green, green, green

What a wonderful drive that was back to Paro. We started at around 2600m, went up again to a pass at 3600m, down to 1400m almost to Punakha. We had lunch break there after visiting the temple of the divine madman Drupka Kinley. That was a lama in the 16th century from Tibet, teached very unconventional and he had a magic penis to fight against evil spirits and witches. Again a lama with thousands of stories around it. I really like that about this culture, for everything is a story or even two and it isn’t about wrong or right, it matters if you believe it. Because of this guru there are a lot of phallus painted on the houses, you can buy penises in all seizes, forms, colors, some are even the body of a bhutan air- plane. No limits to that. The phallus stands for harmony, good luck and the erect penis is supposed to drive away evil spirits. The explanation Tenzin gives here is that the spirits have a mind of a five year old and then they laugh about all the penises and forget why they came in the first place.
After that visit we walked up again to the village trough rice fields. I love the green of these fields. Also the whole drive was through forests that are incredibly dense and they seem untouched and are in different greens, incredible. I couldn’t look enough. We arrived at around 3:30 at the hotel that is vis-à-vis from the airport and a couple of planes took off or landed, very cool. Bhutan has in total two helicopters. When I told Tenzin and Phub on the trek that in Switzerland injured cows are evacuated by helicopters, I could really feel the gap between my home country and Bhutan.
I don’t want to leave. I think a bit of my heart will stay here. It is a incomparable country. I have the feeling that Bhutan can do it right, does it right with the whole environment issue. They charge people that want to visit the country. I don’t have the feeling here in Bhutan that I come as a tourist and go away again and leave a big pile of problems that I caused by just being there. I think they can handle the carbage, the dirty water issues and all that. Not like it was when I was in Bali, Thailand or Mali. Bhutan is also the only country to have the Gross Happiness Index. It is since 2008 in the Constitution of Bhutan. There is also criticism about it of course and Bhutan is still a poor country but making a lot of progress (https://thediplomat.com/2018/08/bhutans-unique-…) It isn’t all fairytale and I am the last to see things like that through pink glasses. Nevertheless because of the late opening to the outer world at least in terms of tourism I have the feeling they have the big opportunity to make it better then many did before. Money isn’t everything, I get the feeling when being here. But as said, easy for me who can afford 250$/day to visit this country for three weeks. I leave with a feeling that in this country, people do care more for eachother, for the place they live in, for the environment - it’s not just about themselves- and I think we all should be more like that.
Oh and I think I’ve never used the word penis as much as I did in this post 😊.Read more