Friday 13th June

Well it certainly started out as Friday the 13th!! Yesterday my phone gave up the ghost - not surprising given what I had put it through!! So I set off to wait outside the monastery for Wangchuk the taxi I had arranged to collect me at 6am so that I could be at the tourist bus station at 7 am. By 10 past he had still not arrived so I managed to ask a guy who was watching the kids from the orphanage (opposite the monastery) play soccer, to phone my taxi guy- engaged!! So I decided I'd better start walking to find another taxi. I found one who was drinking tea so no he wasn't up for business!!! I started running only to be joined by an old guy who thought this was very funny - a western woman with a back pack running grim faced down the road. He skipped and danced along side me while I muttered that this was very serious and that I really could not miss my bus and where the hell were the taxis and where the hell was the bus station!! So thankfully he peeled off after a while and I continued to hot foot it down the road while waving my hand for a car to stop! The first car to come along did stop and a guy (yay he could speak English, asked of he could help. I explained that the taxi had not arrived and that I had no phone and where I had to go. He said no problem, get in, he will take me but he would have to go home first to fetch his driving license!! He was taking his daughter to school. So very thankfully, in I jumped. It turned out his daughter had missed her school bus!! So we dropped her first and he took me all the way and refused to accept any payment! He was an engineer who had trained in India. He had set up an NGO and would love to hear more about the Sustainability  Institute! 

So it was with enormous relief that've spotted the other volunteers and sank into my seat on the pretty upmarket bus (compared to the city busses) which was to be our home for the next seven hours.