Back, closer, to civilisation!

This will be another very quick blog post as I'm on limited time. After three days out towards the east in Bhutan, I am back in Punakha where there is better internet. But it's expensive so will write more back in Thimphu tomorrow.

It has been a few days of spectacular mountain scenery viewed from some fairly hairy roads. The National Highway 2 in Bhutan is one of the great road trips in terms of scenery, but the narrow, bumpy and winding roads rates it pretty highly in the adrenalin stakes as well. There is a hell of a lot of road works happening as well. The roads traverse high mountain passes and skirt the edges of some pretty deep valleys. A bus went over the edge last week costing 9 lives, and we drove past two trucks that went over the edge (I believe the drivers were okay). Fortunately the driver is good and speeds are fairly low, so it hasn't been all that stressful (except when a truck squeezes past and a look out the window sees a drop of about 100 metres straight down.

I've been to Trongsa, Bumthang and Gangtey over the last few days... each of theses places (basically a different valley and community in each valley) are amazingly different. Trongsa has thick temperate rainforest, but once you head over the pass (which provides some great Himalayan views) you end up in a broad, pine-covered valley similar to Big Sky country in Montana. Gangtey is a high glacial valley where some very rare black-necked cranes spend the winter in the wetlands.

So all good so far. This is a very interesting and intriguing place...

More to come.