Good Luck Symbol

Having Crossed the River

At a break after another bridge in the village of Tikke

Someone else must have taken pictures after this, but what we had in front of us was 2000m of climbing. The last 400m or so was steeper than the 4.5% grade we’d been accustomed to, and there were ladies in the road applying tar, and chunks of wet tar, and potholes, and quite a bit of debris. Very scenic, but I didn’t get many photos.

Climbing in the Black Mountains

More Climbing in the Black Mountains

John approaching the summit of the longest hardest climb of the trip

You might be able to see that the tops of the prayer flags have some sort of sword on them. Many such flags had come down and the ground was littered with these wooden swords, like this one.

The Sword of Wisdom

I wanted to bring one home for my son, but I thought that maybe in doing so I would release the souls of some dead for whom the prayer flags had been raised. Maybe, as with taking living shells from the sea floor, I would be visited by a shark, or its equivalent for the soul. Our guide, Namge, informed me otherwise. He said that the sword is called the Sword of Wisdom and it is used to slash away ignorance. The round symbols at its hilt at are the (rising) sun, the (crescent) moon, and the earth.

Soon, everyone was there, and John, the master descender, was off, towards Gantey at 3000m.  Gantey is in a valley of rare cranes, but we didn’t see them.

Three of us at the pass

John, getting the jump

Then, the landscape opened up again, to these yellow and green terraces of which I never tired.

Home among the terraces

Banana Trees

Washing in the river

The Great Dzong at Punahka, at the confluence of the Mo and Po Chu (River).

Just for scale

Dark and Narrow Corridors

Dancing Monks

Monks descending the stairs

  From the monastery we headed back to hotel.  On our way, we had a very long stop at a post office.

So, yesterday, the 17th, after having arrived in Thimphu in the mid-afternoon, we cleaned up and then as a group we headed out for some sight seeing and dining and shopping, not all in that order. It was late enough by the time we left the hotel that I could shoot very little. Someone else will have to supply the photos.

What I recall most is the reverence for the king. We were showed the buildings of the National Assembly, and one of his palaces, which while palatial, was no Versailles. We heard the history of his great grandfather’s unification of the country in 1907, and of his own unilateral giving up of the absolute monarchy in favor of a constitutional monarchy to be led by his son, beginning in March. We heard, too, remarkably personal, touching stories of the King’s effects on the life of our own Bhutanese guide. It is clear why they hold him and and his forebears as near deities. His picture is on the wall of every establishment.

His Royal Majesty Jigme Singye Wangchuck

As we heard these tales, schoolgirls walked by us and smiled and posed for pictures, and giggled innocently.

From there, we drove across the river and visited a couple of shops, one of them a small factory for woven textiles. If I can get my son to pose, I’ll eventually put a picture here of him in a traditional robe made there. And then on to another shop, one which seemed to have Indian as well as Bhutanese items, and probably some from China, Tibet and elsewhere. The proprietary gave unconvincing answers about provenance.

Dinner at a local restaurant may have been the best meal of the entire trip. The chili cheese made me sweat so profusely it made the others laugh, a standard no other purveyor was able to match. The curries and other melanges were tastier than elsewhere. Beer and mixed drinks flowed early, loosening us all up. And we were greeted too, by the head of Etho Metho, the Bhutanese Agency with which KE, our own provider, contracts for ground services in Bhutan. There was some story I didn’t quite get, but the gist of which is that he had held a senior position in govt, probably for tourism, and then left with the King’s blessing to form his own company. Maybe he didn’t have the monopoly, but he did have quite a nice head start. Etho Metho is not the name of a solvent used in fabrication of amphetamines, but instead means rhododendron in the local language.

Now, back to the Dochu La. We had in front of us a 670m ascent to about 3050m, the Dochu La, where we would get spectacular views of Everest and other peaks in her range. From there, we’d descend 1700m to Punakha, site of one of the great dzongs of all of Bhutan. I left last as usual.

Leaving Thimphu

Roadside Shopping

Gathering at the Dochu La

Chomolungma and Ama Dablam in Nepal

But there was lots to see, including market stalls like these

or more people building roads

or kids with breathing apparatus

More Terraced Rice Fields

From here we drove into Thimphu.  Here is the Hotel Riverview.

I don’t have the pictures from the afternoon, but here are some from early the next morning.

This is excerpted from a message I sent my wife. “Today was longer, but not so hilly. The weather was absolutely beautiful. Clear, cool, a few clouds. We rode along the walls of a canyon above a river for about 50 miles, dropping down to it at the last moment. I had a flat that I didn’t fix properly, so for the last 15 miles I was stopping to pump it up half a dozen times.” All true. The children greeted us as if we were something very rare and unusual.

And the roads scenic

On the first few days John didn’t want to get too far ahead. That didn’t last. Here he is with Sange and Kinsahn.

They build the roads by hand in this country.

