Our house recently came under attack by thousands of tiny dim-witted ants. The first place they chose for setting up their colony was our commode. Worse, they settled inside the nozzles from where the water rushes out when you flush. The result - mass carnage each time we'd use the loo. I played a personal Noah to thousands of them - rescuing them with toilet paper much to the wife's chagrin. I don't think they ever got the point. Or probably I didn't get their point - it must've been a mass ritual suicide of some sorts.

A few days later another industrious lot of them was found using our drawling line in the balcony for covering the distance between the two opposite walls it was tied to. On their way, some of them would forget the purpose of their voyage and wander off into a bed-sheet drying on the line and eventually settle there. After playing a patient watching game for 10 days or so the bedsheet was washed again. Most of them had died by now and had to be dusted away; the remainder must've felt as if the most dire prognostications about global warming had come true - our bucket played an angry ocean to their bed-sheet continent.

They weren't done with us yet. A few days later we found clusters of them sticking to our bedroom walls - exposed to the elements and an opportunistic spider or two - refugee colony like. A few of them even latched on to the glass pane of our sliding balcony door. Looking closely showed that a few of them held tiny transcluscent eggs in their mouths.


The least they could've done is settle on our walls in interesting patterns. A poor, dithered, monochrome Mona Lisa would've been great but alas their taste was probably more contemporary and thereby beyond me.

They are all gone now - or so we think. I hope they are not scheming in a dark, dingy corner of our house - after all a surprise planned by ants can't be pleasant!

Earlier in this series:
- Bhutan - Day 0 - Getting There
- Bhutan - Day 1 - Phuentsholing To Thimpu
- Bhutan - Day 2 - Thimpu To Trongsa
- Bhutan - Day 3.1 - Trongsa Dzong
- Bhutan - Day 3.2 - Bhumtang
- Bhutan - Day 4 - Wangdue, Punakha

I close my eyes and fly back in my mind's eye to the last day of our stay at Bhutan. I have no notes, a few pictures and a memory that is already dented by daily buffetings of city life.

We left our hotel at Wangdue after the usual bread, butter, jam, tea fare. The view from our balcony was sadly the only good part about our stay at the hotel that went by the name - Dragon's Nest. Thanks to this exotic moniker, the picture of Harry Potter from the cover of Goblet Of Fire would keep flashing before my eyes randomly. An Indian family in the room next door; separated from us only by paper-thin walls, was keen to catch up on their dose of K-serials. जन्मों के प्यासे goes the phrase in Hindi. They were also a family of prodigal snorers, making it very hard for me to sleep. I spent the night turning in an otherwise comfortable bed.

On our way to Paro, we took a short detour to Thimpu and visited the art school there. Anyone can enroll for a four year course at the school after finishing class XII. We saw classes on wood carving, painting, weaving, sculpture and metal craft. The atmosphere was remarkably like what used to be in the physics or chemistry labs in our schools! I am sure that most artisans can make a decent living by doing up the houses and dzongs in Bhutan. While dzongs might be opting for the traditional decor out of cultural reasons, the houses have to do it by law.


Just a few minutes before entering the main city, I had seen a beautiful prayer wheel at a small square. While I hadn't stopped the car then, I wanted to revisit it. The prayer wheel was installed inside a covered structure which served as a public space of sorts for old men, women and monks bent by age. The wheel itself was quite interesting and right between the big golden lettering were pictures of demons and snakes that looked straight out of an anniversary issue of Raj Comic's Nagraj series.



Just a few minutes from Paro, we saw another suspension bridge down in a valley. A small dirt track branching downhill off the side of the highway led to the bridge. We walked to it.


The two towers on each side of the bridge were two-storied. There were stairs inside that allowed you to go to the upper floor - whose walls were covered with beautiful paintings of Buddha, his incarnations, famous disciples and the man responsible for construction of a series of suspension bridges in Bhutan centuries ago.


Our guide informed us that some of the original iron chains used in construction of this bridge were reused during its recent overhaul. The bridge was covered with bamboo thatch - making it easy to cross without feeling giddy.


Paro has Bhutan's only airport and soon we were driving parallel to the runway. Our hotel was a cosy little place that served delicious Bhutanese and Indian fare for lunch. For a change we could order à la carte, allowing us to mix adventure of a new local dish (that turned out to be potatoes in melted cheese) with pragmatism of the hard-to-get-wrong Indian daal (that turned out to be very good indeed!).

It was already quite late in the afternoon and we headed straight to the Paro Museum. The building used to serve as a watch tower for the Paro Dzong before being converted into a museum. It was fascinating from inside - though some of the narrow, dark aisles that went in circles made you a little dizzy. If you've been to a big museum in India, the museum here will not hold much novelty for you. In fact the stories and depiction of a lot of deities of the Buddhist pantheon felt like they were a straight import from Hinduism. It is easy to overlook the richness, diversity and antiquity of our civilization during our day-today lives, but when you are in a foreign country - that too inside a museum - it is hard not to feel a degree of pride and a certain pang of separation. Still a small (silver?) statue of the Buddhist God of compassion, with hundreds of arms and eleven faces, had superb workmanship that impressed me profoundly.


