Well we set off on the long drive from Bumthang to Gangtay – 57 km for the crow but 148 km for the driver – thinking we would just power through with no stops except for lunch. However, serendipity got in the way. We pulled over to a traditional hand weaving place, where the 30 year old woman in charge of showing us around has professional training but was taught the basics by her mother and grandmother and is a 6th generation weaver in her family. She was great, but this is not the point. The point is that there was a construction site next door with about an eight foot deep excavation already dug and the workers were bustling around with strings and chalk and plumb lines and such. In the middle of the hole was a a monk with a large amount of ceremonial equipment chanting over the noise of the backhoe. Our guide explained that he was drawing the negative influences out of the ground before the foundation was poured, a standard procedure if you want your house built to code and with only positive things emanating from the site.

And that’s not all. This was a Sunday, and that means people have the day off for sports and recreation, and this is Bhutan, so that means archery. Sure enough just down the road we found a match going on and we wandered carefully over to size it up. I remember using bows and arrows at day camp on Ile Perrot as a kid and this was nothing like that. First, the range is 140 meters long, as long as a Canadian football field from the back of the end zones. And the target is a rectangular white slab about three feet high by 20 inches wide, with rings no more than a foot across. From where we stood at one end I could sort of see the white target at the other end but could not make out the rings. The archers play in two teams of eight, with half of each team at each end. I assumed that the flight path of an arrow going that far would have to have quite an arc but that just shows how little I know. As you can see from the picture below, the aim is close to horizontal. At each end there is a protective wall on each side of the target to cower behind when the incoming shots are being taken. If you are a visitor. The archers could somehow pick up the flight of incoming arrows from 140 meters away and judge where they would land and they casually walk out into the zone before the landing as though to catch them or to show disdain for an opponent’s shot. One guy was so casual that he neglected to pay any attention to an inbound shot which whizzed by his ear and buried itself an inch or two into a post. But the best is when the target is hit – the shooter’s teammates at the target end spring into action to do a slow ritual song and dance to celebrate – see video below.

And then on to Gangtay, in a broad flat bottomed glacial valley unlike the vertiginously steep valleys that are the norm here. The view from the pass looking into the valley is a bit like the view south on highway 22 near Longview Alberta, if only the valley there sat at about 3,000 meters. This is where the black necked cranes come for the winter from their breeding grounds in Tibet, though they had already left for the summer before we got there. Not much to do here but chill, enjoy the view, visit the crane centre to visit the two cranes too injured to fly north, and hike. We did all of that, including a hike up and over a high pass through a forest of rhododendron trees, which were blooming lower down and will be soon higher up. We had a local guy with us since our guide had not been on this route before – a gentle man with 10 cows, no English and a nice smile and who, after two hours of a steady incline, told our guide “now we go up” but who waited politely as we paused repeatedly to try to figure out where our breath had gone.

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