Day 10, Phuentsholing to Thimpu

May 02, 2009

My journey to Thimpu began at 1pm. After abusing my body in battered cars for more than a week, I finally got the luxury of a brand new Swift for my trip to Thimphu. I got lucky with the driver too. He is calm, doesn’t speak unless spoken to, drives responsibly and knows the country.

Unfortunately, just like Nathula, the road to Thimpu was under construction. It seemed to me that the whole world is under construction. Though the car is new, because of bad roads we were horribly slow, barely averaging 30 kilometers every hour. But as they say, the journey is more important than the destination. Since I was in no hurry, I tried to focus on what was around me rather than on the road.

As soon as we crossed border in Jaigon and entered Phuntsoleing, we started ascending a hill. I soon discovered that Bhutan is almost entirely located on mountains and is covered with thick jungles. As has become common to me over the last few days, we were driving through clouds for most part of our journey. To my surprise, I found that, although located along the same mountain range as Sikkim, Bhutan is very different from its neighboring state. The mountains here are less steep and hence the roads wider. There are quite a few flat pieces of land where people have the possibility of farming and construction.

Throughout our drive, we encountered several people waiting in the middle of nowhere for a ride from strangers driving by in expensive imported cars (because of the meager import tax, Bhutanese import many cars. You can see more Prados than Marutis.). I reckoned that there was no public transport between towns.

I took the wheel after we crossed the 100km mark to Thimpu, as I find driving far more exciting than being driven. I also wanted to experience the thrill of driving on the mountains, in a foreign country, neither of which I have done before. That’s when we picked up three young boys at about eighty kilometers from Thimpu. I used this opportunity to learn about this country from its native people. Apparently the boys were there to play football as they have no ground in their own school, some 15km from where they stopped our car asking for a ride. They also told me that most Bhutanese drop out of high school, thus leaving a lot of jobs to be filled by foreigners (read Indians). According to them, the education system isn’t strict, like in India. Neither the students nor the teachers have keen interest in studies, as a result of which the youth doesn’t turn out to be competitive or hungry for achieving. When I asked them if they were on Facebook, they drew a blank. Apparently, very few Bhutanese outside Thimpu own computers or are connected to the World Wide Web. What a secluded life these people lead! They are not connected to the outside world, they are happy and content with what they make. At least this seems to be the scenario on the country side. What lies in Thimpu, I am yet to see.

As we approached Thimpu, the road got better. In fact, the last 30km of our drive was smooth as silk because the road was one of the best I’ve seen so far in the Indian subcontinent. I was awed. But more surprise awaited me in Thimpu. The roads here in the city resembled those in Europe. From what little I could see in the dark (it was 8pm by the time I reached Thimpu), I could have been in Italy.