Tour of Bhutan 2024 | Day 15 | Mongar – Lhuntse – Mongar | 185.1 kms

My alarm goes off at 8 am and by 8:45 am, I am down at the lobby for breakfast. Phub is already waiting
for me at the lobby. We are served fried rice with chili paste and also coffee with butter toast. The taste is good. After breakfast, we ready the bikes and leave by 9:15 am. Phub was staying at her sister’s
place yesterday. Today, she has packed lunch for us which we collect from her husband’s office few mtrs ahead. Lunch is placed in my bike’s top box. From there, we head towards Lhuntse which is around 75kms. We initially go down the mountain taking a series of bends, leaving Mongar town behind and doon take narrow village roads hug to the mountain.

The valley is to our left with Khar Chu river flowing below. We put on Google Maps as Phub is also visiting for the first time. The roads are smooth tarmac at some sections while they are completely broken at others. Some stretches, there are no roads as we need to ride over loose sand and boulders. The views are awesome. Greenery all around. We can see farms with mango trees, banana trees and large farms of oranges. I can see some locals selling bag of oranges by the roadside. In some farms, I can see oranges being harvested and loaded onto pickup. The atmosphere is little damp and due to that many roads are wet. I can smell the different aromas of the jungle trees and it’s a great feeling as we push ahead. Most sections of the roads are winding with only some stretches we get straight ones where we increase our speed. We are riding at 34-40 kmph. Some sections of the roads are cut through towering cliffs with loose rocks hanging over your heads. We notice many bee hives being built by the bees on these cliff faces. I stop at one of them to photograph. They are really huge.

We also encounter many metal bridges when we cross one mountain from the another. at one such bridge where we cross over to the other mountains with river now flowing to our right, we stop to take photo on the bridge before pushing forward. The last 20 km to Lhuntse are series of bends with gradual increase in the altitude. We arrive in Lhuntse town around 1:30 pm. It is the most smallest district in Bhutan with not much shops and residential complexes. The Lhuntse Dzong is perched on top of a hill commanding a 360 degree look over the city. I take a photo. There is some festival today and many people have thronged the Dzong. The parking is far away as one needs to walk till the Dzong. We decided to not go inside because of the distant parking as as well as Phub’s attire. From there, we decide to visit Guru Rinpoche’s statue in Takila town on the other mountain behind Lhuntse. We back track till the very same bridge where we took photo. There’s another road from there which goes straight uphill. This is the road that leads to Takila town.

We drive for another 12 kms to reach the parking lot where the Guru Rinpoche’s status is seated. It stands at 175 feet, the tallest of any statue in Bhutan. The infrastructure is similar to the Sitting Buddha complex in Thimphu. We go inside, and enter the temple directly where a monk helps us in knowing the story of the place and how the statue came into being. We offer our prayers, take blessings from the monk and exit outside.

We take lunch in the open courtyard outside the complex perimeter walls. The taste is delicious, some left over is fed to the dog. We have rice, pork with radish and chili with cheese. We go again inside to snap some photos, observe the bee hives which are clung to the temple complex, collect some of them which are fallen down and brace ourselves for the return journey back to Mongar.

We get some traffic on return and are on high alert at bling corners. Halfway, the weather urns cloudy and we even loose the sun behind the mountains. The cols sets in for the last 20 km push to the hotel. WE touchdown hotel at 5:26 pm. Phub foes to his sister’s house while I relax in my room. Later in the evening, I take a stroll around the town to free up my legs and the come back to the hotel for a cup of coffee. In the lobby, I continue writing my diary till the time dinner is ready. I have dinner around 8:40 pm following which I retire to my room for a comfortable sleep.