Nepal and Bhutan
Thimphu to Haa Valley
Day Eight – 16 October 2017
Weather: Sunny and warm again.
We headed out for a visit at the Thimphu general post office which opened at nine.
There was a shop and museum located inside. I bought a silver coin at the shop and then we met up in the museum where we spent a bit more than an hour watching a documentary on how the Bhutanese delivered mail between the towns and villages in the hills.
They could spend days, even weeks, following the well worn trails with the mail and supplies on their back.
The documentary took much longer than expected and Nitin asked the guide to give us a quick tour of the museum, but the young man didn’t seem to understand the concept of “quick” as he started showing us every single display.
With limited time, it would have been better to just let us read what we wanted and the guide could have been free to answer questions.
The one display that I found of interest was the stamps commemorating the total eclipse over Bhutan in 2009.
What a sight that would have been with a dzong in the foreground.
After two hours, we headed out to visit a paper making factory.
Here they continue a Bhutanese tradition of making paper from the Daphne plant. They soak the plant for twelve hours and then cook it for four hours. They wash and pulp it.
Then they mix the pulp with a vegetable starch like Hibiscus Manihot before the mixture is spread out on a screen and piled up, compressing the water from the paper.
The individual sheets are dried on a heated board.
And the finished product is piled.
During this process, they can also add decoration to the paper.
And this is dried outside.
We could see the final product in the shop.
Including a close look at the special prints.
Beautiful work.
After a couple of purchases, we headed out of Thimphu towards the Haa Valley to the east.
Not long after we entered the valley, we pulled into a roadside cafe/shop and asked if we could have our packed lunch there.
They said yes and we were able to purchase hot drinks from the cafe to have with our lunch.
We had an audience.
So much cute.
The road to the town of Haa was another curvy drive on the side of the hills. This video is at 2x speed.
We passed through the town of Haa and near the end of the road, we turned into our guesthouse for the next two nights – the Soednam Zingkha Heritage Lodge. Our porters were waiting.
This was the first time I stayed in a place with a shared bathroom. The rooms were huge.
There were three washrooms on my floor and five rooms, so there was always one available. The door locks were actually padlocks.
Another first.
Go to Day Nine
Go to Table of Contents