Well we left Thimphu for Punakha and over a couple of days did a few hikes. As one does in Bhutan. On the getaway day we woke up at 2350 meters but drove quickly to a little monastery up a long and winding cart path. Monks were scattered across the grassy lawns practising their horns with the mountains as a backdrop and no one around to complain. We had a look around, after which our guide, who is a silver haired woman about 4’11” and wearing a Kira skirt that brushes the floor, lifted the hem to show us her pretty serious hiking boots and told us we were going to walk to the next temple. Where we asked. At the top of the mountain she said. A figure of speech, or perhaps Bhutanese humour, we thought. But we overestimated either her command of figures of speech or her sense of humour, because we set off uphill to, you guessed it, the top of the mountain, a gain of about 500m in about 3 kilometres. And not just any 500 m, because we started at over 3100 m (10,000 feet) so we were huffing and puffing before we even got going. Sunshine changed slowly to cloud and then gloom as we walked through a very spooky forest, accompanied by a random dog that picked us up early on and stuck close by, having nothing better to do, and then we climbed up into the underside of a cloud and the temperature dropped about 10C and then we were there. We had the magnificent 360 degree panorama that had been promised, but it was all the insides of a cloud. The temple was great, but we could see our breath. We left by a different route and came out at a different place and felt quite pleased with ourselves. Best of all we met a yak herder on the way down, getting ready to move his herd to the north for the summer, and then met his yaks close up a little later, so scratch that off our bucket list.
The next day we had two walks around Punakha, but for artistic symmetry we’ll refer to them here as hikes. Again they were to temples. Again they involved going to the highest nearby point of land. One was a new build, put up by the Queen Mother, although that title is a little confusing to us here as the current king’s father married four sisters and collectively had ten children, but in this case I think it means the current king’s biomum. Pretty fabulous, and dedicated to universal peace, and accessed by a path that leads through rice paddies planted with alternative crops this time of year, so who could complain about the steep steps up or the suspension bridge to start us off that bucked and swayed like a bronco at the Stampede.
Finally, we had a walk up to the Temple of Fertility put up by the Mad Lama and apparently a very popular destination for couples having trouble conceiving. It seems that the would be mother is required to carry a rather large and heavy wooden phallus around the temple three times to have a chance, and the photo album with pictures of former visitors and their subsequent babies suggests a decent success rate. The phallus is not seen as indecent; instead, it features in the myths surrounding the Mad Lama and is found as a decoration/protection on a lot of the homes in the villages. No pictures – what is understood and accepted here is NSFW as I type away on a phone owned by my firm.
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