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.
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