My last days of work were a real nightmare, I had lots of work that needed to be ended before I began my holidays. I work on a research institute of an university, so schedules are a little alike school. November is a mix of rentrée for the scientific work and the begining of the "end of year stress" for the administration issues. Besides, I had some outwok that needed to be finished also. I didn' t manage to begin packing my things before 2am. Nevertheless, I was feeling rather fine - normally I am badly shaped when I wake too early in the morning, even if I slept well and plenty.

I didn't prepare much this trip. I knew very little about Nepal before I started reading the Lonely Planet's Survival Guide (LP) in the plane. My ignorance was such that I was a little surprised when I discovered of the existence of the Terai, the tropical plains in the South and that the vast majority of the people were hindu, not buddist (well, I must say that this discover dates before that LP reading...). The decision of going to Nepal wasn't really mine. As I wasn't in the mood to travel alone, I was looking for companionship. The destination didn't matter much to me, I was confident that it wouldn't be difficult to find a suitable destination for both of us once I had found a companion. Maria Jose used to travel alone, but she would prefer to have company to travel to such a far place, so there I was. From the begining, I think I was doubly lucky: I found a great companion to a really appealing place. In fact, that year I had the best holidays of my life twice - besides Nepal, my first programme, I ended up going to Morocco for 2 weeks in August with some friends of mine.

The lack of preparation (reading) wasn't completely unintentional - I had really hard times on the weeks before departing, as I stated before. At that time I believed that reading guides lessens or even adulterates the impact of the places and people on our senses - we have the feeling of "proofing" already known things, instead of discovering completely new things by our own. I wasn't too radical with this belief. Now I think that getting some info can help a lot and can have little impact on that sense of discover. It all depends on the use you make of the info and the kind of info you consume. I still hate "must see iteneraries", well organised schedules, and so on, but I welcome some notes on what to see and do, a little of old and new history, a little of the political, cultural and social situation, etc, some advices on atitudes to adopt, reasonable prices, etc.

The lack of (good) information induced us to a boring mistake: some metereologist said Maria Jose that the temperatures in Kathmandu were very low, perhaps below zero Celsius during the night, so we brought clothes both for winter and summer. We had decided to pass by Bangkok, a little bit to avoid any problems with the rumours of the recent bubonic plague. Although we gave not much credit to those rumours, we feared to face any problems entering Europe or even Nepal after passing India. When we made our reservations, in September, almost everyday there were news about measures taken at the airports to deal with passengers coming from India.

Back to the the airport... Maria Jose showed up some minutes after my arrival. There isn't much to say about the trip. We catch an Air Portugal flight to Madrid (about 50 min.), then we had to wait for 2 or 3 hours for the Thai flight to Bangkok. We had our first touch of exotism when we entered the Thai 747 - the decoration of the plane was violet and blue, combining with the outlook and the hostesses were also dressed colourfully with green, pink, violet and other flashy colours, all smiling and talking to us with that funny oriental accent.

On the way to Rome, where we would make an hour visit to the airport, we met an italian guy who was living in Miami for some monthes. He was kind, although we suspected a little bit that he hadn't a much respectable occupation. He said he ran a business latin american clothes imports, he had a house in Miami and he knew several countries on Central and South America. He knew specially well Colombia and Venezuela. He was returning to Italy because he hadn't been alowed to enter Florida after being a month in Caracas. He was very surprised by the US Inmigration people informing him that he would need a visa issued by an US consulate to be in US for more than 6 monthes; shorter stays were ok for EU (European Union) citizens. I too was surprised (and suspicious, too), with his story, as it didn't match my informations on entry visas to US. Every person I know who went to US for a visit needed a visa, and Portugal is in EU too. I found particulary strange that he showed so big surprise for what they have done to him. We talked a little bit about Caracas, as I was there once for a little while, and about Cuba too. He knew some cubans in Miami and seemed to enjoy earing me talking about my impressions of the country. He showed some interest in our destination. I don't remember well if he had ever been to South East Asia, but I'm sure he showed that he was very well informed about drug business in that part of the World. Interesting guy, anyway.

The airplane was full, mainly of people going for some days to Thai beaches, the major part were italians, although there were some spaniards and a couple of portuguese of indian origin.