We didn’t use the space heater in our room, because it was sketchy and dying in a Bhutanese farmhouse fire isn’t how we wanted our honeymoon to end. Breakfast potatoes were good, and the buckwheat pancakes were fine if you added enough eggs, butter, and chilies. Sorry to be so whiny, it was a rough night. We went to the oldest temple in Bhutan.
I thought we’d already visited a couple that claimed that distinction, but apparently I was wrong. It was a great visit, though. There were (mostly old) monks chanting and playing a large bugle-type instrument. There were many doggos on the property as well as a couple of cows. There were butter lamps burning in one of the outbuildings, which was lovely but unfortunately challenging to photograph.
We drove to the Tang Valley and visited Ugyencholing Heritage Museum, which was pretty great. It was a long drive on a day when we didn’t want to be in the car, but it ended up being totally worth it. We met Kunzang Choden, who was a member of a feudal lord family which owned the compound which now houses the museum and all the surrounding area before the third king broke up the large land-holdings and freed the serfs in the ‘50s. She is an author and was a tremendous person to meet. We bought a couple of copies of Auntie Mouse and one of Folktales of Bhutan.
Her daughter went to Macalester and her son went to School of Visual Arts in NYC. She married a Swiss man and lived in Lincoln, NE, and Laos for a while. They moved back in 2013 to renovate the family home/museum and have started a reading education thing for village children as well as start trying to build playground equipment. She was sent to a school in India when she was 9 with her brother because the third king emphasized secular education, but the only schools in Bhutan were for training monks. There was no road at that time, so they walked 15 days each way. She was in India until she got her bachelor’s, coming home only occasionally. She worked for the national government for a while, and felt obligated/indebted because all of her school had been paid for. She says village children are forced to become adults too soon because they’re put to work at a young age. There was very cool printing stuff in the museum, as well as interesting information on agricultural trade. Rice from south and eastern Bhutan was brought to this village and traded for Tibetan salt and borax. Borax was used in butter tea (!?!). Grain storage charged 7% interest for grain loaned out during famines. There used to be sheep in the valley, but locals have been buying cheap imported fabrics and the market for wool went away. The government brought in 200 merino ewes, but they weren’t well suited to the climate because they’d get footrot during monsoon season. So, there’s a small seed sheep program in the village but no other sheep.
We had lunch at the museum. The chilies weren’t too spicy, and there were fried potatoes, which was a treat. Buckwheat pancakes and then pear custard for dessert. There were villagers harvesting rocks from the Tang River with a Farmtrac tractor and trailer. They use them for building. It seems backward to me to pick up rocks from the riverbed. :) There was no paved road to the museum because the government only paid for the road as far as the school, since the museum isn’t considered a government building. We drove back to Burning Lake (Mebar Tsho), which is really just an eddy pool in the Tang River.
Villagers were making an offering and gave us milk tea and crackers.
I guess several tourists had fallen into the ‘lake’ and died in the last year, but it’s hard to see how that would have happened. Choki told a story that the fourth king leaned over the lake and his locket dropped in the water. One of his bodyguards dove in with rope around his waist, but couldn’t find it. The next day, an army officer was sent in and he found it, but he was unconscious when he was pulled out. He said there was a whole underwater temple down there. He immediately got a promotion. We walked around Chamkhar town (Jakar is only the dzong), and it was pretty weird. Before that, we bought some Red Panda beer and Magpie apple brandy at the swiss cheese shop. The Panda taproom was closed before 3 p.m.
The town didn’t seem like it didn’t see too many westerners. The Peling Hotel is amazing. Red Panda has lots of yeast. I think we are the only people staying at the hotel, and we were definitely the only people eating in the dining room, which gave it an Overlook Hotel vibe. Dinner was decent, with pasta, bacon, and cheesy potatoes, as well as eggplant and green beans. Dessert was a sliced red delicious apple and four grapes, which was pretty funny. Before dinner, we lit the wood stove in the parlor of our apartment-sized room and had a couple of Red Pandas there as well as on the balcony/deck. Pine cones were provided as firestarters, which gave it a whack-bat sensibility. Whack-bat!
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