In the video I show you the touch-up I did for my eyebrows (I had microblading done), how my nails got done in a beauty salon in Nepal, and what I understood about stars when doing my client’s transit chart.

In this post I will focus on what’s happening travel-wise and I also talked about it in the video.

Firstly, the travel.

I wasn’t able to book any flight tickets when flights were again announced to fly from Nepal because my boyfriend was still here with me. But then we realized that nothing will happen in Nepal anytime soon, and that we will both be stuck here for God knows how long.

So I booked a taxi for my boyfriend to Sunauli border, though he was refused the permission to leave by the Indian embassy representative because he only had one ID card. He showed other documents on his mobile but that wasn’t good enough for the representative.

So we discussed this with the driver and he, having much more experience than us, suggested him to leave and he would be likely to be able to cross the border without the permission from the Indian embassy representative. They quickly got him a local permit to leave the city and they left.

We took the risk, and after five hours of driving he reached the border and crossed it pretty much trouble-free. Half of the dollars that he took with him for further travel were denied changing on the Indian side because the notes were slightly scratched. Eventually he was able to get half of the money in rupees that he was supposed to get for half the sum.

But that was enough for him to buy the ticket for the special covid train to Kerala – a 53-hour journey or so.

It turned out, however, that he was sold a fake ticket and the travel agency’s number was switched off when he was trying to reach them. So he wasn’t able to get any seat.

Thankfully there were no ticket inspectors; for almost three days he had only a few hours sleep and when he got to Kerala, he was absolutely exhausted, unable to even think anymore.

He took a 45-minute rickshaw to his home and now he’s starting a 14-hour quarantine totally alone, in one home. No family members are allowed to visit. It’s that strict in India now.

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Once he crossed the border I started looking for the flights out. It turned out that because of the Nepal government’s decision to severely limit flights and passenger number, the day flights were published they were sold out in around 48 hours.

Since the government is going to reassess the next month’s covid situation and decide whether flights would be allowed, nobody knows what will happen then. So I was so disappointed seeing that there are absolutely no tickets available – it meant I might have to stay here for a month or more, when my mother needs me now.

When I was thinking about the gloomy possibility of being stuck, I received a message from my friend (as though he was reading my mind!) that I should try booking the ticket from Trip.com.

I checked, and indeed there was a flight available. Yet since I never used that website before, I called the Nepal travel agent to confirm. He also told that one flight is available on that day. He, however, wanted too much commission, so I ended up also checking skyscanner.net with which I’m much more familiar and they also had the same day flight. So I ended up booking through them (though it was still a Trip.com flight).

So I had the ticket to fly out in several days. I got busy making calls to the taxi company to arrange something for me. They told that it’s probably not going to work out because the permit office is closed on the weekends and without permit it’s pretty much impossible to travel as police check-posts are on every corner.

The Nepal government tries to profit from this crisis by charging quite a lot for the permit and you have to leave as soon as you get it. If you have to leave, yet that day the permit office doesn’t work, you have no choice but to be stuck.

I pressured them to take the chance because otherwise I would miss the only flight that was available. Eventually I talked them into it. They produced a fake permit for me, praying that they wouldn’t be caught.

To be continued…