Our next stop was the dzong at Paro. Minor repairs were being made inside. Workers applied a fresh coat of paint to the walls and windows.


The paintings on the walls were covered with a thin, yellow, silk cloth. Little monk boys tussled over little monk issues that only little monks could have understood.


A couple of them sat before a temple selling silk prayer threads. Their faces bore an expression of extreme serenity.


Taktsang - a dzong built on a rocky hill and some two hours' trek from its base - was beyond us already. With a heavy heart, I took picture of the pine trees that lined the road. It was time to head back to the hotel and prepare for next morning's flight back home.


Paro airport is unlike any airport I have seen to date. I am sure the country's best artists were employed for doing it up. The construction was very contemporary and mostly used concrete and very little wood, but the paintings were probably the best modern specimens of Bhutan's traditional style. As we walked to our Druk Air plane, I turned around for one last look at the terminal - it was as if we had just walked out of a temple and not an airport...


We made sure that we got the window seat on the right. Our stay had been predominantly cloudy, but the sky had cleared up today. Some 30 minutes into the flight, we could see snow capped mountain peaks in a distance. I had a distinct feeling that this was just a beginning with my love affair with the Himalayas.

Earlier in this series:
- Bhutan - Day 0 - Getting There
- Bhutan - Day 1 - Phuentsholing To Thimpu
- Bhutan - Day 2 - Thimpu To Trongsa
- Bhutan - Day 3.1 - Trongsa Dzong
- Bhutan - Day 3.2 - Bhumtang

We started early next morning for Wangdue. With more than 6 hours of picturesque drive ahead and my altitude sickness fully gone, I was keenly looking forward to enjoying every moment.

After a few minutes' drive from Bhumtang, we had an encounter with a herd of Yaks. They were quite scared of our car and would be out of our way in no time. I found them remarkably agile for their size. A yak or two would even gallop downhill in panic but with the car gone and food readily in sight, they would forget all about the scare of just moments ago and resume grazing again.


We drove through patches of rainy weather and occasional sunshine. We drove through valleys and crooked mountain roads.


We saw mountain tops glistening in the distance - rivulets of rain-water or water from melting snow ran downhill from there. At almost every other sharp turn we would encounter a small stream or a waterfall - small only with respect to the mountains that surrounded us. If one of these waterfalls were to materialize somewhere close to Bangalore it would be one of the biggest tourist attraction in Deccan! Alas the picture below does a poor job of conveying its scale - this waterfall by the roadside was over 75 feet tall!


We saw small houses on the mountains and in the valleys. They had an attached terraced farm, and a private brook. A small covered structure with a prayer wheel inside was often seen over the brook. The water turned the prayer wheel and the wheel tolled the bell, announcing its presence to those passing by.


We reached the Wangdue town at 3:00 and headed straight to the dzong there. This was to be our most disappointing experience. The monk quarters were dank and stank of urine, making it it impossible to stand there.

We politely declined the offer to be shown the temple rooms inside this dzong. It was prudent to head to Punakha - ex-capital of Bhutan and some 20 km away from where we were - to visit the famous dzong there while there was still some light left. Just as we were leaving, we ran into a boy who wanted us to take a picture of his. He looked as if all the happiness had abandoned his world. He had walked out of a Charles Dickens novel (think Oliver Twist or Nicholas Nickleby) into this dzong.


Punakha Dzong has been built near the confluence of two rivers. It had been recently restored and its whitewashed facade exuded a youthful exuberence. Several jacaranda trees that stood in its courtyard were in full bloom. Their purple canopies clearly visible as we approached the dzong.


Once we were at the entrance to the dzong, the sheer scale of its construction hit us. We would have to climb the same terrifying stairs that had been the bane of our existance in all the dzongs. Never before had we encountered them right at the entrance though. Never before were they this high either.


The paintings on the wall of the dzong looked vibrant and almost freshly done up. The courtyards were clean, airy and lit-up by the beautiful evening light filtering through the clouds. In a courtyard in front of the dzong's main prayer hall monks fed pigeons pieces of ceremonial cake.


While we had driven to the dzong, on our way back we'd walk across the river over a bridge and then drive to the hotel from there. The main bridge had been recently renovated, and like everything else here, looked right out of a fairytale.


For reasons, that I am unsure of to this moment, we chose to cross the river on a shabby, bamboo-wood bridge that ran parallel to it. It was almost as if someone had knocked together a ladder in 2 hours and just thrown it across the banks. It was supported in places by pillars made of rock but it still made the suspension bridge that we had crossed yesterday look like a cakewalk. The slats of wood were irregular, at times broken, and often non-existent. Through the gaps between the slats, you could see the river gushing below. It produced a head-spinning illusion of being on a raft and drifing in a direction opposite to the flow of the river. Worse, the bamboo hand railings were coming off in places. I would have preferred a raft indeed!


