Source: Status Quo
The last time we saw our hero, he was wondering aimlessly in dreamland. Shortly later the entity known as Dad, made a call to our hero’s notoriously buggy sleep.wakeup() function. After deliberating for about a minute on whether I should actually wake up or start counting geneboosted sheep again, I chose the former. We were going to a Buddhist monastery in nearby Bhutan and I was mildly excited.
We drove for about north for about 40 minutes before we reached the India-Bhutan border and a town called Phunshilling. The strange thing about the border here is that, it is actually, inside the city. There’s no No Man’s Land, just a large, heavily decorated gateway across with dragons and other drawings and just two Bhutanese guards standing on either. There’s no border check, no need to show your passports, you just drive on through. Once you are through, there really isn’t much to tell you that you’re in another country, except for the details like the streets are cleaner, the people seem more relaxed and the cars have red number plates with distinctly non-Indian characters.
So I’m in Bhutan, and it doesn’t look all that different. Well, that’s not entirely true, the people do look different. Anyway we drove straight through Phunshilling, which took under a minute and were soon going up a mountain. No, we weren’t mountain climbing, there was a pretty wide road going up the side in the typically winding way that mountain roads do. Now, this was exciting, partly because the driver seemed incapable of driving under 60 kmph and partly because the view of the town below and the sun setting behind the cloudy mountains was simply amazing. I tried taking pictures, but anyone who has studied physics will know that keeping your camera fixed at one point is not particularly easy when your velocity is 60 kmph at an incline of about 30 degrees to the horizontal.
After winding our way up for about 20 minutes, we reached our destination of the Buddhist monastery or Gumpha. It was pretty high up, and the large compound which wasn’t all at the same level either. My grandmother had some trouble getting around, but it wasn’t too bumpy on the whole. The actual shrine along with the monk’s residence was along the edge of the mountain, and standing there, you got a clear view all the way down to the town below. The view was, in two words, rather breathtaking. Combine the view with a simple, yet serenely beautiful shrine behind you and very few people (which is an impossibility at most Indian holy sites), and your state of mind is one which you will achieve only a few times throughout your life. Frankly, I don’t care if most of India burns in nuclear hell tomorrow, but I would mind if anything happened to this place. Bhutan certainly makes it to my list of places where I have to live for a few months.
Unfortunately we couldn’t stay there for much longer because it was getting dark and the driver said that it wasn’t safe for foreigners after dark. Apparently, the town had another side, which I’ll talk about later. So it was back down the winding mountain road, past the gate with two guards and back to India with its one point something billion people and very few places to go and catch your breath. Nothing else of the day is really worth mentioning. We went back to the bungalow, where my parents had tea twice in three hours and I read Edgar Allan Poe. Dinner was once again simple, but excellent. Home-made bread, a bunch of vegetables chopped up and cooked together to make something delicious yet unnameable and chicken curry with local chickens (i.e. no bird flu). Been a rather long time since I had chicken. Then some more Poe and another call to my very reliable sleep.goto() function and back to my aimless wanderings in Dreamland.
