iamdat This journal is dedicated to the people and places whom I have had a chance to come across.

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.