Bhutan - Day 3.2 - Bhumtang
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!
Our guesthouse in Bhumtang
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 coloured 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.
A prayer wheel at the entrance of Jakar Dzong
This (still) being a Sunday, the courtyards and corridors of the Dzong were empty.
At an empty courtyard in Jakar Dzong
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.
More prayer wheels
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.
Grill work with fire extinguishers
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.
A dirt track in Bhumtang
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.
A fairytale land
Prayer flags and a monastery
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.
These staircases reminded 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.
Jakar Dzong from a distance
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.
A quaint room heater
Soon the room was warm and cozy. Only dinner stood between us and a long night’s sleep…
Bhutan - Day 3.1 - Trongsa Dzong
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.
The Wheel of Dharma
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.
Painted ceiling at the entrance of the Dzong
Inside a riot of colours awaited us. Though shades of maroon and mustard dominated, colourful paintings on the wall supplied every possible color the human eye is capable of perceiving. The colours were so powerful that I could’ve stared at even mundane patterns - like this one made of swastikas - for hours…
Powerful colours
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.
Inside the Trongsa Dzong
The painted window frames of the Trongsa Dzong
Painted balconies
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!
A cross between a ladder and a staircase
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 Trongsa Dzong looked like it would take off like a spaceship
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.
Roosters frolicking about
A rooster shows keen interest in paperwork
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.
A Buddhist deity 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…
Bhutan - Day 2 - Thimpu To Trongsa
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.
Chortens near Dochula Pass
Chortens
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.
Cactus with yellow flowers
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
One of the many faces of the himalayas in Bhutan
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. Colourful knitted woollen 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.
A small family-run restaurant in Bhutan
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.
An adorable mountain dog
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.
A cloud covered valley that wasn't a dream
Just then we stopped at another pass. Most passes are marked with a small white stupa decorated with colorful prayer flags.
A Stupa
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.
Trongsa Dzong
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.
An evening stroll
Large pink petals of a flower
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.
Trongsa Dzong 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…
Bhutan - Day 1 - Phuentsholing to Thimpu
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, colourfully 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!
In Bhutan (from Jaigaon)
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.
A picturesque traffic jam
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:
If you can read this... you are too close!
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 us 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, almost had 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.
Bhutan - Day 0 - Getting There
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 altering 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 tantalisingly close to the himalayas. The night would be over in no time.
A Short Trip To Coorg
We started early (if 6:30 AM can be called that) for the Coorg trip. By noon, we were already driving (being driven) on the lush, serpentine, hilly roads. The weather was bearably warm, though it tended to get very humid during the evening. Great gray clouds were seen rolling over distant, misty hills. But their destination was obviously some other faraway land. Learned from the coffee estate owners there that the rains have eluded Coorg so far and most of them have had to rely on the brooks/streams/ponds in their estate to water their plantations.
Saw coffee plants for the first time and learned to distinguish between the Arabica and the Robusta varieties. Saw how cardamom and pepper are grown and sampled a bit of both right off their respective plants! Saw a water fall (Abbey falls) and walked till the microbes living on my skin thought that they were inhabiting one.
We started back for Bangalore quite late (if 11:30 AM can be called that). The shortcut our driver took, brought us on a patch that was being tarred afresh. A complete stranger came to our rescue and allowed us to take the car through a dirt-track that ran through his estate. Some 40 km later we were stranded in a jam caused by a tree that had just been felled to broaden the road.
By the time we hit the Mysore-Bangalore highway, it was so hot that we could see mirages on the road. As a car would race ahead of us, we would see it reflect in a non-existent puddle of water on the road; half expecting it to cause a splash. My wife recounted an old cartoon she had seen on TV about an Arab and his camel stranded in a desert. They chase mirage after mirage and get so disappointed that when they actually stumble upon water in an oasis, such is their disbelief, that they walk right into it and drown. Just the sort of note I should end this brief travelogue on!
Related Posts: Notes from a Coorg visit in June’09 Yet another short visit to Coorg (Apr’09)