“How can you have so many stamps in your passport when it’s invalid?” asks the immigration official.
Janella is so mystified, she’s practically speechless. She’s traveled on this passport internationally before, not to mention just used it to enter China and Thailand.
We’re not exactly sure what the problem is, but the peeved dude waves us into a little side office where no fewer than two other, presumably higher-up officials, say Janella’s passport is all wrong.
There seems to be a scanning problem -- it doesn’t register on Nepal’s scanners, or something -- and officials don’t like Janella’s long last name and the tiny signature.
They give Janella a blank piece of paper and ask for a signature. She complies. They compare it to the signature on her passport. Handwriting experts that they are (ha!) they decide, nope, it doesn’t match.
The situation is so absurd that we just sit there, waiting to see what happens next. Janella offers to give another, smaller signature to see if THAT would match, but that one doesn’t pass muster either. One of the higher-ups leaves the side office, presumably to talk to his boss.
Meantime, I have a vision of calling the ELI office to say Janella has been denied entry into Nepal and put on the next flight out of the country.
A lost backpack, an exiled Janella. This is downright kafkaesque.
The higher-up comes back, he’s now also looking peeved, but tells Janella it’s OK, and she should go back into the immigration line. To be on the safe side, she goes to the same dude so as not to have to explain herself again. The dude isn’t satisfied.
“Go over there,” he tells her, waving in the direction of the side office.
“I just came from there! They sent me back and say it’s OK.”
“It’s not OK,” the dude insists.
As if to prove he’s not being capricious, he shows me scans of a regular passport, and Janella’s. To me they look the same, but he says something about the numerical code not being readable. Hearing the hubbub, other immigration dudes chime in. The higher-up comes by, mumbling something.
The immigration dude is not happy. He’s about to kick Janella out of line again, but either because of the look on her face -- a mixture of frustration, exhaustion and dismay -- or the absurdity of the situation, makes him change his mind.
“She can go ahead, but she’ll have the same problem leaving Nepal,” he warns us sternly, waving Janella through.
We proceed, relieved, find my bag, and leave the airport.
Janella quickly spots Anish, ELI’s Nepal coordinator, whose face she knows well from many photographs ELI gets from volunteers. She waves, he waves back.
“Namaste. Welcome to Nepal.” he says in the gently lilting English Nepalese speak. We tell him about Janella’s bag.
“No problem. It happens often, but they always get here in the end.”
And just like that he reassures us, guides us to his car and off we go into Kathmandu.
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