Around Thimphu

I am in Bhutan. I have my own hotel room in the Dragon Roots, less than a minutes walk from John and Diane’s hotel. When we arrived, I was astonished. The country is better than I could have imagined. Once in Paro, good Karma drove us to Thimphu, about an hour away from Paro. Once I had my hotel room, I started to explore Thimphu. John and Diane where exhausted from traveling but I still had some adrenaline in me and decided to use it. Karma drove me up to a Stupa overlooking the city.

The Stupa


Unfortunately, I missed the memo that said that you had to walk around everything in three’s. Three times around the stupa, or six, or 21, 108. And you always have to walk clockwise around everything. I think that they purposefully had the driver on the right side of the car, just so they could drive clockwise around the roundabouts. There were many Bhutanese and tourists walking around the Stupa. They leave the gates to the stupa open all the time, there is always someone walking around the stupa when I pass it.

A very friendly looking, old, Bhutanese man


After looking around the stupa, I walked back down toward my hotel; back to the heart of Thimphu. At first I was a bit frightened walking around this completely foreign country by myself. My paranoia really set in when I felt like guys were smiling just a little too much. But everyone was very friendly and didn’t mind returning a smile anytime you threw one their way.

I ate with John, Diane, and Ugyen, the man who helped get me into Bhutan. He is a personal friend of the King, and a complete businessman. He had his blackberry and Iphone out faster than I could order a bottle of water. Having a few businessmen in the family, I could spot them from a mile away. He might as well have had a dunce cap on. Oh, everyone has cell phones in Bhutan, nice ones too. Iphones, blackberries, the works

Around 3 o’clock I crashed, hard. I started to get delirious and I swear I was hallucinating about monks and bunnies… I gained a bit of consciousness again at 6 and lost it shortly afterward. I came to at 1 a.m., fully conscious. What was I going to do at one in the morning? Around five I had had enough and left my room. Instead of walking towards the stupa, like the day before, I walked in the opposite direction. After a while I came upon a monastery on the outskirts of town. A monk approached me and we chatted about the monastery. The name of the monastery is Zangdo Pelri. The monk was very kind and was curious to know where I was from and what I was doing in Bhutan. He had grown up in Thimphu. I asked a very shy monk if I could take his picture and after a few minutes, he finally stood still.

Monk in front of fire with white smoke



Karma’s mother (the woman I was suppose to live with while I was in Bhutan) was out of town for over a week, so a Llama arranged for me to stay of one of the nunneries on the outskirts of town, Ziluhka nunnery. It worked out that I would go to the nunnery while John and Diane left and went to Punahka, a two-hour drive from Thimphu. A nunnery, what have I gotten myself into?