…You make my heart sing, / You make everything / Groovy. Who knew that 60 years later the Troggs would come in handy? Glad I saved brain space by failing to memorize the periodic table so I could remember those deathless lyrics instead.

Anyhow, we set off on the long drive from Punakha to the Bumthang (actually pronounced BOOM-tang) region, a combination of four distinct and distinctly remote valleys. Long, of course, depends on how you measure it. Google Maps says it is 86 km as the crow flies. You get a sense of the windingness of the roads to learn that it is actually 208 km to drive. And it is about six hours on the clock, as getting out of third gear is only a dream. We saw what passes for Bhutanese humour on a road sign that proclaimed a speed limit of 50km/hour on the national highway we were on. It seems unlikely that a lot of tickets are given out – it’s pretty hard to get up to that speed even under perfect conditions, and for those that succeed in going over it’s not worth the trouble of searching out their next of kin.

So a visit to Bumthang involves visiting a lot of dzongs and their temples, and temples without dzongs. Some people are saddened by so many dzongs, which inspired the Bhutanese hit song Dzong Dzung Blue by a Neil Diamond fan. But we like them, although they tend to blur together a bit, especially since photography is strictly prohibited so you can’t snap a photo to help remember one from the other. And while some are in a bit of a state of disrepair, they all have shiny new CCTV cameras everywhere to make sure you obey. We dealt with the dzong overload one day by visiting the Red Panda craft brewery for a little tour by the owner, the son of a Swiss father and a Bhutanese mother, who spoke perfect English with a heavy German accent, which was a little confusing, a condition that we addressed with a very generous glass of the house weiss beer.

But there are tidbits of detail that stick in your mind and help to remember some of these places. We stopped at the very large and contour hugging dzong at Tronsig (pictured above) on our way, which rumour has it was built there after an important religious personage had a vision of a butter lamp burning there, it being just a coincidence that it was built on top of the only route through the valley, allowing the dzong to extract a toll of half a trader’s load in return for passage. We also hiked a short distance – about 1.25 km – with a 300 meter elevation gain, not just to experience an average 25% grade but also to visit a cliff hugging monastery occupied full time by a single young monk who not only came in from cutting wood in the forest to let us into the temple but also got out some serious keys to open the safe and show us the temple’s rarest and most important artifacts and relics.

And we went to the hard to reach Tang valley for a picnic and a poke around among the villages and local sights. Just like at home, our picnic emerged from a six container tiffin set housed in a special thermos like contraption that meant every dish was served hot, and we were accompanied by three furry dogs who seemed to have nothing better to do and who edged forward hopefully every few minutes, one indifferent cow who looked around and went on her way, and a pack of crows who were smart enough to know there was no way we were going to eat everything. We got there by way of the famous Burning Lake, where a holy man who was the umpteenth incarnation of someone important, was pressured by the locals into proving he was holy and decided to jump into the lake holding a burning butter lamp which, you might already have guessed, was still alight when he emerged some hours later. What we encountered when we arrived, however, was a lake only if that is the noun reserved for a mountain torrent frothing frantically over rocks and through chutes – anyone in there with a buttter lamp for a few hours would have emerged in India or wherever the stream ends up. But who are we to knock a good story? The devout, some of whom are pictured below, like it just fine.

PS – Saw the Himalayas again while driving past a little village on a mountain ridge.

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