Saturday 27 April 2019

Back onto the bus for another day of driving. We left at 8.30am, back along the same winding road towards Thimphu.

Again we stopped at Dochula pass for a tea break. When we came by the other day it wasn’t too busy. But today, it was absolutely packed! We couldn’t work out why. Bus upon bus upon bus of Indian and Chinese looking tourists.

After Thimphu, we stopped for lunch around 12pm. We were told that we would have a packed lunch today. We were expecting sandwiches. However, packed lunch just meant a guy with a car who brought along lunch in metal containers! So it was the same as usual. Rice and plain vegetables.

Then more driving.

We were expecting to reach Haa by around 3pm. However, the road was terrible. It was being resurfaced. So there were patches where we had to sit and wait for nearly an hour whilst they waited for the road to dry. That happened three times. The other two times weren’t such a long wait. But it ended up being 5.30pm by the time we reached Haa.

Haa hasn’t been open for tourism for very long, because it lies on the western edge of Bhutan, right next to Tibet.

We visited the white temple and were lucky to arrive just before it closed. This temple was located after one black and one white dove were released. The white dove landed here. And the black dove landed just higher up the valley – so a black temple was also built.

It was similar to other temples, very elaborate. One monk was inside the temple, playing games very loudly on his phone!

Much of the town is occupied by a joint Bhutanese and Indian Military Training Camp. The Indians come here to learn mountain skills.

Dinner was probably the worst yet. I had rice and asparagus. Exciting.