I have booked our flights to Kathmandu in October! All in all (from date of departure until date of return back home) we will be gone 2 weeks and 5 days. We are leaving from Canada (god bless those cheap Canada Air ticket prices) at almost 9pm, taking a puddle jumper to Toronto, where we will hang out for about 4 hours, a good enough time to let M stretch her legs and run around (there are a couple play areas in the terminals). Then, at almost 2am, we board our 15 hour flight to Hong Kong. Yes, 15 hour flight, with a 3-year-old! Holy moly. We’ve got some good things going for us, however:
- Longer flight = less layovers. Might as well get it over with!
- It takes off at 2am. M should be appropriately exhausted and take a good, long sleep (me too?!)
- We have a 14 hour layover at our next stop, plenty of time to book a hotel room plus stretch our legs.
Upon arrival to Hong Kong I am booking us a day room at the hotel airport. This way we can go back to bed, or use the indoor or outdoor pool for entertainment first and then go back to bed, or whatever!
It is now two calendar days later (thanks to moving forward a day automatically over the date line), and we have only a five hour flight left to reach Kathmandu.
Our return trip is not the same in reverse. For this trip we are taking a puddle jumper to Dhaka, Bangladesh. This is not awesome, as Bangladesh is somewhat of a chaotic country, and also extremely unfriendly to women. Luckily, I’m prepared to dress conservatively with head covering and wear a pretend wedding ring. People are generally quite friendly to “married” women with children. We will only be laid over there long enough to get to our next flight anyway… so here’s to hoping that we don’t miss that flight!!! Luckily the airline is Cathay Pacific (not Nepali airlines or some godforsaken Bangladeshi airline) so they are very good at working these things out quickly if things don’t go as planned.
That will be crazy, but after a four-hour flight we will be back in Hong Kong again for 10 hours, long enough to get another hotel room for the day and enjoy the pool and children’s areas again. From there we have another 15 hour flight to Toronto, a 3.5 hour layover to stretch our legs, and on to Windsor. Anyone else tired yet?
I did all this for under $3000 total. A small miracle. Back in my frequent traveling days going to Kathmandu, anything under $1500 per person was a bargain. Also, I hope I racked up enough credit card points on my chase sapphire preferred to get us to California to visit my BFF and her new baby!
So excited!!! (Also, gonna pick up overtime this summer to pay it off.) The only thing that would make it better is someone to travel with.
Mother of All Things 
Woah, lady!!! I’m very excited for you. I hope to get back to south korea.
That’s awesome!! I hope the anticipation of that trip carries you through the summer!
I got to go to Chittagong, Bangladesh, when I was in the Navy. Had an amazing time, except for when our liaison Lt. took off with me, without telling anyone why or where we were going, and flipped out the whole detachment, especially our CIS agent, an amazing woman. We were all going into town, and when everyone else got out of the car, he asked me to wait, be got out, and I assumed he was getting someone from my group to come with me, but no, he just blazed away with me in the car! Good times.
Then, when my dumbass thoughtlessly told a man in the Bangladeshi Navy that I was unmarried. It was like he couldn’t conceive of even the idea of a single woman who worked with men. Aaaaaaand then he basically body tackled me when I tried to casually go with my guys to another part of the room. Whoa.
Liaison Lt. had only seemingly pure intentions in the end – he wanted to take me to have my sari undergarments (I’m sure there’s a word for those I should know… :/) made for me, and he stopped to get another Bangladeshi lady from the store I got my sari at, so she could come with us, and meeting her was a major highlight of that trip, so that was cool, but not telling anyone what was going on was not OK. He got reprimanded for that.
So yeah. What you said about Bangladesh. Tho I have to say outside of those experiences, and within the cocoon of my naval detachment, everything about that country was amazing, from the food to all of the (other) people I met… Just life changing.
I’m really looking forward to hearing about your trip! Do you find it easy to pick the language back up, or is it something you’ll start kind of doing warm-ups for before you go?
Good to know you agree and thanks for sharing the story!
I will definitely refresh my language starting about now, haha. However, it has really stuck with me more than any other language I’ve learned. I did 6 years of “formal” Spanish in high school and college and can speak very, very little. But I lived and spoke Nepali for almost 6 years and can still carry on a conversation. Partly because I love the language so much, and partly because I was so immersed in it in my daily life.