As we headed to our hotel, sun crept out and painted a valley here and a mountain there in a dusky golden hue.


It was hard not to feel sad at the thought of it practically being our last day in Bhutan tomorrow.

Next: Bhutan - Last Day - Paro

Earlier in this series:
- Bhutan - Day 0 - Getting There
- Bhutan - Day 1 - Phuentsholing To Thimpu
- Bhutan - Day 2 - Thimpu To Trongsa
- Bhutan - Day 3.1 - Trongsa Dzong

It took us slightly over an hour to reach Youtongla Pass. We were now in Bhumtang. A notice board near the pass reminded us that the specter of AIDS loomed large over Bhutan too. It read - "Thank You. No Time To Joke With AIDS. MSTF. Bhumthang".

On our way to the guest house, we made a short stop at a small village selling handicrafts in the Bhumtang valley. While the workmanship of the crafts was superb, we found their prices quite steep. Perhaps we'll visit one day with our salaries in Dollars, Euros or Pounds, and wonder what the fuss was all about.

Our guest house was a gorgeous concrete and wood structure on a hill. Its beautifully painted facade made up for the slightly curtailed visit to Trongsa Dzong!


A small river flowed in our backyard - its gentle murmur discernible in the room. It was impossible not to nap till the lunch was ready. Potatoes are one of the chief produce of Bhumtang and so they had to figure somewhere in the menu. We were served a portion of them "roasted"; though it was quite clear that the recipe involved deep-frying before roasting. Another surprise was "matar paneer" where tofu had switched roles with cottage cheese. The rest was the usual, traditional sautéed affair. We did love a fiery dish called the chilly-cheese - which was basically green chillies sautéed in melted cheese - lip-smacking, hear-attack inducing stuff.

Jakar Dzong was just minutes away from the guest house. At its entrance were two huge and brilliantly colored prayer wheels - calling them prayer cylinders will be more appropriate. A stick attached to their axle hit a bell tied just above the cylinders each time they went round. The tempo of the bell's tolling would slow down as the wheel would come to a halt.


This (still) being a Sunday, the courtyards and corridors of the Dzong were empty. This is the first time I saw litter - including plastic litter strewn about in the open.



We then walked to a small temple nearby. At its entrance, we again saw beautiful prayer wheels running from a wooden block on the floor all the way to the ceiling.


In addition to the usual wood work and the paintings, this temple also had some fine grill-work on the windows depicting Buddhist religious iconography. I saw several fire extinguishers is this most interesting setting. The wood and the traditional butter lamps used in these dzongs and temples are a tangible fire hazard and accidents happen almost every year.


We came out of the temple and took a dirt track flanked on either sides by paddy and potato fields. Clouds had come out and a surreal light illuminated patches of mountains surrounding us.


At the end of the track one of the most breathtaking sights awaited us. In a huge, green field in a large valley stood a grand monastery. Cattle, calves and horses were grazing around freely. Boy monks in maroon robes ran about the temple. In a corner a cluster of tall, white prayer flags fluttered relentlessly. Take the odd electricity poles or two and their cables out and this was Fairyland.



The door on the side from which we approached the monastery was closed. A small ladder led us over a low wall and another small ladder received us at the other end. A peach tree was in full bloom in the courtyard. It bore delicate pink flowers which littered the ground.

The staircases that led us into the various prayer rooms in this monastery kept reminding me of Escher's Relativity.


Inside, besides the colorful ceremonial cakes, packaged potato chips and biscuits (Sunfeast or Parle G) were kept as offerings to the deities. Teenaged monks tried to commit a page of an old manuscript to memory by chanting it aloud. A senior monk with a belt in his hand walked amidst them to ensure discipline. Outside, little boy monks played, fought and occasionally chased a dog or two with their robes.

One more temple was left on our itinerary and reaching it involved a long walk through a narrow, hilly dirt track. We also had to go across a river on a makeshift suspension bridge - my first time on one. It wasn't your typical nightmarish suspension bridge which is narrow, rickety and connects two distant points across a deep gorge, but a broad one over a docile river. But it was still a suspension bridge with no support in the middle and that variety tends to swing a lot. You feel it most when you are right in the middle - which in a way is good because going to the other end is as viable an option as returning back. And then as a child they burden your minds with dark scientific facts about resonant frequencies and soldiers breaking their march on a suspension bridge to prevent it from collapsing. It all comes flooding back and makes you wonder if you'll ever make it. Well, I made it fine - albeit with sweaty palms and trembling legs much to the entertainment of my lovely mountain goat of a wife.

The last temple was an ordinary one. The only memory I have of it, is that of a very heavy chain mail. I have no clue what it was doing there but our guide picked it up, put it on and made an elaborate ceremonial bow to a deity thrice. He said that it was like doing 300 of them and he wasn't exaggerating. I could barely move the mail, let aside put it on!

As we drove back to our guest house, I could see Jagar Dzong far away on a hill and a trail lined with white prayer flags that led to it.


