Himalayan Honeymoon: Thursday, February 2

We had eggs and fried rice for breakfast at the Phobjikha farmhouse, which was very good. The crane visitor center was closed, but we saw tons of black-necked cranes on a 4-km nature walk. The terrain was pretty gentle. Choki got some good pictures, which he sent to me. Cranes were plentiful, and the path was level and beautiful.

500 of these cranes migrate from Tibet to the Phobjikha Valley each winter. Cows and horses also graze in the marshy valley.

We took a steep walk up to Gangtey Goenpa, which is one of Bhutan’s oldest monasteries. There were many stray dogs (SO MANY DOGGOS AND PUPPERS!), and Choki bought some cookies from a convenience store to feed them.

We toured the temple at Gangtey. The temple had seven big Buddhas and 1,000 small figurines of Guru Rimpoche. We circumambulated three times around a stupa with the remains of one of the previous gurus of the monastery. When visiting a temple, usually the monk in residence will pour some holy water with saffron into your hand. You are supposed to slurp some of it, and pour the rest of it on your head. We’re fairly nervous about getting sick from any non-bottled water, so we generally haven’t been drinking much of it. On the other hand, it was sooo cold in the temple, and dumping a handful of water onto my head didn’t help the situation much. We drove to Trongsa. There was a hydroelectric dam construction project in progress, but it was too far down in the ravine to see anything. We stopped for lunch at a perfectly nice place that served several kinds of buttery vegetables. We’re both having a hard time getting and staying warm at this point. We were the only people in the restaurant, and it wouldn’t have been heated even if there were more people. The Black Mountains are located on the opposite side of the river, and they’re super dense with foreboding-looking trees. Lovely and intimidating; looks like a good place to disappear. We got to within sight of Trongsa Dzong (it was no more than a couple hundred yards away as the crow flies), but in order to get to it, we had to drive another hour to cross the river on a bridge, which was kind of discouraging to your road-weary travelers.

We stayed at the Yangkhil Resort, which was lovely. We asked Choki whether we could stay in a hotel rather than a farmhouse for one of our two nights in Bumthang, and he worked that out, which was great. The view from our room’s balcony is tremendous. Trongsa is a very small town; there’s very little land that isn’t a sheer cliff. It’s strategically important, but nowhere for a significant number of people to live. We had dinner at the hotel; the chili cheese curry was super spicy, but the rest of the meal was very nice. I requested something to read, since I had run through my library book ahead of schedule, and one of the porters brought a bunch of his personal books to the room. I also got a two-week-old newspaper from the lobby. I read about the succession of Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyal, which was some low-grade Game of Thrones stuff. The room was very nice and I slept well (and I think Molly did, too).