Bhutan 7 – The moving finger writes and having writ gets off to the airport.

If you see any adverts or posters for Bhutan the chances are it will feature The Tiger’s Nest monastery which sits in a dramatic mountainside setting.  We’ll visit it on our descent from the trek into the hills.  At the hotel we stayed in before the trekking we went to dinner and there on the TV was Crystal Palace v Arsenal, live.  The Bhutanese hotel owners turned out to be an Arsenal fan “London belongs to Arsenal” and “we’re gooners” were his words.   Gooners being Arsenal fans to the uninitiated.  The hotel has views straight across to Tiger’s Nest from the dining room and they have net curtains at every window between us and this iconic view.  Not really what I’d call joined up thinking.   Incidentally, on the breakfast menu it lists Porage Oath and you can make up your own joke for that.

Our trek is us two, a guide, cook, horseman and five pack horses with everything we’ll  need except for two very important items as you’ll find out.   The beginning was the toughest walking I’ve ever done, three hours and forty minutes of unremitting steep up without even the relief of a false summit as encouragement.   Then a quick lunch, then another hour and a half, finishing at about 3,800m (12,500ft).  At this altitude the lack of oxygen to the knees must come into play, so I guess a build-up of lactic acid probably had something to do with it.  I always hold my breath when taking a photo, especially with a long lens and had to take an extra deep breath after every shot.  As you can imagine, the views were stunning as we looked westwards to the setting sun on the mountains.

The pack horses carried the tents and other stuff, including a large gas cylinder because open fires are banned here as a further curtailment on unauthorised tree felling.  After a delicious dinner, ho ho, we discovered that what was missing were our sleeping bags which we should have brought.  We know that it’s going to get very cold and I already have long johns plus trousers on the nether regions and six layers on top including a padded jacket.  We’re still cold although we are going to get hot-water bottles.   One hugely expensive hotel had a party coming up but they turned back at some point leaving their local rep. in his yak hair tent by himself.  H pointed out to our guide that there would be unused sleeping bags nearby and he dutifully went off and returned with two very nice down bags.  I stripped off two layers and was still cold in the night.  The dogs, there are always dogs in Bhutan,  started barking like mad in the night and it appeared that we had a leopard after the horses.  Lots of tracks, no sightings and while we were high enough for a snow leopard, exceptionally unlikely so just the common or garden type.  Oh, and we had two inches of snow, I said it was cold.  Well actually it was bloody freezing, six layers back on straightaway, especially for our al fresco (and very fresco it was) breakfast but at least we had a tablecloth so standards were being maintained.  As you can imagine, the views were tremendous in the cold air.  Today was downhill for two hours or so to the Tiger’s Nest Monastery, clinging impossibly against a sheer cliff and then down for another two hours after that.  This monastery was founded by Guru Rimpoche, revered throughout Bhutan who flew up here on the back of a tigress which is of course a very safe form of transport until you disembark. 

As you might imagine I have taken a few photos on this trip but the one I missed was a Dzong as the sun was setting.  It was to be called ‘Just a Dzong at Twilight’ which is of course completely untrue and just an excuse for a really terrible joke.

Bhutan 6 – Thimpu and some musings.

Occasionally we’ve seen projects run by the Worldwide Fund for Nature, WWF and as a little joke Dorji tells me that he likes the World Wrestling Federation.  You might remember that there was a big legal battle a few years back about the trademarked use of WWF.  The wrestlers lost and said it badly hurt their business, but it didn’t really. 

 

The national sport here is archery and we finally saw some.  They were using modern composite bows rather than their traditional bamboo ones but I was amazed at the distance shot and size of target.  I think for the Olympics they shoot from something like 70metres with a target about a metre across.  Here the target is about the size of a dinner plate and 150metres from the archer and each time the target is hit there’s a well-deserved victory dance.  The other sport/game we saw is called Khuru which is like long distance outdoor darts.  The ‘dart’ looks a bit like an old style childrens spinning top with a spike at the pointy end and the shaft extending back for another six inches or so to a flight.  Overall about 10 inches long, about half a pound in weight and thrown hard and fast.  The target is similar to the archery one but only about the size of a saucer and the distance is about the length of a cricket pitch (20metres).   As we arrived to see a game, I was about a further cricket pitch length behind the target and one of the darts hit the edge of the target or a stone and flew past me at chest height  about two or three feet in front of me.   A bit further and more than my dignity would have been punctured.   Anyway, it missed. 