It had cooled down fast and a spell of rain seemed imminent. Our room had a quaint, iron room-heater. They fed it with firewood and pine cones and lit them with a candle. The pine cones caught fire easily and helped ignite the wood.


Soon the room was warm and cozy. Only dinner stood between us and a long night's sleep...

Next: Bhutan - Day 4 - Wangdue, Punakha

Earlier in this series:
- Bhutan - Day 0 - Getting There
- Bhutan - Day 1 - Phuentsholing To Thimpu
- Bhutan - Day 2 - Thimpu To Trongsa

This is when things got interesting. For next two days we spent more time outside than inside the car. It has hardly been a week since we returned from Bhutan, but already the entire trip seems like it was one long day. I kept a meticulous account of each day in my notepad - right down to details of each meal - and that has helped me bring some sense of chronology to these posts. The material I have in my log for the 3rd day demands that I break this write-up into two. Trongsa was the first dzong that I have ever entered so I have a lot to tell. Our description of visits to other dzongs will become less detailed and will state only what is unique to each one.

It was a sunny but cold morning in Trongsa. We checked out of our guest house and went straight to the Trongsa dzong. As we neared the dzong, our guide took out a long white scarf and wrapped it around himself. The common public must wear one before entering a dzong or face stiff fines. Tourists are fine - even in jeans.

The dzong was as beautiful as it was imposing. We entered through a large wooden door with the wheel of dharma painted on it. In its center was an ornate door knocker. It is a motif we'd see consistently on most doors across the dzongs.


A narrow passage, with rows of prayer wheels inside a long niche built into the walls on our either side, led us in. The ceilings were covered with beautiful mandalas.


Inside a riot of colors awaited us. Though shades of maroon and mustard dominated, colorful paintings on the wall supplied every possible color the human eye is capable of perceiving. The colors were so powerful that I could've stared at even mundane patterns - like this one made of swastikas - for hours...


The dzong was 2-3 storey high and almost the entire construction was in stone and wood. The architectural style seemed vaguely familiar - it was as if I was standing in an opulent haveli in Rajasthan. The material wasn't sandstone or marble but what the painters had done to the wood, made it look as grand. The windows and the balconies were painted in breathtaking detail.



Most floors were accessible to tourists - though it involved climbing a wooden structure which I can best describe as a cross between a ladder and a staircase. It was steep, creaky and much harder to climb down than up. The picture below will never convey what a terror it was!


From the first floor I could see the walls of the dzong and mountains beyond. It felt like I was in a giant flying machine which had landed on a mountain.


The dzong had two wings - one that is used for administrative purposes and the other where the monks pray, study and live. Roosters and cats played in the courtyard and seemed to accept each other's presence grudgingly. They paid heed to matters of official interests too.


Sunday was the day off for monks. We saw practically no one other than an occasional priest or a tourist or two. The monk quarters had small temples - or rather prayer rooms with imposing idols of buddha or his various incarnations. Our guide arranged a visit to one of them on the first floor, outside which was this beautiful painting of a wrathful buddhist god with 9 heads and 18 arms.


Photography wasn't allowed inside the temple. With hardly any light coming inside, it was too dark anyway. There were statues both big and small, old and new and paintings that were fading and so covered with curtains. While showing us a row of statues of sitting Buddha, our guide enthusiastically explained how we could tell which one of them represented the "Past Buddha", which one "Present Buddha" and which one "Future Buddha" by looking the position of Buddha's hands. It was customary to offer some money before the statue of the deity - much like temples in India.

I was completely mesmerized and would have spent at least a few more minutes exploring. But we had to leave for Bhumtang - the spiritual heartland of Bhutan where more dzongs, monasteries and temples awaited us...

Next: Bhutan - Day 3.2 - Bhumtang

Earlier in this series:
- Bhutan - Day 0 - Getting There
- Bhutan - Day 1 - Phuentsholing To Thimpu

We left Thimpu at 8:30 morning. Our destination today would be Trongsa in central Bhutan. We would cover about the same distance as we did yesterday. We hoped that the traffic would be better today.

A breathtaking sight awaited us at DochuLa Pass barely an hour after our departure from Thimpu. 108 small white towers or chortens, arranged in concentric circles on a small mound mark this pass. Beautiful white flowers blossomed amidst these towers. Some of them had fruits too; we learned that they were wild strawberries! Hundreds of prayer flags fluttered in the valley surrounding the mound.


A red notice board informed us that the area surrounding the pass was a botanical garden and "collection" of "live plants" was strictly prohibited. To me the whole of Bhutan had seemed like a large botanical garden - the idea that a small area was demarcated as one, seemed a little bizarre. We had seen hills covered with red and pink rhododendrons, magnolia trees with pale-white flowers and various other species of wild flowers and berries that were a mix of strange and vaguely familiar. And this spectacle continued far and beyond this "botanical garden"!

