Monday 23 November 2015

The rally is over!

The Last couple of days we have been camping which has been interesting. The penultimate road we were about 170km from the border and only had enough beds for about half the rally. Paddy and I volunteered to camp and were allocated a tent.

We had had another brilliant, challenging and exciting drive covering more massive hills with indescribable falls along the roads. We shared the driving and dropped into a smaller nomad festival when we arrived. It was even more interesting and as the sun fell produced some fantastic photographs.

We returned to the campsite and when we were shown the shower room we suddenly found ourselves being offered a very comfortable room for the night. So, much to the disgust of Xavier and Ines who were in a tent, we snuggled down in great comfort! Result!

After an excellent nights sleep we headed down the final 170km to camp near the border. It was another fantastic drive and a really well prepared camp site by kind permission of the local llama.

We even managed to have a shower which was a big plus. The llama had laid on some dancing for us which as usual Paddy and I were more than happy to throw ourselves into when the time came. It was a great evening and ended with a few rounds of Perudo. I am getting increasingly concerned about my Perudo expertise, a source of some pride for many years. Perhaps it is time to accept that this pride was somewhat misplaced!

Yesterday morning we left at about 8am to drive some 20km to the border and cross into India. What an extraordinary change it is to go from Bhutan to India. Everything is suddenly so frantic, noisy and dirty. The process was really simple and took no time and then we were off to Guwarhti. The road was fine but you are back to managing enormous volumes of traffic and if you don't push you don't get anywhere.

We got to within 8km of the hotel and ground to a stop, traffic not car I'm relieved to report. We had to cross a big bridge and about 6 lanes close down to 1 which caused chaos. Two cars boiled, Dougie's XK150 and Gerry's Model A, but everyone got there in the end.

What a fantastic rally on brilliant roads in a beautiful country with the most fantastic people. I simply cannot fault Liz and her teams preparation and every detail of running the rally. I knew that it was going to be great but Bhutan simply exceeded all my expectation. As Craig would say "fabuuuuulooooos"

No comments:

Post a Comment