Our next visit was to the village of Metshina. It was our first stop after driving over Dochula Pass. Our main destination in Metshina was a temple built by the ‘Divine Madman’, the Lama Druka Kuenley. Bhutanese people believe that women who visit this temple and receive a blessing will conceive a child. For my part, I warned Vicky not to receive any blessings, and then I followed her around and stayed close to her – just to make sure. I wasn’t taking any chances.

You can see the temple in the distance in the first photo. It’s on top of the low hill in the center of the photo. The village of Metshina is a typical Bhutan village. Their villages do not have roads. The trails, like the one Vicky is standing near, are what people use to walk around their village. These are rice fields in the photo. The stacks of rice that you see are rice plants that have been harvested, but not threshed yet. They stack it for the rice to dry but to not get ruined in the case of rain. The farmers come back and thresh it when they have more time. You can see me standing next to a rice stack to give a size perspective. Those are big stacks of rice.

The next photo looks off to the right from the first two photos and you can see more of the valley, terracing, and crops. It was a productive looking farming area.

Now we have arrived on top of the hill at the temple built by the “Divine Madman”. We heard the guys below before we saw them. I don’t know if they were doing something timely and important for the temple or if they were just practicing but it sounded good. (and I like those haircuts)

In the next photo, also at the temple, some people were hanging new prayer flags. You can see Vicky giving them a hand. The flags have prayers written on them as you can see if you look closely. Then when the wind blows, the prayers get launched into the universe. They always put prayer flags in windy places, just for this purpose.

The last photo for this post is the “Divine Madman’s” temple. It was not too busy but I didn’t get many photos after this as I was staying close to Vicky to prevent her from receiving a blessing. There were young women there, however, for just that purpose.