[Here is the photostream of Bhutan 2013 Day 9, for those who prefer pictures to tell a story. 🙂]
We were super excited this morning as we would be spending the day in our attempt to reach Tiger’s Nest at an altitude of 3120m! The minute we stepped out of our room, we saw snow!!! First snow in the valley of Paro for the year! We wondered if this was an omen? Today, we used up 6 heat packs in total – 2 each for the 3 of us 😛
[Here is the photostream of Bhutan 2013 Day 8, for those who prefer pictures to tell a story. 🙂]
Simple breakfast
While waiting for hubby at the lobby, I had a chat with an old lady from California, where we exchanged tips on keeping warm… haha! She advised that we should “heat up our skins” by the fireplace just prior to sleeping, so that our bodies could warm the bed, and that we should heat up our clothes by the fireplace prior to wearing.
We had a light breakfast of long beans, baked beans, barley porridge, muesli and delicious made-to-order cheese omelette (skipped the toast and cornflakes).
[Here is the photostream of Bhutan 2013 Day 7, for those who prefer pictures to tell a story. 🙂]
Different breakfast everyday
Breakfast today was rice porridge with cheese (slightly salty taste to it and quite smooth, nice!), brown bread (slightly dense, but not as dense as the pancakes), white toast, Greek yoghurt (sour) and fried eggs (difference between fried eggs and omelette here seems to be that fried eggs have runny yolk while omelette are fully cooked with the yolk and egg white slightly mixed together). Gotta say that the food here was the best we had out of the 3 hotels and we had something different each day 🙂
[Here is the photostream of Bhutan 2013 Day 6, for those who prefer pictures to tell a story. 🙂]
It’s Bhutan National Day today, Happy Birthday Bhutan!
We had Bhutanese buckwheat pancakes for breakfast today 🙂 It was very dense and had a slight bitter taste to it, but it went well with the fried eggs with oozing egg yolks. Dorji said that they usually eat pancakes with chilli.. haha! By now, we were quite good at eating ema datshi during lunches and dinners, but we just couldn’t imagine having chillis for breakfast… We also shared our failed experiences in keeping our fire going, and Dorji promised to help us get some “fire starters”.
[Here is the photostream of Bhutan 2013 Day 5, for those who prefer pictures to tell a story. 🙂]
Hot oat porridge
Today I had a very hard time crawling out of the very warm bed into the cold room. Hubby managed to set up the fire so I waited for the room to warm up before getting up :p It was too cold to shower!! Breakfast was the hottest we had so far! The lovely pipping hot oat porridge, which remained hot till the last drop, really warmed us up 🙂 There was also egg and toast, pretty standard fare.
Back to our room, we had difficulty getting the fire up again and had used up almost half the match sticks. Finally, while hubby was outside trying to gather more wood, he met one of the staff who helped us get the fire started with a single match stick and a tiny piece of wood. Talk about being experienced huh :p
[Here is the photostream of Bhutan 2013 Day 4, for those who prefer pictures to tell a story. 🙂]
Breakfast was the usual museli and toast, with bananas by the side. We could choose how we wanted our eggs done, and the cheese and mushroom omelette that we ordered was very delicious! We had some time after breakfast, so we went around to take some pictures. There was actually a pretty good view of the valley.
[Here is the photostream of Bhutan 2013 Day 3, for those who prefer pictures to tell a story. 🙂]
Today’s breakfast was served as a set, so we chose to have muesli and scrambled eggs, with toast. Seems like tourists only get continental breakfast! Muesli was deliciously crunchy if you ate it quickly enough, and the scrambled eggs were so much, we wondered if they had given us 4 eggs each… Starting to get overdose of eggs! The toast came wrapped within a paper napkin, very cute, but very hard as usual.
[Here is the photostream of Bhutan 2013 Day 2, for those who prefer pictures to tell a story. 🙂]
Indeed peaceful
Woke up bright and early to have breakfast at 7:00 so that we can some time after breakfast to check out the rest of the hotel. We liked the beautiful flowers that were blooming in the little gardens! Then we realised another advantage of arriving at the beginning of breakfast time – we would definitely get hot food! However, breakfast was only ready around 07:15, so it might be a bit difficult if one was in a rush…
[Here is the photostream of Bhutan 2013 Day 1, for those who prefer pictures to tell a story. 🙂]
Happy couple landing in Paro
It was a very early morning for us! Managed to squeeze in a 4-hour nap before leaving house at 3:45am Singapore time to attempt to catch a cab to Changi Terminal 1. We were quite lucky to spot 2 empty cabs almost immediately! Managed to check in by 4:15… By then, there were already many people who had requested for seats on the left side of the plane (so that we can see the Himalayan mountain ranges from the plane)! Looks like everyone got the same advice from their tour agencies, or maybe we are all using the same agency, DrukAsia, the only Bhutanese agency that has a branch in Singapore currently 🙂 We had initially tried to get an upgrade to business class, unfortunately there was only 1 seat available. However, the staff was very kind to offer us an alternative – the economy seats with extra leg space (1 row behind business class) on the left side of the plane, and hubby got me the window seat!!! Woohoo!! I haven’t had a window seat for the last 4.5 years :p Thank you hubby!!!
Beautiful station in Kaohsiung
[I know we started this blog in Aug 2013 and this trip was in Jun 2013, so it’s kinda backdated. But after documenting the Taipei trip, we thought we should ‘complete’ it by documenting the Taiwan trip as well, even if it’s just a photostream. So here it is. 🙂]
And so we went on a Taiwan trip in June this year after more than 4 years. I believe many Singaporeans goes to Taiwan, Hong Kong and Bangkok probably once every year or maybe even more than once, so > 4 years sounds incredibly long.
But this trip was not really planned for, because I was supposed to be going to Boston for a conference, and wifey was supposed to come join me after that and we could tour around the academic city of Boston and Cambridge. But for a totally incredible reason, we ended up booking on a trip to Taiwan instead. You wouldn’t want to get me started on that incredible reason…
Eat.Eat.Walk.Walk . 吃吃走走 