Bhutan: Prayer flags and first stop

I have hundreds of photos of Bhutan and people have asked to see some of them, so I am going to do a little Bhutan series starting now.

In an effort to move the photos from my hard drive (where there is no space) to my USB, I’ll go day-by-dayish but also theme them somehow.

First theme is prayer flags, because they are everywhere. The idea behind these, I learned, is mostly in memory of the dead. Something about reincarnation and aiming toward heaven. Again, I’m not interested in Buddhism whatsoever, so I tuned out a lot, but to me, they’re reminders to pray.

They’re generally found in the higher spots and honestly, there are so many that it’s basically just littering. They just leave them up and a bunch of them look pretty nasty. Some have pre-printed writings on them; I assume they’re prayers.

You do see them everywhere, both horizontally and vertically. There’s something magic about the number 108, and I think at some point you’re supposed to hang 108 of them.

They’re found hanging from one cliff to another and we speculated on how people do that. Since archery is the national sport, we theorized that someone would tie a strand to a bow and shoot it across the chasm.

The big critter is a yak. We saw several of those, but since I’d been in Mongolia three weeks before this trip and had them in my front yard, they didn’t impress me all that much.

The two other photos: As a segue from last week’s Foshan trip, I am including a photo of the toilet in my first hotel. It looked like a throne. I thought it was funny. The chain bridge scared me. I didn’t for one minute think it would collapse, but I really had a hard time keeping my balance on it. I pictured falling over and tearing my other PCL or something.