Take a leap of faith sometimes

When you’re traveling, you have to take a leap of faith sometimes. However, I’m actually a very paranoid person and I like to play it safe. Before I leave our hotel room, I always hide my laptop and other valuables. Also, I check my bag 100 times a day to see if my wallet and phone are really still in there. Furthermore, while Jeffrey happily talks with random strangers, I look at them with a suspicious eye and think “what do you want from us?”

However, these last two weeks we’ve taken a lot of risky decisions.

For one, we went on a trek to Rara Lake without any preparation. This time we didn’t even have any trekking gear anymore, besides our walking shoes. We had thrown it all away after our Base Camp Trek. We were very lucky that a German couple gave us their sleeping bags before we left. Otherwise, we would’ve froze to death at night.

Two, we went on one of the most dangerous highways in this world in a bus: Karnali Highway. During this ride I have prayed, and I’m not religious, that we would survive. I’m happy to be able to say that we did survive. Now it’s easy to say; oh that was really an exciting experience. No, seriously, I would not recommend going on that road to anyone that wants to stay alive.

Three, we took a huge risk in getting our visas for India. Because we are basically the worst travel planners in the world (yes and we try to give you travel tips, a bit weird I know) we didn’t have a visa for India. While we were very close to the border!

To get a visa for India you can either get an e-ticket online and fly in, or go to the embassy in Kathmandu and fill in some forms. However, we were miles away from Kathmandu (and closer to India!) and flying in would be quite expensive.

Then we spoke with the staff of our hotel in Bardia, and they said that they could fix the visa for us. This meant that our passport flew to the embassy in Kathmandu without us, with a complete stranger. Meanwhile we were on our trek, without our passports or copy of our passport.

And last of all, we left a lot of valuables at our hotel in Bardia (such as my precious laptop). So, I had to overcome some of my paranoid fears.

In the end, it all worked out. Sometimes you really just have to take a leap of faith. Then, just hope you don’t die, that your passport won’t get stolen, that the visa for India you pay for is real, and that your valuables are all still where you left them.

Of course, this could’ve all gone completely wrong. But this all, and the people at the amazing Bardia Wildlife Resort showed us that sometimes it’s good to trust people. Because, now WE MADE IT TO INDIA!