Touchdown

The clock on my laptop still reads AEDST time. Apparently it is 3:27 in the afternoon, 12th November. That means that roughly 24 hours ago I finished the last of my overpriced cappuccino and strode confidently through a pair of obstinate automatic doors into the customs section of Sydney Airport. Time is a strange beast.

As I stood in the arrivals area at Tribhuvan International Airport (possible slogan: Proudly made out of brick since 1975), waiting for my backpack and hoping that I wouldn't require the services of the "Missing Baggage Complaining Desk", it finally sunk in. After five months of planning, hoping and financial navel-gazing, I was on the ground in Nepal.

I had known for a few hours that I was no longer in a part of the world with the edges blunted off, though. Picture this: I had just made it through customs at Delhi International Airport. I was tired, cranky, and not entirely sure how to even get to the departures area to transit to my flight to Kathmandu. I pushed my little airport trolley out the doors, ignoring the incredibly persistent touts, hoping to see DEPARTURES writ large on a nearby building. I had stepped no more than twenty metres from the exit when I turned into a dead-end alley by mistake. The rough concrete of the alley floor was scattered with lumpy piles of tattered cloth, and it wasn't until one of them rolled over to face me and hack up something obscenely biological that I realised they were people sleeping rough. Welcome to India; have a nice day.

Today has been spent sightseeing around Kathmandu - pictures will go up as soon as I get a reliable upload to Flickr. Until then!