Bhutan Diary 4: Coffee and conversation in Thimphu

On the way back we decided to drop in to the Art Café, another recommendation from the printout. This is tucked away in a corner, next to the Swiss Bakery, and even though we were in the right place, it still took us a little while to find it. But was it worth it! It’s a cosy little coffee shop, with a coal heater and great filter coffee. Needless to say we fell in love with it immediately. Sadly it stays open only till 7pm. Obviously the coffee shop culture has not arrived in Thimphu yet. But I did find it strange that a coffee shop should stay open only in the business hours of 9am to 7pm. How do they ever manage to do any business?


A little while later, this guy who I had spotted at several places, starting with the Siliguri bus station, and later Phuntsholing, walked in with his camera bag. I decided it was time to say hello. He was Darshan, an architect from Ahmedabad. He was accompanied by a couple of pretty Bhutanese girls, both of them called Sonam. Both Sonams were very friendly and talkative. We spent some time chatting over coffee. The Art Café was their local hangout, and apparently it serves some great soups and sandwiches. We weren’t hungry, so didn’t try any.

Next on our agenda was a visit to the National Stupa. Our printouts informed us that we if we visited it in the evening, we would come across Bhutanese doing their evening prayers. We asked the two Sonams at Art Café about it, but they seemed unimpressed. To them it was just a stupa, which people visited, mostly old people, and they had not heard of any evening prayers. We decided to go anyway, much to the amusement of the two Sonams. They thought we were the religious variety. Nothing could be further from the truth. But we certainly were interested in observing if not actively exploring, the local culture. The Sonams were so familiar in a way. They were just like the millions of young Indians, dismissive of their indigenous culture, and proud of their English speaking capabilities. This atleast was my first impression, and I do hope I was wrong.
We walked to the National Stupa, and I must admit, I can understand their lack of enthusiasm. The Stupa is well, a stupa. Not much more to write about it. It seemed to have a temple, but the doors were closed, so we couldn’t actually see it. There were a lot of people around, and most of them were hurriedly making rounds of the Stupa, while chanting under their breaths. And admittedly, a lot of them were old. In fact, I got the feeling that a lot of them were on their way back home from work, and were dropping into the Stupa for a quick prayer. Part of the charm of the place is lost because of the construction going on around it. So there was a lot of scaffolding and other construction material lying around. Anyway, we played copycat and made a round of the Stupa, though with our leisurely pace, we couldn’t be more unlike the Bhutanese.
On the way back, we lost our way, and it turned out to be a longer walk than we had intended. It was getting colder and I was thankful for my monkey cap. We dropped in at Khamsa Coffee at the Cham Lam Plaza, another recommendation from the printouts, hoping for a hot cuppa while enjoying ‘the view over the surrounding mountains’, but this was not to be. It was closed, what is it with these coffee shops in Thimphu?
Back to the room in Centre Lodge, and a hot suja later, we were ready for dinner. We went across to Hotel Tandin, another recommendation from the printouts, and had a ‘wine cooler’ while we mulled over what to eat. The ‘wine cooler’ is an artificially flavoured drink that has absolutely no connection with the beverage it borrows its name from. It comes in a variety of flavours and colours. I don’t recall which one we tried, but I have a feeling they will all be equally bad. Tandin seemed to us a place for Indian food. The menu was primarily Indian, and that’s what everyone seemed to be having. So we decided to try MK instead, which claimed to serve Japanese food.




Mk is a more modest place (apologies for no pictures) on the first floor in a building just behind the cinema hall. The menu is displayed on a blackboard, in Japanese. Some had an accompanying explanation in English, but most dishes were written in Japanese. Hell, I really regret not having taken pictures! Anyway, the friendly lady who came to take the order recommended to us a soup, a dish of fried tofu with vegetables and cheese momos. Of course all these had Japanese names, and I could kick myself for not having written them down. The food was interesting, as always. My pick would be the dumplings which had a filling of cheese and some green leaf, possibly spinach.
That was our first day in Thimphu.

Bhutan Diary 3: Thimphu, the capital with no traffic light

The drive to Thimphu from Phuntsholing is about 5-6 hours. It was COLD in Thimphu. We checked into Norling Hotel on the main street in the downtown Thimphu, Norzim Lam. The first couple of hours in Thimphu were spent getting used to the cold- a hot water shower followed by tea while sitting in front of the hot blower.
We started the next day by scouting around for a different hotel, for we weren’t entirely happy with Norling. A friendly man on the street just outside Norling (I can’t even remember how we got chatting!) suggested Centre Lodge to us. Centre Lodge (00975-2-334331/2) is a small hotel with just about 10-12 rooms, in the building next to the Cinema hall. It’s clean and lovely, but it really was the view that settled it for us. We grabbed it. It’s small and new, so don’t expect great service. The food comes from two restaurants downstairs, both of which are excellent, but both don’t open before 8. The reception is manned by two people, Suraj (00975-17687022), who has been to Mumbai and actually knows his Andheri from his Goregaon, and thinks Thimphu is expensive in comparison, and a girl called Sangeeta who always looks impeccable with her eye liner and dark lipstick in place and takes two steps at a time when climbing stairs.

