Touring Bhutan

  Thimphu, Bhutan
Saturday, November 11, 2006

We spent two nights in the country's capital Thimphu. Our guidebook proclaimed that it is the only capital city in the world without a traffic light. While we were in Thimphu, we saw the national sport - archery. The target is quite small, about 3 feet tall and 1 foot wide, and it is 500 feet away from the archer! We could barely see the target when we stood next to the archer. The crowd stands pretty close to the target. We were amazed that people weren't regularly hit by stray arrows. In order to let the archer know how he did, either his teammates would do a dance or sing a song when he hit the target, or, if he missed the target, the other team would start trash talking - it was pretty funny!

Outside of Thimphu, we hiked to a monastery called Cheri Goemba. It was in a beautiful location atop a peak, and since it was a holy day, the monks were chanting all day. We were allowed to sit inside and enjoy the chanting and temple ambience. We also saw the weekend market in Thimphu. It had a wide variety of vegetables and fruits but most of all there were piles and piles of chili peppers. It seems that all of the national dishes feature chilies prominently.

After Thimphu, we ventured east to Punakha. It was at a much lower altitude and we enjoyed the warmth for a day. We hiked to the Divine Madman's temple, Chimmi Lhakhang. A monk gave us a fertility blessing by lowering a large wooden phallus and an iron archery set to each of our heads while he was chanting. We also hiked to a large chorten (Buddhist memorial); it had three floors and all of the walls were covered with colorful paintings depicting the Buddhist wheel of life and other Buddhist images. As we hiked down, we saw many families working together to harvest the rice. The next day we visited the Punakha dzong; it was situated next to two rivers and was one of the most picturesque dzongs that we saw.



We drove four hours east to Phobjikha Valley. The valley had no electricity, and the heat in our hotel rooms for the next three nights would be a small stove in the room. The valley was the winter resting spot of the black necked crane. We hiked out to see them but they flew away when we got very close. The next day we ran into tourists from the International Crane Society who had gone to Bhutan primarily to see these rare birds. It was only then that we both realized that we were supposed to watch the birds from quite a distance and not disturb them in their natural habitat. Oh well, they just seemed like normal birds to us. To say that these people were a bit nuts about birds would be an understatement. As they described to us how special it was to see these birds fly from ¼ mile away, we just gave each other knowing looks and never mentioned that we got within 100 feet of the birds before they flew away.

The next day we drove another 2 ½ hours east in the morning to Trongsa. We visited the large Trongsa dzong; it had beautiful painting covering its interior walls. It took us 3 hours to drive 40 more miles east to Bumthang. The roads were very narrow with many blind curves. We were glad that we weren't driving ourselves.

We visited three monasteries, Tamshing, Kurjey and Lampa. We also visited "burning lake." The next day we drove 6 hours west back to Wangdi where we stayed in a nice hotel next to a stream. The following day we drove another 6 hours back to Paro. Midway through our drive, we stopped for a beautiful hike up to the snow in a dense forest. We hiked up 1,800 feet to a small monastery at 14,000.


Driving:

We spent a lot of time driving (or being driven) around Bhutan. The roads are slow going to say the least. We were in a small Hyundai SUV with our driver and guide. This was a very comfortable vehicle and we were even able to listen to our Ipod for some long days of driving. The first vehicle we had was not so good. It didn't have seat belts, a heater, or a defroster. After a cold (40 degrees outside), rainy day when the driver had to keep the windows down to prevent the windshield from getting fogged up, we asked for/demanded a change and were obliged. On 95% of the roads that we traveled on, the pavement was not wide enough for two vehicles to pass while both being on the pavement. The roads were constructed in a way that they were about 1.5 lanes wide. This meant that anytime two vehicles had to pass one or both would have to drive over to the soft shoulder. The roads were extremely winding and always going up or down; there is very little flat road in the Himalayas. This made the passing very precarious at times and we thought that we might plummet of a cliff a few times. These winding roads, combined with the passing slowdowns, meant that we averaged between 16 to 20 mph for journeys of 3-6 hours. Mark definitely could have ridden his bike faster on some of the roads. We always enjoyed it more when we were on the side of the road closer to the hillside as opposed to the cliffside of the road. The roads were sort of like the Bolinas-Fairfax Road in Marin, but for hundreds of miles with traffic from busses and large trucks. Luckily there is not such a large population in Bhutan so passing didn't happen as often as it might.

Hotels:

The accommodation in Bhutan ranged from adequate (think Motel 6) to quite nice (maybe like a Sheraton at one place, but more rustic and natural, like a nice hotel in Tahoe). We were often cold in our rooms, but had little wood stoves in a few places to keep warm. The little stoves were great and we could get the room nice and toasty. Unfortunately the fire would burn out in about 30 minutes if no wood was added, so we had to be diligent. We were sometimes the only tourists particularly in the small hotels, which was strange at mealtimes when we would be the only two people in the dining room for a 4-5 course meal. Always strange to have so many people serving you.

Other tourists:

There are not a lot of other tourists in Bhutan (we were told there were around 14,000 last year), and most of who we saw/met were in larger groups of 6-12. Because of the expense of Bhutan, most of the other travelers we met were between 50-65. Bhutan has a minimum amount that tourists must be charged for every day that they are in the country. Sometimes we would feel that the price was too much for what we were getting, but then we met many tourist who were paying 1.5-2X more than us per day and were travelling around in a packed mini-bus and staying in some of the same places. Most of the tourists we met had traveled extensively to other places in Asia and were coming to Bhutan after they had been to 5-10 other Asian countries. It was amazing how many of the tourists we did meet were from the San Francisco area. We actually met two people who lived on our same block on Chestnut Street, one of whom had stayed there 3 years ago and one who was still there. Apparently two of the bigger tour companies that organize Bhutan trips are based in SF. We even met someone who knew one of my Mother's childhood friends who had recommended our tour company to us.

Back In Delhi: We are now back in Delhi as we are filling in this journal. It is weird being in a city where there are around 14 million people after being in a country the size of Switzerland that has only around 700K people. The noise form the car horns alone is enough to drive one insane. Tonight we will be having dinner with Sid's (Sarah's friend from Berkeley) father, who lives in Delhi.