Should Be Very Likely

Should:  Will likely (become or do something).
Very:  To a great extent or degree; extremely; exceedingly.

On our last night in Kathmandu the tour coordinator stopped by our table at dinner, and we chatted a bit.  As he got up to leave I mentioned that our passports didn't get stamped with the requisite visa when we entered the country.  It was a typically hectic experience dealing with customs in a foreign country - jet-lagged, a foreign language coming at you fast and furiously, different requirements and procedures every time.  I figured I was going to get stung for another $50 visa fee but I knew I could live with that.

The guy paged quickly through our passports looking for the visa stamp, brow furrowed somewhat.

"Is this bad?" I asked.

"It's very bad," he said.

He jumps on his cell and makes a series of calls.
  
"OK," he states.  "I made some calls to friends I have in immigration and at the airport, and we should be good tomorrow." 

There's that fucking word: should.  I hate that word, especially when it's combined with very.

I should point out that when we entered Nepal we were given a receipt for the visa charges and a couple of other pieces of paper, customs forms and crap like that.  I had lost those promptly - I didn't know when, either, unsure whether one of our guides had kept them or the hotel staff picked them up or I just lost them, the latter the most likely eventuality given my history of losing stuff.  We realized how wonderful it would have been to have some more supporting documentation at this point, maybe even a slip with the visa stamp.  To say that my existence on this planet was not seen as favorable by my wife would be a huge overstatement.

Our coordinator moves up our pick-up time from 11 to 9 the next morning to give us time to jump through some hoops.  At 9 he calls and tells us it'll be 9:30 as the immigration office doesn't open until 10, then shows up at 9:45.  This is all par for the course.  We head off around 10 which, as I have pointed out previously, puts us in the maw of rush hour.  It seems to be the most popular time to leave - we always leave then.

We arrive at the immigration office where our dude talks to a kid at a window, who points out a woman at a desk with a twist of his head, after a long stream of furious dialogue and much shaking of a large sheaf of papers we had given our dude - flight tickets, tour itineraries, hotel vouchers - ostensibly to prove we hadn't slipped into the country illegally over the Himalayas, pulling our suitcases on wheels, and then were trying to leave the country via the international airport in the country's capital during rush hour.  More of the same with this woman, who directs us upstairs where we talk for a while with another woman who inevitably points next door to a couple of guys.  This lady had her own  private office - indicating a more influential buck-passer, we hoped - but she stood the whole time, in a somewhat confrontational pose.  Our guide goes at it with the two guys and then speeds off back downstairs as we struggle to keep up.

"OK," he says.  "We have it sorted out - we just need to make the application online.  Then when we get to the airport it should be OK."

He points out the one automated visa application terminal - a long line of people queued up, mostly grungy backpacker kids - then gets on his phone and takes off, still holding our passports.  SuperK and I look at each other confusedly - she stays put and I leave in hot pursuit, unwilling to let our one remaining piece of important documentation out of my sight.  Outside, in a typically chaotic neighborhood of dirt roads and careening cars surrounding the nice, new immigration building, I find him in the door of a small business talking to the proprietor.

"This guy is very fast," he tells me, turning to go back into the Kafkaesque immigration building, one of the few places in the world that I had hoped never to enter ever again.  "But it's very expensive."

"What's expensive?" I ask, increasingly concerned that these psychopaths weren't going to let me out of their country.

"500 rupees," he says.  "Apiece."

$10.

"Yeah, let's do this," I say.

At this time I fumble in the little man purse that I've carried absolutely everywhere in Nepal for a solid week and the sheaf of papers I had been given at the airport fall out of a kind of hidden outer pocket.

"SuperK," I say, handing the papers to her without comment and IMMEDIATELY moving back out of punching range.  The woman lifts weights.  She looks at the papers, looks up at me - holding the glance an uncomfortable extra beat or two, admirably saying nothing - then talks to our guide.

"OK," he says.  "We can go to the airport now."

I toss the equivalent of a buck to the guy who started to work on our very fast, very expensive application, and we pile into the car and head to the airport.  When we arrive a dude in a tie jabbers with our facilitator dude and we're handed off.  The airport guy takes us quickly and efficiently through what seemed like 719 different offices, line, queues, and obligations.  I'm throwing money at everyone at this point.  I do not see how it would have been possible to do this without help.  It did not seem doable.

So we get through the maze.  Our payoff was a 2 hour flight with a 7 hour lay-over; a 16 hour flight in a plane seat the size of a shoe-box, surrounded by ill, screaming children; then a 7 hour flight to Vacation City Near; finishing up with an hour bus ride home.

I slept good.