Nepal – Day 6: Immigration Issues and Patan

As I mentioned previously, our second arrival in Nepal was accompanied by unforeseen difficulties. The officials at the airport refused to acknowledge our visa extension forms, leaving us with two options: overstay and pay a fee of fifty dollars or extend our visas at the immigration office. On our very first day in Nepal, my dad and I happened to walk past the immigration office and did not form an overly favourable impression of it. Practically besieged by crowds of desperate looking South Asian migrant workers both inside and outside in the blistering sun, it seemed a realm of understaffed chaos.

Nevertheless, the alternative to braving this pandemonium was to put ourselves entirely at the mercy of Nepal’s immigration authorities. We were assured that we would be held to have overstayed only one day and would have to pay fifty dollars to essentially extend our visas on the spot. Furthermore, our passports would not say “OVERSTAYED” in bold capital letters. However, we did not like our odds. What if the immigration officials on duty had a different way of counting days? And what if they weren’t as lenient? On top of that, the official we were dealing with kept wavering between recommending us to arrive half an hour earlier and an hour earlier on the day of our departure, which did not add to our confidence.

To make a long story short, we forewent a second visit to Kathmandu’s Durbar Square in favour of calling on the immigration office. We were accompanied – may the Hindu pantheon bless him – by the owner of Jampa Hotel, Prakash, who made sure we would get there right before opening time. We pursued a strategy of divide and conquer. While I dutifully stood in line with other forlorn existences, Prakash and my dad swooped upon officials like hungry vultures to shove our visa extension forms into their hands. Somehow, they managed to capture one window, and before I knew it, they were out of sight.

I let several people ahead of me in the queue before I finally gave up; the line had shrunk to a manageable level and there was no need for me to hold our spot anyway. One person I let in front of me was a twenty-something years old Chinese man who had just confided to a compatriot that he was visiting Nepal to look for a girlfriend. From the snippets articulated in a thick northern accent, I gathered he had already scouted several factories for that purpose.

After some time, Prakash emerged from behind the counter, giving me a thumbs up and beckoning me to come in. Passing by the counters and walking through a few sets of doors, I found myself in a comfy office with a black couch sat behind a wooden coffee table. Perched upon it was my dad in jovial conversation with the immigration director. I sat down next to him in disbelief while the previously stern office worker scuttled around and brought us sweet black tea.

As I found out later, what had happened was quite simple. My dad kept refusing to fill out a new form, arguing that the one we had prepared for our arrival at the airport should suffice. Having evidently never seen a similar form in their lives, the officials kept passing my dad higher and higher up the chain of command until he ended up in the director’s office. According to his own version of the story, he casually strolled in and told the director: “Leave these forms to someone and let’s go get a drink,” to which the surprised director responded that he could not drink during work hours.

What really got matters moving, however, was the director’s clear horror at the form we had acquired. He said the government website must have been programmed wrongly, as visa extensions can only be acquired from the immigration office. Furthermore, the fee of six dollars per application did not make sense: the website had allowed us to ask for only two days of extension when the legal minimum is 15 days for a fee of 45 dollars.

Taking personal responsibility for the mix-up, the director manually filed another application through his system while apologising to us. Recognising him as an upright character, my dad also told him how we were never given an invoice for the initial visa fee we paid when we first arrived, and that we had been short-changed at the airport. The director immediately started making phone calls, scolding people at the other end of the line, but of course it was impossible to get any kind of compensation. Hopefully the system will change, though, and invoices will be made compulsory.

It took us only an hour to receive a new sticker in our passports, and we got a lot of envious looks as we left the immigration office. We met up with the rest of the group at Durbar Square. As they had just completed the last item on their itinerary, we all stopped by to drink some beverages and buy some teas at a local store before continuing to the royal city of Patan.

Patan, also called Lalitpur, Yela, or Manigar, boasts of being the most beautiful city in the Valley of Kathmandu. Its carved windows and decorations are the most elaborate, and while Kathmandu and Bhaktapur impress visitors with their liveliness and grandeur, Patan carries itself with an air of quiet sophistication. Although much of Patan’s Durbar Square continues to linger under reconstruction, Patan Museum, the city’s most impressive attraction, welcomes visitors in its full glory. It offers tourists not only beautiful expositions on sacred art and the city’s woodwork, but also great views of Durbar Square.

After spending much time in the museum and its gardens, we made a short tour of Durbar Square and continued to the second major attraction of Patan, the Golden Temple. Its black facades belie a splendid inner court which, true to its name, possesses golden dragons, monkeys, and elephants, as well as prayer wheels and other objects of reverence. Our guide told us that the Newaris are an industrious, business-like people who never took a strong liking to the monastic life. Instead of delegating the care of religious sites to men trained as monks, therefore, they have always taken turns looking after them. Thus, the city will select a father and son to look after the Golden Temple for a set period of time, with each man on the list having two opportunities in his life to serve this role.