We also saw a much bigger notice board (again red) in the same general area, that read "Election Advertising Board". We would see more of these throughout our travel in Bhutan. Bhutan had embraced democracy barely a couple of months ago. The idea here was to give the various political parties and their candidates a place to put their posters rather than stick them to the walls of the beautifully, and I am sure painstakingly, painted houses. With elections now long over, most of the boards had been cleared of all the posters.

An hour later we were in the Wangdue valley. A few meters before a check-post we got down from the car and walked the small stretch along a river. What had caught our attention and prompted this walk was a cluster of cacti with big yellow flowers. The buds were a shade of maroonish-brown but once they blossomed, yellow completely took over.


We drove on for another 3 hours on the curvy, mountainous roads. Most of them were remarkably good considering the harsh terrain. A few patches were being repaired or widened. The mountains had many faces. Some were covered in trees that were shedding their leaves while others had trees whose leaves sported hues of rust and green



Our breakfast had been plain old bread, butter, jam and tea so after over 5 hours of driving it was natural for us to be ravenous (the word reminds me that it is time for another piece of Bhutan related trivia - the Raven is national bird of Bhutan). We stopped at a small cafeteria down in a valley. A semi-circular attached room - which doubled up as a shop for handicrafts - led us into main dining area. From where I sat, I could see the lush mountains outside and hear a river roar. Colorful knitted woolen flowers were kept in a vase on each table - evidently a woman's touch. On a wall to our left hung a picture of the last king of Bhutan with his four wives.


We had a generous quantity of black tea followed by some delicious mushroom soup. The main course included french-fries, red rice, sautéed beans and a mélange of lightly cooked mushrooms, tomatoes and red onions. I looked at watermelon slices that followed in disbelief. I associate them too strongly with the unbearable heat of the plains to enjoy them in the cool mountain weather! Tea was served again along with the bill which was more or less on the same lines as what we had paid for dinner yesterday.

This was probably a family run establishment and our guide seemed to know the people here. Having been caged in the car for so long, we were eager to stretch our legs. So we left him to chat with his friends and stepped out. In the small courtyard outside, young dogs were frolicking about. There were a couple of old ones too. They exuded a zen-like calm and lay half-asleep on the concrete staircase that had led us to the café. Their coat was clean, lustrous and bordered on being fur. All of them were a remarkable specimen of their species. I took out my camera and started clicking them. Just then I heard the pack of younger ones bark and charge in my general direction. I felt an adrenaline rush like no other but instead of fleeing, found myself firmly planted to same spot. Fortunately for me, the cavalry charge had been towards another dog that had strayed into their territory. They were still indifferent to my camera but I was too shaken up to continue clicking.


We walked a little on the roads which we had only been driven on so far. Grey clouds obscured the mountains ahead of us. In the valley below, I could see the river that I had only heard so far. It was still and pleasantly cool. Soon it started to drizzle. Before it could turn into a downpour, our car overtook us. Grudgingly we abandoned our short hike and got in.

I was soon asleep and must've dozed for at least an hour. I was woken up by the sound of rain pattering against our car's roof. The road was fully wet and the terrain had gotten more difficult if anything. The rain had laved all the trees and plants on the mountains and had heightened the intensity of the color green. I spent a few moments contemplating whether I was dreaming or if those surroundings were indeed real.

Just then we stopped at another pass. Most passes are marked with a small white stupa decorated with colorful prayer flags. The rain had dwindled into a gentle drizzle again so we could get down and look at the valley before us. A small concrete platform of sorts indicated a "viewing point" from where we could see Trongsa Dzong. Dzongs are a combination of a monastery and a fort. Most of them are built on mountain slopes and have white walls (there is no intention of a camouflage) which gently taper off towards the roof. A little higher-up on the same mountain was its cylindrical watch-tower. The dzong is accessible on foot via a trail that closes at 2:00 PM. At close to 4:00 PM, we were obviously late for trekking to the dzong and would be taking the more mundane motorable route to it tomorrow.


We soon reached the Trongsa town. The supply of Britannia fruit cake and roasted gram we had picked from the army canteen yesterday had served us well. We supplemented it with a pack of Parle G (3 Rupees, but marked up by 2 Rupees) and a bottle of drinking water (20 Rupees, but marked up by 5 Rupees - hey we were gullible tourists). Our guest house was just a few minutes' uphill drive away from the town. We were soon enjoying black tea with a traditional Bhutanese snack of something that looked like an intricately carved wooden hair-clip and tasted like a mildly sweet fortune cookie that they serve at the end of your dinner in a chinese restaurant. A common feature of all the places where we had eaten was a big and beautifully painted thermos flask with hot water for tea always ready.

We strolled in the dim dusk light on an uphill road that would take us to Bhumtang tomorrow. I finally got a chance to photograph flowers that I had only seen in passing so far.



Our food was falling into a fixed pattern of sautéed mushrooms (the shiitake variety this time), ferns, beans, cabbage and carrots. The chef at our guest house (another small family run enterprise) attempted a remarkably Indian tasting curry of potato pea and carrot. The experiment with lentils was off the mark; though welcome for the deviation from the sautéed fare.

