Bhutan and Highway

As you drive from Bumthang to Thimphu or vice versa, you will pass through beautiful RED Rhododendron flowers in full bloom and often making you to gasp for more oxygen as you tend to forget even to breath after looking at the beauty of the nature. The scientific name may be Rhododendron arboreum (I will have to check). But, at times even the beauty of nature seems to be surpassed by human carelessness of littering the beautiful landscape and famous BUMPY highways of Bhutan, not forgetting the slipperiness of road formed due to accumulation of mud on asphalted road from widening activities.

Highways: I can understand the bumpiness in places where road widening is occurring or where road sunk due to some geological and topographical characters. What irks me is the bumpy ride one experience in newly asphalted road. I can’t understand why the road engineers along with road contractors are not chipping in extra effort to level the road for the comfort of everyone. I wish that, road gets lavelled face after the completion of road widening activities.

Typical view of Bhutan's road

One problem that bothers me as an environmental conscious citizen is, stone and sand quarry situated right next to the highways. I find it very difficult to understand, how people get environmental clearance to extract sand and stone from places very near to the highways. The overarching problem of such quarries are road disruption, chances of shooting stones hitting the passerby, making the highways unstable and making it prone to mass wasting during monsoon season, etc, etc, all leading towards increased chance of accidents and loss of life. I feel that quarries should be at-least a kilometer away from the nearest highways. Adopting such strategy would prevent the ugly look on our landscape formed due to massive un-organized extraction of resources.

It is at-times disheartening that either our “count-less” number of environmental and conservation policies does not mention such strategy or may be the problem lies with implementers. As one of my friends notes that, “penalties generally are based on ‘face by face’ and not on ‘case by case’ basis”. I think my friend’s phrase has very big meaning.

My only prayer is, please improve our highways not only on the wide-ness but also on smoothness. Provide our motorist an enjoyable ride and not bumpy head spinning ride in Bhutan’s never ending beautiful snake wining roads.

(Keep the Rhodo flowers on their branches, rather than the bonnets of vehicles and using it as a means to warn the passersby of the narrow road. The moment you pluck the flowers for your vehicles be mindful that you are depriving birds and insects from food. Offer all the flowers in its entirety in the nature itself rather than inserting on monuments: Sherub, UWICE)