Bhutan

Day 3: Thimpu – Making new friends (14th Feb)

It was 20:30hrs when we reached the capital city of Bhutan. The air was really chilly and the bus ride interesting because of the scenery. Enroute we had to stop at 3 check posts to get our papers verified, but the Bhutanese soldiers were friendly and everything seemed like routine work. At Thimpu we checked into a small hotel again, paying 250 rupees for a double bed room. We were hungry so we stepped out of our room looking for a place to eat. The streets of Thimpu had many youngsters – most of them hanging around restaurants and petty shops. Being Valentine’s Day, our hotel owner also invited us to a party. But he seemed like a shady character so we didn’t follow him. Not finding a suitable place to eat, I enquired with a local for a good Indian restaurant (being vegetarian, we had to be specific about food). This stranger not only showed us a place to eat, but also joined us for dinner and later paid for our food! And thus we met our new Bhutanese friend – Chetin.

Chetin was a civil engineer from Eastern Bhutan. He had a family of wife and 3 kids in Thimpu and had come down to visit them. The three of us became friends over dinner and beer and he promised to be our guide the next day. So on the morning of 15th February, we set out in Chetin’s car to see the city of Thimpu.

We visited the Thimpu Dzong, the zoo (where we saw Bhutan’s national animal – a serious joke by God if you ask me), drove up to a peak overlooking the city, visited a handicrafts store and stopped to click snaps of the Tashichhodzong (now Bhutan’s Parliament house). Later Chetin took us home for a delicious lunch of red rice, boiled vegetables and some good home made wine (prepared from rice, barley and maize).

When we started off earlier that morning, there wasn’t a plan of Chetin dropping us to Paro (our next destination), but the bonding really happened over the day that he offered to drive us down to Paro. With Chetin’s two daughters for extra company, we left for Paro at 15:00hrs. Along the way we saw some breathtaking views of the Himalayas, driving almost alongside the Thimpu River. Thanks to Chetin, I was able to shoot lots of photographs, and was enlightened with loads of trivia on Bhutan.