The Outdoors of Bhutan

Few places truly look unique, Bhutan isn't one of them. Most of all, Bhutan reminds me of Norway, mountain ridges covered in pine trees, mountain roads winding on forever. But then the landscape opens up and suddenly you are in Scotland with a light rain no matter where you go, piles of stones left by people of ages gone by. Then you hit the hairpinbends, lower altitudes and humidity of the eastern part or the country and I'm back in Bolivia, racing down the Camina de Muerte with my friend Jimmy. And then, when everything is fine, it gets drier and there are cliffs hanging perilously overhead everywhere and it feels like mountain roads in France. There's a very clear line here, Bhutan is very much a mountain country, in fact, when the mountains end and the plains begin, you'll find the border to India.

Everywhere is a shade of green, broken only by wildflowers, cliff and earth, perhaps it is especially wo as this is the rainseason. That also means that the mountains we're driving in are often shrouded in clouds, with intermittent showers,although they appear more frequent the lower we get.

We've been on two longer treks so far on this trip, one leading up to Tiger's Nest and one over two days walking in a valley somewhere in he Bumthang area within two hours of Jakar. The nature is gorgeous, but coming from Denmark it can be quite overwhelming, the nature is everywhere, just driving in a bus can reveal the most gorgeous sights, it's a lot like Norway in that sense, except that the view is always there, I guess that driving in the mountains has an advantage.

But exactly because driving in Bhutan is so basic, it would hardly even be called a road in Denmark, it's narrow, with no markings, going intermittenly from asphalt to dirt, with cows and other animals lounging about and workers expanding or improving the road with no warning, it shows so much of Bhutan in such an easy way. It's the main (and only) road east to west, and it runs through all the villages, towns and cities it passes; it's not a new road, it's the old road through the country. In South America, you could see how close you were to a city on how much garbage was in the side of he street, the more, the closer. Here, it's how many children are running around, how dense the foilage is and how good the road is.