At least here in the capital, Thimpu we finally enjoy some food with taste rather than the blandy bland stuff we’ve had all trip and I’m convinced that all chefs serving food to tourists here have to go to the courses run by the Bland Master Chef winner of the decade.  To confirm what I mentioned in an earlier note, the capital really does not have any traffic lights.  In the middle of one junction and only one junction  stands what looks like a bandstand for a soloist.  The soloist in question is the woman police officer directing the traffic in an almost choreographed, stylised manner, rather like the buskers we see doing mechanical men in shopping areas.  There were only two roads leading into the junction though so it was a bit of overkill.  Perhaps it really is just a tourist attraction and at least it isn’t a monastery.   Thimpu itself is pleasant enough and similar to many places we’ve visited but it is just like a medium sized town, although it has a tremendous textile museum with great exhibits in a beautifully designed building melding modern and Bhutanese architecture seamlessly.   As we stroll back to our hotel, a rock band is playing in Clock Tower Square, the one with the clock.  The line-up consists of drums, two lots of bongos, bass guitar and a didgeridoo, they’re from Bangalore and very good.  The Tantrics are so good we try to find info. on the internet but fail.

The country is completely clear of globalisation in that we saw no International chain hotels or shops.  No McDonalds, no Starbucks, Pizza Hut or Greggs.  The only chink in this is English Premiership Football with the occasional car sticker.  At the market next to the festival in Bumthang (naked monks, remember) one stall had one scarf and I’m pleased to be able to report that it was an Arsenal one.

There is what I can only describe as a sort of serenity to a lot of the Bhutanese people, especially the women and although it is clear that the population is generally poor we don’t notice the huge gulf apparent in India where luxurious homes sit next to shacks you wouldn’t think fit to use as a garden shed.  The most obviously poor people are Indian labourers, mostly women, mending roads with nothing but muscle power.  The big piles of rocks delivered in heaps are reduced to whatever size required right down to gravel if necessary just using hammers.  Cement is mixed by hand.

At one point in Thimpu our guide points out the palace to us and describes it as a ‘modest palace’ which seems like an oxymoron to rank alongside Military Intelligence or Charlton Athletic, but to be fair it is quite small.  

In this two week trip we’ve seen a surprising number of dignitaries at close quarters.  We’ve been introduced to one MP and seen another, seen the King’s uncle, the Minister for Finance, another Minister, the King’s secretary, an area Governor, an assistant Governor, a couple of retired assorted VIPs and the top religious leader of the country blessing a line of believers.  All of them at not much more than arm’s length and none of them with any security.   At  a trade exhibition I was about to photograph the Finance Minister at Dorji’s suggestion when an Indian woman asked me where I was from and started chatting but  I excused myself and said I wanted to take my photo.  Later Dorji told me that she was a visiting high ranking Indian Politician and part of the Minister’s group.  Oops.

We’ve only a few days left and I’m really looking forward to one of those delicious airline meals.

Bhutan 5 – Cranes and Knees

There is only one road running east to west across the country and now and again there’s a stretch of more than 50 metres without a bend, pothole, climb or descent.   Dorje laughs and tells us that we’re approaching the straightest bit of road in the country and it lasts about 400metres.   We cross a number of 3000m plus passes, one at 3750m which is just over 12,300ft and my ears pop twice going up.  I read that at 8000ft there’s about 25% less oxygen in the air and that at 35,000ft it’s 75% less than at ground level, so at least when we go trekking at the end of the trip we will have spent a decent time at altitude.  That will reduce the risk of altitude sickness which if you don’t know can very serious, possibly fatal.  The only remedy is to get lower fast and there seems to be no discernible reason why some people suffer and others don’t.   How our aged muscles will cope with going up mountains having about 30% less oxygen to play with we’ll find out.

