Hi Sangay!
Thanks for your e-mail. The trip to Bhutan was very nice. You have a beautiful country and it was very nice to know its culture and its people a little bit better. We already filled in the feedback questionnaire that the local agency gave us at the end of the trip. You can refer to it directly, but as a summary there are 3 main points where you could improve in general:
- We visited a very nice market (I believe in Thimphu) and we could see the variety of vegetables and especially fruits that you have in Bhutan. However, during our lunch and dinners in Bhutan, we did not have that variety on our menu. Actually, we decided to buy some mangos and lychees on our own for our desserts.
- We went to visit the Tiger's Nest and it was a beautiful experience. The place is wonderful, but on the way up, we noticed a lot of garbage on the track and on the side. Being a UNESCO place it is a pity that it is not better taken care of, even though there were a lot of trash bins along the way!. There is some education to be done on waste management and the guides could be a very good source for that education. Many of the trash bins were already full. A good idea would be to ask some of the people going down the place to take a garbage bag with them. This is done in other mountains/places and the people normally cooperate with it. It is not a lot of weight to take down a small bag of garbage....
- Finally, some of the roads in Bhutan are terrible, very bumpy and with a lot of traffic. We did not know it in advance and we realized it when going from Punakha to Gangtey. After few hours of bumps and heavy traffic we decided to go back to Thimphu, since the places to visit in Gangtey were not that special. We also decided not to take the trip to the Haa valley, after knowing that the road was similar to the Punakha-Gangtey road and it was 3 hours one-way trip. We feel that we should have known about this when planning the trip so that we could have made a better decision. Actually, we feel that we had 2 more days in Bhutan than needed.
Thanks again for your help on the trip and we look forward to working with you on a future trip to Bhutan.