Trongsa Dzong looked eerie and magical from our room's balcony. Far far away headlights of vehicles would occasionally traced the same curved path that we had hours ago. The days of long drives were behind us. For next two days we'll get to spend a decent time on foot. I could've stayed up all night in anticipation but the sleep got the better of me...

Next: Bhutan - Day 3.1 - Trongsa Dzong

Earlier in this series:
- Bhutan - Day 0 - Getting There

By the time we finished our breakfast, our tour-guide had already arrived at the hotel. We had a minor confusion about our starting time as Bhutan is 30 minutes ahead of India (GMT +6). We loaded our meagre belongings into a white Toyota Corolla and set off.

I was right about being close to Himalayas. The mountains were visible on all sides from Jaigaon itself. Within 2 minutes of our drive we found ourselves at the India-Bhutan border. A large, colorfully painted gate marked the entrance to Bhutan. A man stood a couple of meters ahead of the gate with a hosepipe and washed the tyres of every car entering Bhutan. I think I only saw him doing two tyres on one side of the car and wondered if the gesture was merely a symbolic one.


I haven't crossed into another country by road before, so I was interested in seeing how drastic the transition between India and Bhutan would be. And drastic it was. You enter Bhutan to leave crowd and congestion behind you. The roads are much cleaner with little or no litter. The architecture of buildings in Bhutan (more on it later) accentuates the feeling of having entered a new nation. Even the petrol stations were beautifully done up!

Right at the entrance was the immigration office. During the half an hour or so it took the guide to arrange for our tourist permits we made calls home at a princely rate of 21 Rs/min! Our phones weren't picking any of the domestic carriers since last night and we would be relying on telephone booths for staying in touch with our families for the rest of our trip.

Phuentsholing is about 200 km away from Thimpu - Bhutan's capital city and our destination for the first day. The weather was very pleasant and we covered good ground for the first hour or so. The drive - though smooth, was full of some very sharp turns which made me a little giddy. The combination of altitude and the lack of sleep from last night gradually made it worse for me. All I could do at this point was close my eyes and try to catch a nap.

Shortly we ran into our first big traffic jam. All the vehicles - which included a motley assortment of small tourist buses, trucks and cars - stood queued up on one side of the road waiting for traffic from the opposite direction to pass. I could see mountains all around me. Clouds occasionally drifted to the highway and hung there for minutes, making it the most scenic traffic jam I had ever been in. With nothing better to do, we started counting the vehicles passing us and gathered useless trivia.


Most vehicles in Bhutan have red number plates with the vehicle's registration number written in white. A number beginning with BP indicates a private vehicle, BT indicates a taxi while BG indicates a government vehicle. We later learned that vehicles belonging to the Royal family use BHUTAN as a prefix. I found the message on this truck parked next to us funny:


The jam lasted over an hour and soon we were crawling towards our destination again. We covered our way in spurts and were often stalled for 10-20 minutes every now and then. During one such stop I spotted this large flock of tiny birds (I wish I knew what birds these were) flying into a valley. While the individual birds moved at random, the flock as a whole moved in a single direction.


At around 2:00 we halted for lunch at a small canteen probably being run by the Indian army. You could get Dosas (!!!), Maggi noodles, Pakodas, rice-curry combo and even fresh momos for a very reasonable (read subsidised) price. The place was obviously a hit with the soldiers and we saw several of them come in in small groups of 4-8 during the 40 minutes we spent there. The man taking orders was a brusque, corpulent, Punjabi man in his late 30s. He'd yell your order to cooks working in the kitchen and soon piping hot food will be waiting at the counter for you to pick. It was like being in a small road-side eatery on the way to Chandigarh from Delhi (right down to stinking, dirty loos!).

The remaining day passed in a blur. We kept running into small traffic jams frequently and that slowed us down a lot. We stopped just once to see a small hydro-electric power station down in a valley, and that was about the only "sight-seeing" we could manage. By the time we were in Thimpu, the daylight was fading fast. My first impression of Thimpu was of a beautiful, well-organized city with a lot of character. The highway that led us into the city, gave Thimpu the air of a fast-paced city in a developed country.


We stayed at a small hotel called "Hotel Wangchuk". Our room was small but cozy. The amount of wood I saw used in the room was mind boggling. The wood was of a dark grain and that probably contributed to the feeling of the room being small.We were very close to, what seemed like, the main market in Thimpu (think M. G. Road in Bangalore). It was nippy and quite windy outside but a lot of people - mostly teenagers - were out shopping. This was the only time I would see so many people together in Bhutan! Our room had an electric kettle so picked some Taj Mahal tea-bags for the morning's tea (the shop packed it for us in a brown paper bag instead of a polythene one). Most things in Bhutan cost the same as they do in India. You can use Indian Rupees interchangeably with Bhutanese Ngultrums.

