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.
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?
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.
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| 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?