Our target today is the Phobjikha Valley which is one of the few over-wintering grounds for the highly endangered Black-necked Crane which spends the summer high on the Tibetan Plateau.  About 300 or so arrive here each winter usually at the beginning of November so we don’t expect to see them.   The valley itself is a classic glaciated U shape, although a little flattened into more of a deep dish (just right for a pizza).   After a walk we meet our car and a bird is flying across which looks a bit gull-like but I can’t tell what it is.  As I track it right to left, across the bottom of the lenses appear two large black and white birds.  We’ve seen the first two arrivals of the winter.   They mate for life and this pair is the advance party.    At the hotel, the first we’ve ever stayed in where our room had its own wood-burner, the staff are really excited that the cranes have arrived as we’re the first to tell them.  We learn from someone else that they flew in at around 3.00 and we saw them at 4.30.  These birds are culturally important to the Bhutanese and as a commitment to conservation they put all us westerners and particularly our short term vision governments to shame.   The valley floor is closed to everybody while the cranes are present, the electricity supply to the whole valley has been run underground and the maximum penalty for killing a crane is a life sentence.  There is a lot more impressive conservation commitment like this but this isn’t the place to bang on about it.

Just near here is a village which has all supplies pulled up from the valley floor in a wooden box on a cable.  The box is about 10 feet by 6 feet and twice a day it takes half a dozen or so people at a time to visit the village.  I know that many of you think we’re mad to do some of the things we do but we’re not that mad.  Dorje has done the trip with tourists who were mad enough and apparently it was terrifying.

Our first serious walk of the trip is how we leave the valley.  Starting at 2,900m which is a little under 10,000ft, we climb to 3,200/3,300m and then go down and down to 1,450m.  This as a drop of about 6000ft and about as stiff a test for my knees as can be imagined.  It is very steep in places and has slick red clay where rain has fallen, just right for what H calls Bhutanese Skiing.

Driving here is pretty considerate, the whole road is used, overtaking is a bit wild but vehicles always pull across to allow passing if the horn is used.   Indicators are used to inform the driver behind if it is safe to pass, left turned on means clear, right turned on means not clear.   They drive on the left just like India and on the only dual-carriageway which is near the capital the Bhutanese do keep to the correct side.   My theory about continental drift is that it was probably not plate tectonics at all that had the whole of India crash into Asia and begin to form the Himalayas but merely a foretaste of collective Indian driving.

I know I mentioned schools at one point but we’ve found out that as part of the free medical care schools are visited by Opticians, Dentists and Doctors for the children to get check-ups.    If for instance glasses are needed, they’re provided.   It is all more disciplined than we would expect to see and the teaching sounds a bit different too.  There’s a country wide curriculum and according to Dorje, teaching is not popular because “people get bored doing the same thing day after day”.

A few days after we saw the cranes we came across the English language newspaper for the day after we saw them.  The arrival merited a half page article.

Bhutan 4 – This isn’t at all Spectacular

Well it isn’t.  Spectacular is far too insipid and feeble a word to describe this landscape we’re travelling through.   Hills are higher, ravines are deeper, roads are narrower and twistier, drops are steeper and further, roads seems collapsier.  It really is so impressive that at the end of a day it seems too much to take in and we’re overdosed on dramatic views.

We’re heading out of Eastern Bhutan into Central which is as far as most tourists get to from Western Bhutan.  So far we’ve seen the same few people regularly, about 20 or so and that’s all the tourists there are.  Even they didn’t all get to Trashi Yangtse.   We’ve eaten regularly with a German couple, Tanya and Wolfgang from Bavaria but haven’t mixed with anyone else.