Bhutan Diary 3: Thimphu, the capital city with no traffic lights

Next we went for a walk on Norzin Lam. By now we had read all the material we had on Bhutan and decided on the places that we might want to visit. In the process we had also realized that the trip might be longer than we had earlier anticipated, that we would miss Lensight for sure, and that we would run out of money. So in we walked into the Bank of Bhutan. We met the manager, who was sitting with the manager of a rival bank, the Bhutan National Bank, and we explained our problem. They both thought there could be ways around it, the faster one being through the BNB. Apparently BNB has an account with the Axis Bank. He asked us to get someone to deposit money into that account, with a letter stating who it’s for, including an identification such as a PANcard number, and then fax the letter to BNB. And voila we could then withdraw the money from BNB. We didn’t actually need to do this, but I wrote about it anyway because it highlights exactly how impromptu our trip had been, and therefore how ill prepared we were. But I guess ways open up when you really want something and are creative and optimistic about finding solutions.
The Norzin Lam seems to be the main street in Thimphu. A lot of hotels, shops and government offices are located on it. Typically the ground floor houses the shops, while the upper floors have the hotels and restaurants. There’s a lot of car traffic on this road. I believe it’s the busiest road, and the only one in Thimphu that needs a traffic controller, who stands at the one circle from which everything seems to radiate out.
The people mostly wear traditional costumes. The men wear the gho, which is a knee length robe, while the women wear the ankle length kira. We didn’t see many women wearing the full kira though the half kira, which is like an ankle length wraparound worn differently, is very common. The full kira is a lot more complicated, and requires some amount of traditional jewellery as well to hold the garment together at the shoulders. The women top it with a kind of jacket. Both the men and the women looked most elegant in the their traditional dresses, though I did feel a little sorry for the men because it was so cold. To fight the cold they all wore socks rolled right up to their knees.
Checks seems to be the favoured pattern for both men and women, as also the traditional one, as I was informed when I tried to buy a half kira. There are some patterns and motifs which are traditional and therefore more common, although these days, almost anything goes. The cheapest half kira will cost about 350-400 rupees, and that too at the local market. At regular shops, the prices start at 450. But there is no limit to how high the price can go. There is a tradition of hand weaving in Bhutan, and hand woven kiras, with simple but elegant patterns to intricately complicated ones, in monotones to absolute riots of colour, are all available, if you can afford it. We saw kiras that cost 50-60 thousand.
Our first stop that day was the Handicrafts Museum. Our printouts informed us that they had a good collection of books, and we wanted to pick up something about Bhutanese history and culture. We spent a good couple of hours there browsing through books, and taking an occasional break to look at the other displays. They had some very interesting masks on display. Another thing that caught my eye was this blue stone that was a part of a whole lot of jewellery. There must be a significance to it. We both bought one book each, and some other small knick knacks that we couldn’t help picking up.
By this time we were famished. Lunch was at Chopsticks, a restaurant in the same building as our hotel, and a place which we would visit often over the next few days. It was an amazing lunch of Chinese food, thukpa and sizzler if I’m not mistaken. At any rate, the food here didn’t disappoint, and I loved their suja.
The next stop that day was the Zangdopelri temple. Distances in the town centre are not much, and we spent a lot of our time in Thimphu on foot. That might also have been because neither of us was in a hurry to do anything, and we enjoyed walking around, savouring the place, taking in the sights and sounds, entering shops, especially book and coffee shops and striking up conversations with the locals whenever we could.
So we checked our printouts, asked for directions, and strolled across to the Zangdopelri. This is a relatively new temple, built in the 1960s. What attracted us to it was the fact that it is supposed to be constructed on a former battle site, in order to ‘pacify energies’. It doesn’t look interesting at all from the outside, but step in for a surprise. It has some very impressive murals. The Bhutanese temples and dzongs (forts) always had the most elaborate multicoloured wall murals. They all also had wall hangings of expensive looking silk cloth, also in many colours. In the Zangdopelri, I couldn’t see an inch of empty wall space. There were many idols there, and ofcourse we didn’t then know whose they were. We later got to know that Bhutanese worship the Padmasambhava, called Guru Rinpoche (the precious teacher) by the Bhutanese, the reincarnation of the Lord Buddha, who manifested himself in eight forms. Most temples have idols of one or the other of those eight forms. There was a wealth of stories in the paintings on the walls which we understood nothing of, but were still awed by. I have to let the pictures speak the rest, no amount of writing, none that I am capable of certainly, can quite describe it anyway.
The Bhutanese have this typical way of offering their prayers, in which they fold their hands high above their heads, bring them down still folded, kneel on the ground, and go prostrate and fold their hands again, then get up and repeat the whole procedure. This is typically done three times. In the Zangdopelri we found a woman who kept doing this the entire time we were there. She had some stones with which she was keeping count. So everytime she was prostrate with her hands folded, she would move one stone from one pile to another. Ramya observed this for awhile and told me it wasn’t just a simple moving of one stone from one pile to another, but something more complicated. She was moving stones, but in some strange pattern that we couldn’t figure out. I couldn’t help but admire the muscles on her arms. Well, what do you expect, with all those near-push-ups?