Last Day –
Dec 11 2010
We left
Punakha for Paro at around 8.00. The weather was great. On the way we met some
monkeys and stopped for a short while at Dochula Pass. It was so cloudy that
most of the mountains cannot be seen. In the end we took a group photo and
headed to Thimphu.
It was
interesting to go backwards the journey so far. I got to observe Thimphu from a
higher view. It was truly a fast-developing city with lots of constructions going
on. At the same time, I found some problem with the pollution from the big
trucks of India. They were releasing lots of gas exhaust.
In the
afternoon, we got to meet up with Mr. Tashin, who is the manager of the tour.
We then went for a trekking up the Takshan mountain to see the Takshan Dzong.
The path was not as tough as that from the previous day. We climbed for around
900 meters of height. Unfortunately, no photography was allowed inside the
Dzong. However, while walking down, I came across a workshop where there were
two men making all the butter lamps. I decided to spend quite an amount of time
there to document a story about their process.
By the time
we trekked down to the car, it was near pitch black at around 6 pm. Then we had
a great dinner at a local home and took a hot stone bath. It was really
refreshing to relax yourself in the hot tub. As the trip was coming to the end,
I just wished that we could have got a bit more time because most of the time
we were behind our schedule. There were so many things to photograph, from
still life, landscape to animals, humans …. The culture and religion of Bhutan
are tightly connected in Buddhism.
As the end-note, the only difficulty that I had
during the trip was that most of the locals thought I was a Bhutanese boy who
was acting like a foreigner. Hence, they always looked at me every time I tried
to take some photos or interacted with them. Usually, the Bhutanese people were
very much unbothered by the foreigners.
