Tshelung Nye

Here, cars drive civilly in single file, not swerving about each other and honking their horns like maniacs as cars are wont to do in Nepal and India. There are crosswalks and garbage cans on the sidewalks, next to open sewers. The post office sells stamps of Buddhas. The city is full of teenagers in tight jeans. Apartment buildings are painted with pictures of elephants, monkeys, horses and Kalachakra symbols. Butcher shops are closed and the selling of meat is banned for this entire first month of the new year! Furthermore, in this singular country, Guru Rinpoche and Yeshe Tsogyal spots abound...

A short distance from Thimpu, you turn off onto, yes, another rocky dirt road in, yes, another tiny car. You take this road up, yes, another mountain, for about an hour and a half--making your way through mud and slushy snow, getting out to move logs aside--the taxi driver reassuring you, "this is nothing, mam," until you reach the "parking lot," marked by a few prayer flags.

A short walk up a hill and there it is--Tshelung Nye--a place where Guru Rinpoche spent 4 months meditating. A place where a sweet monk, teeth red from doma, will usher you into the shrine room where a lama and men and women are practising, staring at you as you try to make offerings to the shrine which includes a small Guru Rinpoche statue--a ter Duddul Dorje pulled from a large boulder near where Guru Rinpoche meditated.

The monk will then usher you outside to a small table where a tea party for two has been arranged with a large tea pot, fancy red cups, cubes of sugar, a small creamer of milk and an old tin of what appears to be puffed rice coated in butter.

At this Nye, there is a small hut built where Guru Rinpoce meditated. There is a giant boulder from which the ter was revealed. There is a spring of long-life water made by Khandro Yeshe Tsogyal. And then there are 18 other spots, too! An indentation in a rock, made by Guru Rinpoche's elbow, his bathing pool, Yeshe Tsogyal's bathing pool, his head imprint, a rock in which he imprinted his mala, and oh so many more I can't seem to remember! Such an amazing place!

Although mind you, it somehow took us leaving three times, coming back three times and requesting the red-teethed monk three times, before he actually decided to take us up behind the temple to show us the 18 sites. He dashed through the forest, alongside a clear rushing creek, jumping from rock to rock as though a wood sprite. And at each spot he insisted we pose so he could take our pictures for us. So sweet.

And that was Tshelung Nye. Oh, and when we got to the bottom of the hill, our taxi driver looked relieved to see us. He said someone had told him we had already left. "Where could we have gone?" Keith laughed, gesturing to the forest and the fact that we were in the middle of nowhere on the top of a mountain. "In the jungle there are plants that if you touch, they make you crazy so you don't know where you are and you get lost," he said. Oh.