I am not impressed with the food although H is very happy with it.  It’s either rice with vegetables, vegetables with rice or sometimes as a special treat, rice and vegetables.  Cuisine is apparently completely different in the western side of the country where I understand there’s a chance of vegetables and rice.   Very occasionally there are noodles, bread is bread but not quite as we would know it and I expect to be lighter when I get back than when I left.  The black tea is good but I think I get most of my calories from the odd bottle of coke. 

We’re to spend three nights in Bumthang which is nicer than it sounds and we’re visiting a festival which lasts several days while we’re here.  It’s one of the major ones in the country but there will be far more tourists than the local festival we went to earlier in the trip.  Like so much of what happens here, it’s basically religious.  Just before we arrived in the town we visited a burning lake, remarkable for two things.  It isn’t a lake and it isn’t burning.  It’s mythological.

There’s no secular art at all and in a way it is just like pre-renaissance European art.  Everything is Buddhist and that is just very precisely copied with templates from age old designs.  There seems to have been no development at all for centuries or scope for individual interpretation.  There’s variety but no change which itself is a bit ironic seeing as a large part of Buddhism relates to the impermanence of everything.

The festival is full of tourists (like us), I can’t be too precious about it but the activities haven’t been adapted for us westerners.  It is packed with locals in fantastically coloured clothes with not a pastel shade to be seen on any of them.  I saw one western couple in traditional Bhutanese dress and frankly they looked ridiculous.  Inside, opaque religious ritual with gongs, chants and the blowing of eight foot horns did have more tourists than locals.  Outside were dances in even more wild costumes.  Masked men pranced around in one, led by a red faced clown, who is really in charge, and keeps an eye of what’s going on.   The masks are wooden and very heavy.   In another, all the dancers were in vivid yellow outfits.  The girls danced much more sedately.   However, for us the surprise was one we just saw briefly as we were leaving.  It was a girls dance with a man carrying an erect wooden penis.  At the climax of the dance this wooden penis is placed vertically on a girls head and there’s an emission of something whitish.  Not quite your average Morris Men.   Here in Bhutan and it seems particularly in the central region, the erect penis with attached testicles is a good luck charm, so the dance is not a fertility dance but a good luck one.  There are drawings of the lucky charm in the midst of production on houses and shopfronts; crossed wooden ones hang from the four corners of houses or stand as crosses in gardens and they also act as the spouts for fountains.  Quite an eye opener but not mentioned once by our guide. 

This festival is also famous for the Naked Monk’s Dance and yes, I could mention their filthy habits but I’m not going to.  It takes place around midnight and is just what it sounds like, naked monks dancing, although there seems some dispute over whether they really are monks.  That said this is an official event, not just a load of uninhibited drunks.  The dancers wear a face covering but otherwise are as nature made them.  A bit of dancing, a bit of waving (not hands), a bit of thrusting while the girls in the front row scream.  This is how it was reported to me because I was in bed asleep.  H went with the two Germans and the consensus seemed to be that I had made the most sensible choice.  A few years ago the authorities banned it but then, bad harvests.  Naturally this was blamed on the dance ban and it was reinstated.  I have been unable to discover any official statistics on the standards of recent harvests.   It’s no more ridiculous than the one survivor of a plane crash claiming “it was a miracle” and avoiding any mention of the 150 other poor buggers who’d been incinerated.

Toward the end of the previously mentioned Monk’s dance, H told me that a fight broke out.  Not between tourists but two locals, who would have been Buddhists, generally thought to be a very peaceful and serene influence.  It’s as unlikely as the BNP having a Caribbean Weekend.

What I wouldn’t give for a nice freshly made cheese and tomato sandwich.

Bhutan 3 – Even more Beyonder

That story about the radish wasn’t my odd sense of humour, it’s supposed to be true.

We’ve travelled to the far north east of the country and as we enter the town see more litter than anywhere so far, presumably it is some sort of ironic jest of the gods that the place is called Trashi Yangtse.   Generally the country is pretty good on litter.

