Indian Embassy

After a week of relaxing in the Kathmandu Valley, we decided it was about time to brave the beaurocratic nonsense of attaining an India visa. We had no idea what we were about to get ourselves into! And boy we could never have guessed how ridiculous the process was. We showed up at the embassy about 30 minutes before the paper needed to be filed. 30 minutes to write your name on a sheet of paper, no problem right? Wrong, BIG problem apparently. There were hundreds of people waiting and the embassy workers laughed when we thought we could get it done in one day. They accept applications for the application (hello?!) for only 2.5 hours a day. Then the office closes. So we had to come back 2 days later as the next day was the New Year. We show up on Thursday, wait a few hours, hand in our application for our application, are told to come back in 7 days. We had planned on leaving Kathmandu to get to Pokhara but it takes 7 days to get done what most countries do on arrival in 7 minutes. Weird. So we headed to the Royal Chitwan National Park in the Terai region of Nepal for some safaris and then came back to Kathmandu to pick up the visas. We heard the earlier you arrive the better to get a good number to hand in the application. We queued at 7 AM and thankfully got called just before noon to hand in the application. Then we had to come back at 4:30PM so they could whisper our names quietly from behind a glass window at 6 PM to receive our passports back with visas inside. 10 days after our first inquiry, we had our visas in hand and were ready to head to the motherland. What a process!