Drive to Bumthang

Our farm house.

Our hostess and host.

The sitting room of our lunch restaurant...

and the eating area.

Some of the route we took around the mountains.

Our first yak.

A stupa and prayer flags.

The valley.

More colourful prayer flags.

The Watch Tower/museum, up close...

and far away.

Practising the national sport.

Driving in the clouds.

Having masala tea in the second farm house.

Wednesday, April 18^th.

I was woken up at 6:00 by a chorus of unfamiliar birds but managed to get back to sleep for another hour. We had breakfast with the family, said our thanks and goodbyes and then set off for a very long drive. On the bus I asked Chimi about the family. She told me they had five children who are all grown up and moved away. Three of them are working in the tourist business and none of them wanted to take over the farm. She says this is one of the results of the internet, television and tourism, the kids now know there are other options and don’t want to follow in their parent’s traditional footsteps.

We drove to Trongsa, the gateway to central Bhutan at 2180m. The town is set amidst spectacular scenery and the Trongsa Dzong (castle or fort) which is the ancestral home of Bhutan’s royal family, commands the eye from miles away. Since we are pressed for time in order to get to our destination before dark, we only visited one of the two major sites here. We will visit the Dzong on the return trip. So, we visited Ta Dzong, which is a watch tower built above the Trongsa Dzong and commands views of the entire valley. In 2013 it was converted into The Royal Heritage Museum which is dedicated to the Wangchuk dynasty and tells the stories of the Dzong and the valley and features personal belongings of the kings and queens of Bhutan. After that we continued through some of Bhutan’s most beautiful landscapes on a road that is under construction. Since 1960 the road was very narrow and dangerous. Now with the help of India, the road is being widened. Parts of it were paved, but most of it was hard packed earth or gravel. In the higher elevations some of it was mud because of recent rain and became very slippery and dangerous. At one point a van like ours got stuck in the mud and no one could get past it. All the passengers had to get out and tried to push it out to no avail. Luckily a large truck behind it (and in front of us) had a tow row and pulled it out backwards and then it was able to pick a more successful angle. We got through too, by slipping and sliding, but I have to say this part of the road was the scariest I’ve been on. It was very narrow, we were up in the clouds so it was foggy, and at times when I looked out my window I could see precious little or no road and a long steep drop with nothing to stop us from going over. It was only because of the skill of Sherba that we managed to get through. (I talked to him at dinner and he said they have made the road 70% better than it was, I can’t imagine how dangerous it was then.) Not only that, but because the road has to follow the contours of the mountains, it is incredibly windy. At one point, Chemi pointed across a valley and said we are going to have lunch over there. It looked about two kilometres away, but it took us about an hour to get there because of the condition of the road the route we had to take around the valley to get there. We drove about ten hours today and I’d be surprised if we went 300 kilometres. Actually, Google Maps says it is 217 km.

We arrived in Bumthang, (pronounced Boontang) which is an area of high valleys at 2580-3100m at 8:00 in the dark. It was quite cold. We immediately headed into our new farmhouse and met the husband and wife who served us a few snacks and some masala tea. We had dinner straight away as it was getting late and we all had a drink and a yack, before heading off to bed. We stayed in a row of bedrooms separate from the main house and I have my own room again. I can’t wait to see where we are in the morning. Obviously, the family has built this row of six connected rooms in order to capitalize on the tourist business. They have western toilets, electric space heaters and hot showers.