Day 7 – Dec
10 2010
The day did
not start so early. We woke up at 6 drove to Gasa Dzongkhag. It was a misty
morning. The vision was probably only 5 metres at most, but I managed to get
some images out of the environment. There was a roadblock in our way, but
luckily Mr. Kakhasap managed to get us through. The bumpy drive took around 3
hours before we could reach the place. Many times we stopped halfway to record
images of groups of horses carrying goods down the hill. I also saw some ladies
digging the trench by the roadside.
When we
reached one point, we had two options, either to explore the forest or to trek
up to the Gasa Dzong. I and Mr. Simon hiked up together to the Dzong. It was a
long and tiring walk. We literally ran up and covered around 900 meters of
height. Actually, the path was rocky and rough. There were so many branches of
the trail and funny enough, we climbed up to the wrong hill. Eventually, after
around 1.5 hours we reached the Dzong but only had around 20 minutes to
photograph. I was not permitted to enter the Dzong so I wandered around and
found a community just around and behind the Dzong. They were renovating the
Dzong, so I took some photos of the carpenters who were cutting the wood nearby.
By the time we went back to the car, it was 4.15 pm.
However, the
best fun of the day was perhaps the Buddhist story that Mr. Kakhasap told us:
There was this young monk who met a beautiful young girl. Since the monk was
trying to behave properly, the girl asked him to do one of these three things:
drinking a bottle of wine; or killing a goat; or sleeping with her. Because a
Buddhist monk cannot refuse somebody’s request, even if it’s a sin, the young
monk thought that the third thing was too sinful because every drop of sperm
contained millions of lives. The second thing also involved killing a life but
the first thing was perhaps the safest because he would not kill any life and
the sin was not as grim as the other two. However, after finishing the bottle
of wine, he became drunk and went on to kill the goat and rape the girl. The
moral of the story was that the monk should have thought deeper. If he could
not stand the alcohol, he should have either killed the goat or slept with the
girl instead. The story was so funny because all of us were having a drink
then.
