Paro is in a valley lined with rice fields. You could replace “Paro” with the name of any other city in this part of Bhutan and the sentence would stand. Nevertheless, for this newcomer, the beautifully terraced fields of gold and green were captivating.From the hotel
we sorted gear a bit and headed out for an afternoon’s hike up to a famed monastery called Tiger’s Rest.
It’s about 900m up, and I set the standard of being last. Shooting photos and talking with my friends takes a long time.
Oddly though, we did get down first. So absorbed in conversation were we, much of it about the group we saw going in the opposite direction, well-Nikoned hikers who had chartered a 757 for their expedition, and who were well supported by Bhutanese carrying their long optics, and about whom we made amusing generalizations about their marriages and their politics, and observations about body types and the clothes and advertising they wore, and the message that advertising bore about the kind and frequency of vacations they take, and semiotics in general, that we missed the turn off to a tea-shop and were first to the bottom. This was the only time on the entire trip when I was first to the bottom of anything.
Then we returned to the hotel to unpack our bikes. This was more interesting than it might have been. We had what I think the are the usual amount amount of difficulties and discoveries. And then, we had some really interesting ones beyond that. Some in-the-field resourcefulness and KE’s bag of spare parts rescued the day. To calibrate this for you, a set of taps would have been handy. Actually, the problems of the day weren’t fully resolved until a phone call home the next morning, in which a bike mechanic explained the trick of how to remove a cable from someone’s integrated lever.
