Phuntsholing

Last weekend Rachel and I went to Southern Bhutan, which more or less means lower elevation Bhutan. It was a nice change to not need a room heater at night and to be able to cruise around in a t-shirt in the afternoon. Phuntsholing is only about a 100 mile drive from Thimphu, but it takes about 5 hours, as the road gets continually worse as you get further from either town. Mostly its due to the fact that the roads have to be build on 80+ degree slopes and mudslides happen during the monsoon season, washing out the road in various places. Its an incredible engineering hurdle, if you think about it. So for a good third of the trip the road is beset with small boulders that have fallen onto the road and is down to one lane of dirt while construction crews try to repair the damage before the next monsoon season. Not the most relaxing drive I've ever done.

But the town itself was super fun. I had thought that Phuntsholing was fairly well visited by western tourists, but Rachel and I were a bit of a spectacle, with many more stares and random shouts of "HELLO!" than we get in Thimphu. At one point when we sat down to play a game of cards during a break at an archery tournament we became the new spectator sport, with a crowd of no less than a dozen kids and half as many adults. My nepali language skills never fail to amuse/astound people, but they remain very rusty.

We also got to see crocodiles, which was a highlight for me. They didn't do much, but they were fairly huge. We saw both Muggar and Gharail crocodiles some of the largest freshwater crocs in the world. The Gharails are the ones with the skinny snouts, which they evolved for quick movement to eat small fish at the expense of strength. The bulb on the tip of the nose is found only in males and is apparently used for mating calls/displays, which is where the old saying comes from "the bigger the wierd nose growth the bigger the ..."


All in all it was a good trip, definitely beat a day in the office.