Quite often when we were asked where we were next going on hols. and said Bhutan  the response was “where ?”   Even fewer people know anything about it.   Well, it’s a Buddhist Kingdom with China to the north and India to the south and has  only its fifth king in place, who took over from his father who stepped down aged  54.  He was known as a wise king and ascended the throne at 17 while the current one appears to be highly educated in the west and India.  They do seem to be a farsighted and enlightened bunch though.  It was the previous king who decreed that Gross Domestic Product was less important than Gross Domestic Happiness.  Schooling and medicine are good and they have a proper waste collection system in place.  It became a democratic country in 2008 because the king decreed that a bad king could one day be on the throne and the best way to counter that was democracy, although he still has a lot of power.  Everyone 16 and up has a vote.   In the last few years it was decreed that every village would have electricity and from what we’ve seen all but the very remotest places do have it.   The country claims to be the only carbon negative country in the world because they export so much hydro-electric power to India.  It’s their biggest export by value.   I mentioned China to the north.  The Bhutanese army patrols the border without guns on the basis that as they’re unarmed the Chinese won’t shoot at them.

This Trashi Yangtse has a population of only 3000 but has a hospital, two schools, an academy of traditional crafts, the National Seed Bank and marijuana growing wild along the streets.  Apparently it is illegal to do anything with it and every year there’s a one day campaign where everyone is encouraged to pull it up.  They don’t have a slogan but I thought ‘Trash the Hash’ had a nice ring to it.  As a place though, it is so remote that there are no reasonable hotels so we stayed in a local house.   Fantastically brightly and ornately decorated it was where, despite the export of all that electricity, we enjoyed the first of our regular power cuts.   Probably has more dogs than cars and is very peaceful.  As westerners we are genuinely odd and young children stare in an astonished way.   I can’t imagine it happening anywhere else.

School runs from 8.00 to 3.30 weekdays and a half day on Saturdays.  The day starts with the pupils cleaning the classroom, then a prayer and the national anthem.  Imagine that, you teachers reading this.

The radish styled stupa is ringed with prayer wheels and people circumambulate  (clockwise and odd number of times, remember) regularly daily or several times a day.  Old people go round and round for hours and Heather realised it did provide good exercise for them, but they did have to keep little piles of stones to remember how many times they had been round!   It is difficult to judge ages of people and even more so ones from a different ethnic group so I asked our guide how old these were.  Oh, he said, 60’s, 50’s, perhaps 55.   He seemed genuinely taken aback where I mentioned that H and I were 65.

I’ll mention the beer although there aren’t many to choose from.  The one we see most of is called Druk 11000 and is an example of life imitating art.  A previous beer,  imported from India  was called 10000 and to show that this one was better they called it 11000, just like the amplifier in the film, Spinal Tap.  For anyone who doesn’t know it, it was a film about a fictional rock band who claimed their amplifier was better than everyone else’s because the volume went up to 11 instead of only 10, ignoring the fact that maximum was maximum whatever it was numbered.

As we leave Trashi Yangtse we head westwards and we’re on the only road crossing the country east to west.  In many places it’s another ‘massage’ road and there are sometimes stretches of more than a hundred yards without a hairpin bend.  Travelling is tortuous.  Dorje, our guide tells us that there are three driving speeds in Bhutan: Bhutanese: Tourist: Slow and that time is measured in BST, which is Bhutanese Stretchable Time.

Bhutan 2 – Into the back of the back of beyond

Bhutanese cuisine revolves around the chilli, so we’re led to believe.  The national dish is chillies in cheese sauce and one dish is apparently chillies in chilli sauce.   Our first night’s meal is rice with various vegetables including those chillis in cheese sauce.   Now after four or five days, sure enough chillies in cheese sauce have appeared at every meal bar breakfast, which is always clearly a bit of a go at a western style brekkie.  The local guides have chillies the way some people use tomato ketchup, salt, brown sauce or chips.  They can’t eat without it.   I usually have hotter curries than Heather but for some reason I find that a quarter inch square of the local chilli is painfully hot whereas H can just polish off a whole one, so clearly there are different types of hotbit as I believe it’s known in scientific circles, in different types of chilli.  Oh, and rice at every meal.

