unfortunately, the yellow guest house was full, but after asking at half-a-dozen other places, we found a room at annapurna lodge. i needed to book a ticket to hong kong, and luckily, the nepal airlines office was not far away. i waited for it to open at ten, and then made a reserved booking as i didn’t have all the money with me. the guy said i needed to have receipts for the money when i came later to pick up the ticket. oh shit! i had thrown out all my atm receipts in pokhara!
i went to take some money out, but only half the total amount for the ticket as i already had the other half. i went back with the atm receipt but the finance clerk wanted to see receipts for the whole amount. i tried to explain to the first ticket clerk that i had thrown out my original receipts. he was sympathetic but insisted that i had to provide receipts for the whole amount as the rules were quite strict. typical government bureaucracy. oh shit!
what to do, there was no way i wanted to take out the money just to get the receipt to buy the ticket that i already had the whole amount for. and then a plan began to hatch... i would go around all the standard chartered bank atms and pick up the receipts from the bins placed there. the receipt i had did not show a bank account number so i had assumed that the others wouldn’t either. wrong! all the others showed the last four digits of the bank account. now i was in trouble! they would guess that that was not my account. unless... yes, i found two that had the total approximately to what i needed to show, but with different account numbers. so now i had three receipts in total. they were a bit scrunched up and i tried my best to smooth them out.
so with eva in tow the next morning, i went to the nepal airlines office with my heart pounding. there was a different finance clerk there that morning, he looked much more serious. heart pounding some more. he looked at the receipts and didn’t look happy. i tried to stay calm and not say anything. he went to one of the girls at the booking desks to look at the computer screen. he then shows me the receipts and says that there are different accounts. “yes”, i said, "that one is from my current account, and these two are from my savings account”. he didn’t look happy, and then he asks for my bank card. the game is up now, i thought. i could pretend not to have it, of course, but that won’t help me. i take out the card that i had used to get the money out and gave it to him. he gives it to the girl and she duly types the number of the card (i presume) on the keyboard. his expression hasn’t changed as he gives the card back.
he invites me back to where we were sitting before and staples the receipts to his log and places it in his drawer. then he counts all the rupees, places them in the drawer, and then stamps the printout of the ticket, staples it to a nice nepal airlines ticket wallet and hands it to me. i scrutinize the ticket to check that all the details are correct. “what’s the luggage allowance i'm allowed”, i ask nonchalantly, trying to take his mind off the discrepancy about the receipts. he answers my questions, i have my ticket, and eva and i are walking out of the office with big smiles!!
immigration is easy and the flight is routine. nice views of the distant snow-capped mountains - maybe everest? - after take-off, and nice views of the islands around hong kong as we come down the stack approaching the runway. hong kong airport is a different world from the one i’ve just left. everything goes very smooth and eventually i am in the arrivals halls using the airport's free wifi to find the cheapest way to get to downtown.
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