30/09/06 Thimphu Again! Our day started with a morning hike up to the Tango Monastery. The 250m ascent took about an hour and was well worth the effort. The monastery was beautiful - so quiet and peaceful. A central courtyard contains a small building where butter lamps were burning. We were shown around the temple by the caretaker monk who led us up 3 steep wooden staircases, more like ladders between the floors, in order to show us the 5 temple rooms. The monastery houses a young monk, now 13 years old. When he was 6 or 7, it was realized [View Full Entry]

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27/09/06 - 29/09/06 Wangdue Sure enough with Bless-ed Rainy Day over, the weather picked up and we started having sunshine and blue skies. Our journey back West was initially to the Yanghill Resort in Trongsa. Our first incident of the day was a landslide on the road. We whiled away a few minutes in the sun waiting for the JCB to clear the boulders away. It didn't take too long ,this was the main East - Wast highway after all! Following our morning traveling, we went for an afternoon drive south, following the valley to an old village, Kuenga Rapten. En [View Full Entry]

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25/09/06 - 26/09/06 Jakar, Bumthang province. We carried on further East into the Bumthang province - a 9 hour journey with an hour’s stop when we spotted a family of Common Langurs (or white cap langurs) and stopped to try and photograph them amongst the forest canopy. We crossed the Pe Le La pass at 3350m and climbed up through the clouds. With ever changing vegetation and rising and falling temperatures, we ascended and descended through 2000m. We passed a famous Chorten, which is a replica of one found in Lhasa, Tibet. Well almost… according to the story, a monk dec [View Full Entry]

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24/09/06 Punakha Leaving Thimphu after breakfast we headed East over the Dochu La Pass climbing to 3000 and a few meters and finally back down to 1300m into the almost tropical valley. With such varying altitudes, Bhutan has an abundance of wildlife, flora and fauna and is a paradise for ‘twitchers’. The vegetation had changed form blue pines to chir pines and plentiful fruit trees and lush green stepped rice fields. We stopped to try and feed some wild monkeys but they ran from our apples thinking that we were throwing stones at them. (OK - this is supposition - I [View Full Entry]

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23/09/06 Thimphu One of the most famous Buddhist Lama masters of Bhutan was Lam Drup Kinley, better known as the Divine Madman, and certainly my favourite character from all Bhutanese history, that I have encountered to date. Temples in his name are dedicated to fertility and he is the reason for the wonderful phallus paintings that adorn Bhutanese houses. The Takin zoo is a small park area housing a dozen or so takin(or is it takins, and what is the collective noun for takin, I’ll have to check that out!) The animal that ‘befuddles taxonomists’ according to a sign in [View Full Entry]

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22/09/06 Taktstang - The Tiger's Nest Taktsang Temple monastry is probably the most famous site in Bhutan and revered as a holy place built on the spot where Guru Rimpochey, the Great Buddhist Master landed on his Tigress after flying from India in the 8th Century and meditated in a cave high up on the cliff side. The shrine in the cave was slowly added to with additional buildings until the monastic temple was formed. Destroyed by fire in the 1990's, the temple was completely re-built and only finished and re-ordained in recent years. Legend has it that the gold statue [View Full Entry]

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21/09/06 Paro, Bhutan With 30 minutes before landing, the pilot announced the time and expected weather conditions in Bhuta, before adding For those of you who are flying to Bhutan for the first time and not used to seeing mountains in such close proximity, please don't be alarmed as this is the standard procedure. The plane proceeded to bank left and right around the mountains, with the wing tips seemingly a few meters away and then banked one more time even moments before landing as it rounded one final curve into the Paro valley and straightened up perfectly to touch [View Full Entry]

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19/09/06 - 20/09/06 Bangkok Our overland journey from Siem Reap started early with a private Taxi to Poipet on the border with Thailand. We wanted to catch the bus but it didn't arrive in time for the daily train. (In the end we caught a bus to Bangkok instead, which departs every hour so it wouldn't have mattered). The journey was 160km of mud roads - How does the car suspension survive. I have no idea. It was a bone shaking journey all the way. We walked through a mini no man's land over the border to the unpronounceable Aranyapathet in [View Full Entry]

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18/09/06 Tonle Sap Lake The lake is a huge area; 175 x 82 km when flooded in the wet season with glacial waters that have run down from the Tibetan plateau high up in the Himalayas. The lake is home to thousands of Cambodians and illegal Vietnamese immigrants all living on boats or floating houses. Families many fish to survive and there are also industries such as cat fish farms and crocodile farms. A crocodile is worth about $300 for it's skin to make purses, shoes (feel free to break into Jimmy Nail song), wallets and belts. Children play in small [View Full Entry]

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15/09/06 - 17/09/06 Siem Reap and the Anghor Temples Angkor Wat is the biggest religious structure in the world and certainly the most famous of the Siem Reap area. Looking back now, the three days seem like a blur of facts and I won't even try to give details of dates of construction and what the wall carvings show. There are many guides to Angkor with so much information; For me, the visit was about just wandering amongst the stones, enjoying ducking through crumbling doorways and finding detailed carvings in remote corners. From dark dank [View Full Entry]

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