We returned to hotel to find that a lavish "fixed menu" had been ordered for us. The idea of the food, I guess, was to gently introduce us to Bhutanese cuisine without deviating too much from the Indian fare we are used to. The fact that we are vegetarians makes this task a little harder because despite being a Buddhist nation, beef, pork and fish are staple fare in Bhutan. Still the food was amazing and it would be grave injustice to not include a list of what we had as part of this post:

- Vegetable coconut fried rice generously sprinkled with fried cashews
- Sautéed vegetables and mushrooms
- Sautéed ferns
- Cauliflower Manchurian
- Spaghetti Primavera (topped with loads of cheese)
- Coke

The dinner set us off by about 300 Rs. per head, which in hindsight wasn't bad at all!

It is easy to drift into sleep on a full stomach. I slept a sound, dream-less sleep and woke up only around 7:00 AM to the chirping of a lone sparrow outside. We were staying in a room right above the portico at the hotel's entrance and so ours was the only room with a balcony and this is where the sparrow had come looking for food! It was a cold, cloudy morning - the sort I find very inviting for a long day's drive.

Next: Bhutan - Day 2 - Thimpu To Trongsa

Despite having spent a good part of my life in Northern part of India, I hadn't seen the Himalayas. My notion of mountains was largely shaped by hills/hill-stations of South India like Coorg and Ooty. Visiting Bhutan therefore was not just a vacation - it was to be a crash-course in telling mountains from hills.

The first day of our trip to Bhutan was entirely spent traveling and even then we didn't quite enter Bhutan. Our journey started with a Spice Jet flight to Kolkata, which, like most flights from Bangalore these days, was delayed. To their credit, the check-in experience was by far the smoothest I've had on budget airlines. Yet, the last-moment gate changes and sorting of people into two queues left me a bit tetchy. Finally when I saw the plane docked to the aerobridge I mused that there was after all, a flight at the end of the tunnel.

We flew along the eastern coast over the Bay of Bengal. As the plane neared Kolkata, it moved inland and I could clearly see the numerous distributaries of Ganges. The land below was a living, breathing giant and the mesh of tiny rivulets, its circulatory system. Before landing the plane circled several lush, sun-bathed fields and marshes, which to passengers in the window seats must've seemed like a beautiful mosaic of green stained glass.

After a brief wait at Kolkata airport, we boarded another Spice Jet flight to Bagdogra. At Bagdogra airport we hired a pre-paid taxi (for Rs. 1,720) to Jaigaon - a small town in West Bengal which was to act as our gateway to Bhutan. The drive lasted close to 4 hours. The roads were more or less good - not quite highways - but your basic, tarred, functional roads which small, inner parts of our country seem to have so few of. The driver handled the Maruti Van (Omni) with the ferocity of a man who is on the verge of re-enacting the bravest moments from his previous incarnation as a kamikaze pilot. We must've done something right to have reached Jaigaon alive and that too without alterning the bone-count of our body.

We spent the night at a small hotel in Jaigaon called "Anand". The word means "joy" or "bliss" in Hindi (and in a handful of other Indian languages), but I am sure that there exists a language where this word has connotations of torture. And it is that very language that the founders of this hotel must've had in their minds while naming it. We were in an air conditioned room and having had a long, tiring day, were hoping to sleep in peace. A powercut rendered the air conditioning useless. The hotel's policy of not running a generator from midnight to 6 in the morning, rendered the fan useless as well. We groped in the dark to open the windows and keep the room from becoming stuffy (fortunately for us, it was raining heavily outside and was quite windy). In an hour the hotel's policy around the genset had changed. The roar of the generator, the fan which now spun at a breakneck speed (there was no regulator in the room to slow it down) and random noises from outside kept me from sleeping.

Occasional gusts of cool breeze from outside kept assuring me that were tantalizingly close to the himalayas. The night would be over in no time.

Next: Bhutan - Day 1 - Phuentsholing To Thimpu

Jeans
Shankar's mega flop from the 90s. This came around the same time as the row of flops starring one of the oddest couple in the history of Indian cinema - Prabhu Deva and Nagma. Every one was trying to cash in on Rahman's immense popularity across the country at that time. So most Rahman movies would get dubbed into Hindi and we would be treated to such poetic lyrics as:

कंप्यूटर गाये तो तुम कत्थक नाच करो
डिस्को में जाअो तो होटों पर भैरवी हो

I am told that the lyrics were not much better in Tamizh either, so I didn't miss much.

We digress; what are these two people doing exactly - trying to contort themselves into the yin-yang sign?


Makdee
We know that not many quality movies are made in our country for children, but so much angst over this sad state of affairs? I am sure there were better frames in the movie than one of this girl threatening to punch the potential buyers/listeners of the album. Then there are lyrics like:

कीङा सा गर्दन पे चलता है
दिन रात उंगली से मलता है

which creep you out even if you have sufficient context about the movie being about a bad witch. Was someone ghost-writing for Gulzar here?