The east of Bhutan is very untouristy and our guide apologises for the hotel we’re in but it’s clean, the food is OK, it’s like many we’ve stayed in on our travels and after our journey, just fine. 

As we head north next day on the only road, “the massage road” as our guide describes it, we understand why.  It is tarmac after a fashion but is potholed and many stretches are dirt.  As we climb, and we climb a long way, the road is obviously wiped away regularly by landslides.  The road can be seen snaking up the hills ahead of us or across a valley as it twists and turns to gain height and it is very easy to see all the gashes on the hillsides where a section of road once was.   We’re stopped at one point with a line of lorries ahead of us as a digger clears mud and dirt off the road.  We don’t know if this is a landslide or repairs but at least we can stretch our legs.  Our car is a comfortable land-cruiser and like all cars here the seats are covered in very nice carpet.  Unfortunately, although we have seat belts the buckles remain hidden and untouched  beneath the carpet while our guide and driver both buckle up for each journey.   We are going slowly and I reckon we stand a better chance of getting out if the car topples over for a swifter than anticipated trip to the valley floor if we don’t have to bother with unbelting.   Sandrup Jongkar to Tashigang  is 50 km as the crow flies but 175 km by road and it takes us about seven hours driving to get there.

There is a real treat on the way though.  It turns out that today is a religious festival and everything is shut, so tragically we have to miss the weaving centre and the school for the blind.  A place called Khaling though is having a festival so we go there.   It really is local, everyone is in national dress except for the four or five westerners standing out like sore thumbs, heads and shoulders above most of the crowd.  It’s a market and a get together and a religious blessing for those who want it.  It is incredibly colourful with several hundred very friendly locals and definitely authentic.  The  MP is there in his best national costume and we’re introduced to him.  Apparently he sponsors this festival for purely altruistic reasons.  I take one or two photos.

Tonight we are high on a hillside above Trashigang in a brand new, very smart hotel where the staff are more deferential than Downton.    We awake to cloud and swirling mist.  Looking very mysterious and romantic, it seems that this weather is unusual and we’ve caught the edge of the cyclone that has ripped through eastern India.  Here in Bhutan, the rice that has been harvested and left out to dry has been ruined, which is seriously bad news for the subsistence farmers.

Today is the first day that we can change money so with our guide we go into the very smart Bank of Bhutan in this tiny town which is one the biggest in eastern Bhutan.   There’s no queue but it takes about half an hour to change $100 and a better rate is offered for $100 bills than for lower denominations (60.1 against 54.4).  This is a new one on me.  Three notes are rejected consecutively after inspection by the man at the desk at the back, one because it had a 1cm tear along one side, one because it showed slight signs of having been used and one because someone had written a small number in red ink on it.   Amazingly I’m beginning to get annoyed by this and decide to leave but then ‘the man at the desk’ in this hotbed of foreign exchange trading  phones Head Office and gets permission to accept the note with the number written on it.   I wanted to inspect the notes I’d been given to check for signs of wear etc. but was counselled to think better of it.  Still, we’re flush with ngultrums.

The shops in this town are all very small and the windows are fairly ornate frames but unglazed.  One shopkeeper with a nice grasp of English calls himself a ‘micro-trader’.   ‘Englishman trees’ are pointed out to us and they’re Eucalyptus (actually from Australia), so named because they have white bark and peel in the sun.  Our guide also tells us that we can’t get lost in a Bhutanese city because they’re all too small and we have heard that Thimphu, the capital, is the only capital city in the world with no traffic lights.  Dorjee (the guide) is amazed at our knowledge of Bhutanese flora and fauna because we know a few of the plants and birds but then an expert is always someone who knows just a bit more than you do.

