leaving india

Instead of taking a short cut from Ahmedabad to the border with Nepal, we are traveling around the south of India during the monsoon :-). We have to wait for at least 2 till 4 weeks for a new passport, which we can obtain in Mumbai. To make myself also a bit useful this year, we will visit some projects on behalf of the Dutch program Xplore. The visit at the projects in Pondicherry and Chennai where very impressive and inspiring. In Chennai we got after 3 weeks the news that the new passport was arrived, so we went straight to Mumbai again. After obtained the passport we had to get an exit visa to leave India. This was again a real challenge to our good mood and nerves :-). They only want to give an exit visa if we would take a flight out of Mumbai. Shouting that we wanted to leave over land did not had any effect. So we walked a bit between there office and our embassy till we finally found a possibility. They just copied by hand the originally lost visa in the new passport and we paid some money and off we go :-). After 3 months in India we wanted to get to the border as soon as possible, so we spend some time in the train. From Mumbai to Lucknow and then to Gorakpur and to the border. At the border they checked the passport and especially the visa from Rolina with suspicious :-). But finally it was there, the exit stamp. We bought our Nepalese visa and crossed the border by foot. India was an overwhelming experience :-).