Mushroom Hunting With Pongpa Dorji

Mushroom Hunting With Pongpa Dorji

Pongpa, also known as Kazang Dorji is a friend of mine who apparently lives at Buddha Dordenma ( Buddha Point). We went to meet him the day before, it was me and group of friends who were just bored. When calling Pongpa he agreed to come all the way down to till Druk School to get us, if you are familiar with the roads of Buddha Dordenma, then you will know that is about 5km from Druk School till Buddha Point. He is friend who doesn´t seem to want his friends to suffer alone, a lovely friend who takes a cab to come down and is willing to talk with a lovely walk up the roads to Buddha point.

So we were walking up and talking about some silly thoughts that came in our heads as we took each steps. When a first drop of rain rain hit my forehead and after that followed a sudden flushing rain from the skies. We ran to get shelter but as we ran I saw something on my friends face that I would remember forever, a smile. A smile on each of their faces laughing and joking about how cruel and yet amazing life can be. Dechen told us that we soaking in rain but imagine the fields of the farmers getting water, imagine the fishes getting time to live for the fisherman can´t take the storm and decided to go home. We all agreed to that and also made some jokes about Dechen´s new philosophy, until the rain was too much that we stopped a cab and took a ride up to Pongpa´s house.

We were all soaked, we dried ourselves with a towel and it suddenly occurred to me. I suggested that we go for mushroom hunt, like in the olden days where after the rain people usually go to look for mushrooms in the forest. Near Buddha point was a national park where most people go for picnic and to hang out. It has a rich biodiversity where sometimes Bangal tigers even roam as it makes the journey up the hills. We joked around saying if the tiger attacks the first person, he would go for a dandy meal would be Pongpa due to his chubby figure.

As Pongpa laughed together with us, we drank our last sip of tea and surprisingly even the Gods seem to favour us. The rain had stopped, we took some plastic bags and we were off into the wild. We had to be careful of the types of mushrooms, sadly we had no experts with us but we did had Pongpa who knows a thing or two about mushrooms. So he was our hero for the day, mushrooms were very hard to come by, we kept our eyes on a look out. We only spotted some and most of them didn´t look edible.

“ Ahhh we can´t seem to find many mushrooms today, Well we would have some mushrooms in these bags if Pongpa didn´t eat them every time we found one.” Said one of my friends and we all burst into laughter.

After walking for 30 minutes and searching every corner, we only managed to collect few and most didn´t look edible. Mushroom hunting is actually very fun even if we don´t get mushrooms, is a memory to cherish under the blue skies. Also one must be careful not picking but eating mushrooms without caution.

When I reached home my sister told me only four of the mushrooms are edible and they belonged in the family of Cantharellus Cibariuscan family of mushrooms. So my readers be careful while eating mushrooms.

Mushrooms

Edible ones lol

Amazing sky