If you are going to explore this wonderful country Bhutan from West to East, as we do in our Land of the Thunder Dragon trip at Wild Frontiers, then you must spend long hours in the bus between nightly destinations. This is absolutely unavoidable but turns out to be one of the highlights of the trip because I can guarantee that they will be some of the most spectacular drives you will ever undertake.
On most days you will see all four seasons in just a few hours: the delicate pink shades of fruit blossom trees dotted in amongst the greenest of green summer vegetation; higher up, the golden, copper, red and orange glow of autumnal deciduous trees and the dainty yellow and ocre outlines of larch fir trees about to drop their fine needles in amongst the darker pine forests where curtains of lichen waft in the breeze like ragged old prayer flags. Finally at the uppermost altitudes, the skeletal silhouettes of winter’s leafless trunks and branches are encircled in misty cloud.
These are my favourite hours when you wind along the high mountain roads cut precipitously into the rocky cliff faces with the mist swirling up from the lower reaches of the valleys like steam bursting from air vents. The trees are merely dark shadows in the white cloud that drift into and out of sight. This is the world of the cloud forests, eerie, ghostlike and utterly utterly bewitching, as if you have gone back into some remote pre-historic time.
Then after hours in this twilight zone you suddenly emerge into the daylight and find yourself in thick jungle, the habitat of monkeys, mongoose, leopard, the elusive red panda and supposedly even white tigers (although these are now merely part of Bhutan’s mythology).
The never ending high forested mountain slopes and valleys that interlock with unceasing continuum are studded with little villages, hamlets, lone farms, monasteries and small dzongs often surrounded by cascading terraces of rice fields in various stages from green growth to bronzed readiness for harvest.
My group has several very keen birdwatchers (I hesitate to call them ardent twitchers) and these various topographical environments are a burgeoning paradise of birds, butterflies and other winged creatures.
And all of this beauty seen by very few travellers who venture out to the Eastern parts of this still relatively isolated country. How privileged we are to be numbered amongst them.
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