I had to get the Bhutanese version of a pink slip done today. In Australia, the load for such work is spread out through the year as everyone registers at different times, but in Bhutan, everyone has to do it in the same month. That means a rush and long queues. I found that by going immediately after lunch, I managed to cut the time spent in those queues dramatically.
First stop was at the taxi stand, across the bridge from town, for an emissions test. In a country that has a national policy of Gross National Happiness, one pillar of which focuses on environment, this makes sense. But when you count the total number of cars in the city is under ten thousand, it seems like overkill.
Second stop was the fitness test, where we got to project our emissions into the air in the long, slow (but moving too fast to turn the engines off) queue to the test area. The test itself was a simple check that lights were functioning correctly. I coped with the first request to switch my lights on, but got confuse after that. At the request for ‘parking lights’, I switched my lights down to the first notch, but this wasn’t what they wanted. After repeated requests to put on the ‘parking lights’ and repeated assurances that I was, someone reached in my window and switched on the hazard lights. Semantics can play such a big part in communication. The last light check should have been easier to work out, but calls for ‘back’ or some such actually meant they wanted to check the reverse lights.
It was a relatively painless affair, but I still need to renew the insurance and registration.