Today we visit more Buddhist sites than you can shake a stick at:  Dzongs, a mixture of religious and local government organisation: monasteries: nunneries and stupas/chortens.   All with prayer wheels and all of which you should circumnavigate clockwise an odd number of times.  The beliefs and stories are bizarre, but aren’t they all.   Instead of the relics such as bones, teeth, perhaps a kidney that Catholic Churches seem to have, here at the Buddhist shrines it’s usually the imprint of a foot or thumb on a stone or a rock which is the liver of someone.  These relics are of goodies and baddies rather than allegedly  just bits of saints.

Tomorrow we go further north and about as far as it’s possible to go, where we stay a couple of nights in Trashi Yangtse.  The stupa here is supposed to be an exact but smaller copy of Bodnath, one of the great stupas in Kathmandu.  The Lama who commissioned it in 1740 went to Kathmandu himself to make a model for the builders but this one in Trashi is slightly distorted and leans slightly to one side.  Unfortunately, the radish which he used to carve the copy dried up a bit and shrank on the way home.

Bhutan 1 - Here be Dragons

This all started well with me developing a bout of gout two days before we were due to leave.  I am a most unlikely sufferer according to all the information on which foods cause a flare up of what, described as arthritis in my foot is likely to evoke some sympathy but described as gout is more likely to be met with guffaws.   Well the anti-inflammatory tabs and my foot up worked well and meant that we could set off for the airport without a walking stick.  By the way, gout is bloody painful.

Then on the news we saw that a cyclone was heading across the Bay of Bengal (no, it’s not an Indian Restaurant) and due to hit a little south of Kolkata, Calcutta in old money, just as we’re heading to Kolkata.   Impeccable timing.   Our route being Ringwood, Heathrow, Mombai, Kolkata, Guwahati, wait for our taxi to Sandrup Junkhar and into Bhutan.   A route that ended up with no disruption from the cyclone and still took us 31 hours from home to our hotel – and we do it for fun.

We’d never been to Mombai before but it was very Indian, a complete and utter bureaucratic, overmanned shambles which despite all the apparent evidence to the contrary, still worked.    Fortunately we had over 2 hours between transfers because we needed all of it and this was for an internal flight.  We had to explain at least three times why we had no boarding pass for our onward flight (we hadn’t checked in yet), and what an e-ticket was.  Once was to a soldier who had no reason or right to know but whose big gun was a sufficiently persuasive argument.    Oh, and we had no rupees to buy a drink or food with.  The bus to the domestic terminal set off on a winding trip across a darkened airport past what seemed to be a plane graveyard, a shanty town on the edge of the airport and after about 15 minutes to the terminal where we checked in.  Just as we got through check-in, the queue was going through the gate where the flight was boarding via another bus ride.

So we arrived at Kolkata, the plane half emptied, refilled with people and on to Guwahati in Assam, where the tea comes from.   It’s now 7.00 am Sunday, no rupees, no exchange counter and just a very dodgy looking cash machine.   No-one would take our US$ and we had a 6 hour wait for our guide and car to arrive from Bhutan.   So, I approached two of the very few other Europeans there, a Franco-German couple who live in Thailand and they sold us some rupees.  They were so helpful, they wanted to give us the rupees but I insisted on paying for them.  I was so light headed from lack of victuals I even gave them a favourable exchange rate. 

The wait here at Guwahati was because we’d had trouble sorting out a taxi from the airport to the border and there had been secessionist problems in the past so we were aware that, yes, there could be trouble brewing in Assam.

Our guide was going to be in Bhutanese national costume, carrying a sign with our names on and under the departure board at 1.30.  Nothing to go wrong there then.   At about 1.10 a short stocky man approached us two bleary eyed, grubby and about the only Europeans in the terminal carrying a sign with our names on.  He’d been there for an hour, outside by the door into the terminal with Departures written above it and Bhutanese national dress appeared to be a pair of trousers and a red t-shirt.  He said it wasn’t safe for a Bhutanese to travel in Assam in national costume.   It was a relief to see him though as the last piece of the jigsaw had fallen into place.  We had been delivered.  Not in a spiritual sense, more like a parcel.