KELLY'S GONE AGAIN
…AND HERE'S WHERE I'M AT!Archive for Bhutan
#20. Paro: Pilgrimage for a Budding Buddhist
You ever have one of those workouts where you swear your body will be revamped when you get home? Welcome to my world. Yesterday we climbed into the mountains, 10,000 feet (all uphill, by the way), to the Tiger’s Nest.
Any guilt I’ve ever felt from any time I’ve ever stepped off of the treadmill early (or from every piece of naan I’ve eaten over the last 3 weeks) has now been absolved.
#19. Thimpu: Time to Get Happy

So I took a little break from India this week and flew into Bhutan, via Kathmandu, on Thursday. Bhutan is famous for its use of “Gross National Happiness” as a measure of national productivity, and when I heard that a few months back I thought, “well, I’ve got to go *there*.”
It was a pretty pleasant flight over the Himalayas. When I wasn’t glued to my window watching the mountains, I was reading one of the national Bhutanese newspapers, which had articles on how the country was actually fixing ills, such as humanely taking care of the stray dog population, and more personal columns like “Do You Have a Good Sense of Humor?” As we touched down into Paro, Drukair [Airlines] played traditional Bhutanese music, something like that which you might hear while Daniel-san gets a lesson from Mr. Miyagi. The stuff works — I was happy already.

