Farewell!

Farwell! Bye! See you soon! Be carefull! 

After meeting everyone one last time before our trip, we were finally ready to head off. At least, that's what we thought. 

Backpacks strapped on, sweet friends waving us off and my sister dropping us at Schiphol. Full of excitement and feeling a bit nervous we joined the queue for our check-in desk. A bit more nervous than usual, not only because we're going a tad longer but also because we weren't exactly sure if our visa for India would be granted on time. After months of reading about so many different countries and rules, we kind of had forgotten that for India we can't get a visa-on-arrival but need to apply for this in advance. Two nights before departure we realized this and filled in the extensive forms like a couple of mad cows. There's many stories about people getting their visa within 24 hours but officially it takes 72 hours. So our nerves seemed legit because we were not allowed to board our first flight (to Abu Dhabi where we would have enough time to get our visa granted). After waiting for several hours if we would still get granted before the check-in desk would close, making countless calls to the Indian embassy, Etihad and whoever we could think of, we had no other option than to go back home. And then all we could do was wait...

At the end of the next day our visas finally got granted, they made full use of the 72 hours. Because our minds were already in travel mode we wanted to get away again as quickly as possible and that night we took the train to Brussels where we took off the next morning. Onto destination #1: Abu Dhabi.