 Switchbacks on the Descent to the Confluence

Traditional Homes in the Valley

Trucks Delivering Water to the Families of Road Builders

After many miles, we finally came to the confluence of two major rivers and more roads.  There was a military checkpoint, too, but they seemed uninterested in us.  The bus was waiting with lunch.  Here’s the confluence.

Three Chortens

Painted Trucks

Gorging at the Rest Stop

And a bit more of my e-mail message to my wife. “The final 20miles into Thimpu was over a very busy road under construction, so we rode our little bus back instead. Roads here are barely wider than a single car, so when you are on a bike and a truck goes by, you get squoosed to one side fo the road. There would have been too much of that. We were all happy with the decision.”

There turned out to be a three day shopping bazaar, sponsored by the Indian Army. The Indian Army is the consulting engineer for the biggest, or what seemed to us the biggest, project underway in this country; the building of roads. As part of their goodwill initiative, they bring merchants and entertainment from India to these relatively remote regions.

It was a smorgasbord. There were tea shops, movie theatres, hardware, furniture, clothing,

gambling, fried food, carnival rides

and lots of activity in this tent city, even on this last of three days.

As usual, I started last. And at first, I dropped further behind. The sky was overcast. There was a threat of rain. As the road wound along the river briefly and then began its 4.5% climb for, ummh, let’s see, that’s (3882-2235)m=1647m, 1647m/(4.5%=45m/km)=37km. There was a lot to stop and photograph.

School Children Outside of Paro

Terraced Rice Fields

Shanties of Itinerant Road Workers

Prayer Flags and Clearing Weather

A mid-morning tea stop. Hot tea, nuts and dried fruit, biscuits and chocolate.

 Film actors from Thimphu with perfect English, about 4km from the pass

You know, for 4.5% grade, this was really a lot of work. Someone amongst us must have a photo of me lying on the ground, contorted and looking half dead. Honestly, I was only stretching my back.

The final marker, and the pass’s prayer flags in the distance

By this time I had shed every shred of clothing I could, just to cool me off, and it had begun to drizzle, but I didn’t put on a shell.

Chele La 3988m?

David and I rode in together. The benchmark read 3988m, or over 13,000′, quite a bit higher than we’d been expecting. Anyhow, the bus was there so we could easily add some layers, and there was a fire, and it felt like we’d just finished an epic slog. What a relief, for me. David was more affected by the altitude, and it got the better of him, but then he felt better. There was a ridge leading up higher; worth the walk we were told, so we took it.

When we all showed up, it was well past what we’d think of as lunch time, but there was no place to get really warm on the pass, nor on the long descent to Haa, so we bundled up and just did the descent.   I have no pictures of this.  I recall I was wearing everything I owned, including shells over my gloves, and that it was wet.  I also recall that the descent was bumpy and I had to feather my brakes the entire way, so much so that I felt that the mitten shells were preventing me from braking, so I stopped to take them off.  Then I looked behind me and David wasn’t there, so I rode back uphill to make sure he hadn’t gone over the edge somewhere, but sure enough, he had just taken a detour to water the plants.    My back hurt, my arms hurt, my hands hurt.  We had to worry about every blind corner because with the narrow roads, there was no margin in the event of oncoming traffic.  This descent was just the first notice that while I had brought the ideal climbing machine, I would pay for it on the downhills.   Finally, though, we were in Haa, where we were well fed and able to clean up.

The Noon Ride

I felt the crank wobble badly, so I dropped out and rode to the bike shop.In short, the glue that holds this carbon fiber bike together had failed in the bottom bracket after about 18 months, or 10k miles. The shop is replacing the frame, no questions asked. But, imagine that on the second day of the Bhutan ride my frame had failed.  Maybe we might  have gotten somewhere with epoxy, but maybe not.  Ouch!

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.

OK, we packed a bit two much stuff.  What was it, 200kg too much?  There was some misunderstanding about the allowance, but with bikes, it simply is not possible to get close to the allowance.  With powerbars, too, not a chance.  So, we forked over the penalties and waited for Druk Air to take us first to Kathmandu

Kathmandhu from the air

and then on to Paro, Bhutan.  The route in remind me more of a winding descent on a bicycle than any airport approach I’d ever experienced.

 Incidentally, I learned a few things about Bhutan on the flight.  First Bhutan is not India.  The plane was as immaculate as a newborn Boeing.  In fact, it was an Airbus 319. Who knew there was such a plane?  Second, the Bhutanese women are very beautiful.  Later, we learned the they are so beautiful, the king has married four of them.  But, put away your visions of Utah.  Bhutan is no Utah, either.  If you’ve ever flown United, you are probably more than a little jaded about the friendliness of the hostesses of the Friendly Skies.  You might even have feared that one of these ladies might whack you upside the head with a lead filled purse if you dared to ask for something, or that one of their smiles would fall off and cut you.  Not so with these Bhutanese hostesses.  They had a purity of innocence about them, as well as an elegance of simplicity, and a radiant beauty.  I barely dared to look at at these young women whom I now visualize as a cross between my little sister (I don’t have a little sister) and my 7 year old daughter.

I’m going to leave off here, with some photos from the tarmac.