Our trip has been blessed with good timing. In addition to being in Gangtey for the Black-Necked Crane Festival, we also managed to get “stuck” waiting for a procession of important monks and the High Abbott en route to their winter home at Punakha Dzong. It isn’t really appropriate to photograph monks, especially important ones, […]
Author Archives: magiecrystal
Meet Kencho, our guide and chaperone on this life-changing and mind-bending journey. Not only did Kencho help us negotiate our way through local customs and formalities, he also interrupted his official tourism duties to help old ladies cross the street and carried their bundles down mountainsides. He also laughed at all their jokes and listened […]
This is not a manicured vision of earthly paradise. People live here, incorporating their spiritual practice and values into every aspect of daily life. Waiting with the locals for The Road to open Lucky for us, there’s a roadside market to keep us all occupied while we wait Hard at work Not everybody works hard
There are places in the world so beautiful they leave you breathless and stunned. I think the Gods made these places to catch us off guard and defenseless. The power of these places passes through us like some kind of spiritual electroshock therapy. Pretty sneaky bunch, those Gods.
Five hours of winding roads takes you from the capital city of Thimphu to the remote village of Gangtey. As fortune would have it, our visit was perfectly timed for the Black Crane Festival. The festival is held every year in November to celebrate the return of the endangered Black Neck Crane to their winter […]
I live in San Francisco and work in North Beach. The next time, probably sometime in August, I blow a fuse trying to navigate narrow sidewalks around hordes of tourists, I’ll have to remember how kindly I’ve been treated by the Bhutanese. The generosity and tolerance I’ve encountered here in Bhutan is unimaginable. Even the […]
No, not those kinds. You’ll have to wait until I conclude my trip in Khao Lak, near Phuket, for those kinds of babes. Bhutan is a very poor country but difficult to place in terms of first, second, or third world. It is pretty much other worldly. Poverty is evident but there is also an […]
Chiles are ubiquitous in Bhutanese cuisine. Rather than a role as condiment, chiles are given center stage, dominating various dishes as well as the masochistic taste buds of foreign tourists. The Bhutanese do buy and sell food products other than chiles, even if nowhere to be found outside the vegetable market. Like dried yak cheese […]
Greetings from the Land of the Thunder Dragon Bhutan. Why Bhutan? The last and perhaps most mysterious of the Forbidden Kingdoms, a place where Gross Domestic Product is measured in units of Happiness rather than Productivity. It is also a nation-state, in its struggle for modernity, that has exiled nearly one-third of its population because […]
Brilliant, just brilliant Yes, I am easily amused Off to market we will go Only to find ourselves in a freaking monsoon Not that I’m complaining or anything The Grand Palace Restoration work Seeking shelter Hmmm…just saying Too much coffee?
magiecrystal 