The Dinner Prize

It's very exciting to win a prize! People commented what a great place the Shangri-La Hotel is...but it is far from this place. We got the resort car to take us to the hotel and would need a taxi to bring us home.

Well, the place is nice. The fancy dinner was really a buffet and had much the same food as we've been eating for two weeks -- good, but we're getting tired of curries! Jim has pronounced all chocolate desserts in Asia as dry and uninteresting and last night left half of the tiny sliver on his plate! (Imagine that!)

OK, that was an OK dinner and the wait staff was very friendly (we were the only people in the restaurant at 7:30). Then it was time to get the taxi home. Gokarna (our resort) has a little card with a map and direction in Nepalese. So the hotel brings a cab in and tells them where we want to go and elicits a price which was only a little more than we expected. Since we knew Gokarna is off the beaten path, we had them ask several times if the driver really knew where it was and showed the map. All is good! Great.

The driver takes off in the opposite direction from the way we arrived, but since the resort car was dropping someone off, that wasn't too far-fetched. After 15 minutes through an entirely new part of town we stop and the driver says what sounds like "Gokarna." We say no and gave him the little map. He had great trouble reading the instructions (the English side was practically unintelligible), he grunted and took off saying the price will be double. We say NO, we will give you 1000 rupees. He drives on. Only a few minutes later, I start recognizing things (in the dark with all the shops closed, it was really hard to tell). Then the driver asks , "You know?" Jim said "Maybe." The driver calls the hotel and in fact we were only a half mile away.

Then came the moment of reckoning. The driver started arguing, but he saw Jim counting out his money. We gave him everything we had 1400 rupees and walked away! 

I suspected this would happen sometime and it does make a story (sort of like the bear eating all our camping food) and it wasn't that we were captured by white slavers, so we chalked it up to experience. The evening cost us more than if we had had the best meal at the resort!