When I broke-out of the trek, and descended back to Paro, my main question was 'what now?' Karma, the owner of the travel agency, Travel with Nivvana, was much
more precise. Her questions for me were: 'do you want to see a doctor so
you can claim on your insurance?'; 'do you want to rearrange your
flights so you can return home?'; and 'do you want me to arrange a
cultural trip?'.
I responded that I wanted to see more of Bhutan, we worked out, over
the next four days, to put together a trip that would suit me. It ended
up taking so long as all the government agencies were closed over the
weekend, and so could not issue revised permits and visa.
My parameters were that I wanted to see the cultural sights of Bhutan; its
landscape and scenery; and wanted the opportunity to do some wildlife
photography. In addition I preferred to go to fewer places, and spend
several days at each spot, rather than rushing from place to place.
Adding a cost ceiling completed my part in these preparations. So for
these four days I wandered about Paro, and its immediate environs.
It was only after returning to Paro that I started to get a full idea of how pervasive and important archery is in Bhutan.
On the first day in Bhutan I had seen the local archery field, and seen some people in a friendly competition. The Sunday I was there, it was a full moon, and it was a Buddhist festival day. The archery field was transformed - there was a serious match on, between two different Dzongkhag (equivalent to UK counties), and the match was also a celebration of the festival. Archery is to Bhutan what cricket is (was?) to the UK. There are two teams of five to eight competing; each competitor gets two shots from each end of the field; the match takes a long time (I was there most of the afternoon); the distances they fire over is long; and serious matches have a dress code - everyone is required to dress in the national dress. There is a great deal of offering and morale boosting between shots, as they go into team huddles. There is even a role for WAGs in this team building - their job is to flirt and to act provocatively with the opposition while they are in their huddle to try and put them off their beat. Archery is practiced at all levels, from infants to Olympic standards. Truck drivers tend to practice with heavy darts, while the very poor will throw rocks at a target. It is played by various sets of rules - modern compound bows, traditional bows only, and so on. There did not seem to be any use of modern sport bows, ie counterweights and sights. I saw no women involved with archery, but the dart throwing does seem to be by profession rather than gender.
The other sight of interest was a motor bike. I knew Royal Enfield were continuing to be made in India, but I had not seen a pure Indian design. The bike below corrected this omission.
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