Tashi Delek, Bhutan!

After a successful but exhausting trek up to Chomolhari base camp, we were happy to spend our last few days in Bhutan doing more of a cultural tour. Most of the trekkers left immediately after the trek (since they’d done their cultural visits beforehand), but a few – Pete, Bernard, and Jennifer – joined us for a few days in Thimphu, the capital “city” of Bhutan (population 60,000), and Punakha. We enjoyed having a chance to get to know them a bit better since we weren’t able to trek with them. We were also totally blown away by the thoughtfulness and intelligence of our main guide, Tsewang, and we were thankful to have a chance to see Bhutan through his eyes before we left.

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Into Thin Air (Finally!)

After a rough start to our precious two weeks in Bhutan, Laura and I were finally feeling better and were eager to get out and do some trekking in the Himalayas. Geographic Expeditions and Yangphel (their local partner in Bhutan) had worked a minor miracle and lined up a completely separate, somewhat abbreviated trek for the two of us that would still get us up to the Chomolhari base camp and back to Paro in the seven days we had to work with.

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Gross National Happiness

We said farewell to Tsewang and our six fellow trekkers on Saturday, and spent the rest of the day watching random American sitcom reruns on Indian TV channels. (We get why they’re still airing Friends, but why anyone thinks that Yes, Dear and Just Shoot Me are shows worthy of television immortality is a mystery we’ll just have to chalk up to cultural differences.) By the next day, Dustin was feeling a lot better, and by the day after that, he felt strong enough to tackle the steep, vertical climb up to the stunning monastery called Tiger’s Nest (a day hike we’d missed out on when our tour group did it a few days earlier). The hike ended up being a fantastic introduction to the Bhutan that had been taunting us outside the windows of our hotel room, with everything from beautiful mountain scenery to fascinating Buddhist culture.

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The Land of the Thunder Dragon

The first thought you have after your plane lands in Bhutan is: I’m never flying here again. No one prepared us for the approach and landing at the Paro airport (the one and only commercial airport in the country), which is probably a good thing because I’m not sure I would have gotten on the plane had I known what was in store for us at the end of our hour-long flight from Kathmandu.

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