Still, it doesn't take away the fact that Vishal's score for Makdee was decent, Makrand Desai's rendition of "Kasai" is brilliant and, the hostile album-cover not withstanding, I am still looking for a DVD of this movie.


Parsuram
I think there is a correlation between the quality of the album-art and a movie's performance on the box office. This one sank without a trace too, taking along with it a semi-decent A. R. Rahman soundtrack. I am sure the ladies are still proud of their man. If this were an ad for an after-shave lotion, perhaps I might not have found this cover odd. But guess what, it is not!

Not to be missed: A confused looking A. R. Rahman in the top-left corner and the images of the trinity copied into the heads of the quavers scattered all over the cover.

The good - "Muppathu Nimidam" (Unnikrishnan and Sujatha) was one of the most refreshing Rahman number of that time and he tried a few new things in "Kadhal Vettukkill" (Karthik and Sadhna Sargam). The bad - last track "Jack and Jill", which was sung by; believe it or not, renowned carnatic singer Nithyasree! (with Mathangee)


Parthalae Paravasam
This is one of my favorite Rahman soundtracks, sadly I cannot say the same about the album cover. Sure there is lot of love and bonding between these people, but why are they trying to choke each other? The ladies actually look like they aren't too comfortable! Yes they are grinning, but look at their hands! They seem to be struggling to prise their necks out of Madhvan's vice-like grip; who himself has something similar to contend with.

Before you ask - "Anbe Sugama" and "Adhisaya Thirumanam" are my favorite tracks. The latter is to be heard by plugging in your head phones, turning the volume a notch higher, closing your eyes and drifting along.

And ignore Prabhu Deva at the bottom, he is squigrinning (squinting + grinning) for a different movie that was unceremoniously bundled with Parthale Parvasam on this CD by Sa Re Ga Ma.


Pukar
This one is priceless. Frozen glaciers, Anil Kapur and a young lady (dressed most inappropriately for her surroundings - but we are used to that) trying to tune into his crotch. I guess 90s were innocent times. But now the word bl...., never mind.

At odds with the album cover is a beautiful devotional song - "Ek Tu Hi Bharosa" by Lata Mangeshkar - which I think is only one of its kind as far as Rahman and Lata Mangeshkar go. This is probably also the only album in which Anuradha Paudwal sang for A. R. Rahman - "Kismat Se Tum Hum Ko Mile".


Things have improved a lot over the last few years. Packaging of the content usually gets the same slick treatment as the content itself. Yes a few duds crop up now and then, but they need to - so that we can all look back and have a hearty laugh.

Loops are bona-fide musical citizens right from the days of western classical music. There is even a notation in sheet music for sections that the composer wants you to repeat. Here is an example from Beethoven's Für Elise.


In fact the "looping" instruction marked above is quite sophisticated. You play till the double bar with two dots and start over, and when you reach the bar marked 1, you skip that bar and jump to the one marked 2. Whether it a device for a lazy composer or an eco-friendly exercise in saving paper and ink remains debatable. What is certain beyond debate is the fact that loops are becoming increasingly important building blocks for a modern composer. A. R. Rahman uses them, Harris Jayaraj uses them (at times a bit too much) and there are genres that are based entirely on loops or rather there are genres that entirely are loops!

When I was taking piano lessons, I used to think of notes as the building blocks of music. My piano learning days are behind me (I didn't have the dedication to stick to it. It's something I've bookmarked to revisit at a later point in life.), but I still remain a keen "student" of music. When I got my first Mac, I got acquainted with GarageBand. Suddenly I was looking at a loop, and not a note, as a starting point for a composition. GarageBand comes with a decent selection of loops out of the box. You can augment your collection by buying "Jam Packs" from Apple or other parties.


The latest version of GarageBand opens with a dialog that has an option called "Magic GarageBand". Choosing this option gets you to an interface where you pick a genre for your composition. Within moments you are given a "pre-assembled" piece, where all you do is swap out, remove or add instruments and you have a composition ready!


I "composed" the following by starting out with Rock as my genre. I replaced "Vintage Guitar" with a Sitar, "Sixties' Beat" with "Clap Along", "Gritty Organ" with "Dreamy Piano", "Driving Bass" with "Deep Bass", "Jangle Guitar" with a Punk Guitar and finally added a little bit of Tabla in the beginning to get the following piece (please turn down your speakers - the link starts playing the moment it loads):

Song 1 (mp3, 128kbps)

But you are not restricted to "canned" compositions. You can start with a clean canvas, pick or record your loops and even tinker with individual notes! Here is what spending an hour with Garage Band resulted in:

Piano Jingle (mp3, 128kpbs)

If you have an ear for music, but couldn't learn an instrument out of laziness, lack of talent or paucity of time, you can still make music (or something that resembles it). Thank God for computers!

p.s. I must draw an analogy with programming - notes are the low-level (I would say somewhere between machine language and assembly language) instructions for making music. GarageBand is a high-level garbage-collected environment and you can readily plug-in 3rd party libraries!