Something like 80% of Bhutan’s export revenue comes from power. The huge amounts of water coming off the mountains is easily converted to power with a little diversion and a drop of almost a kilometre before rejoining the main river. But today a Canadian joined us at rock climbing and he’s working on a problem I didn’t imagine could exist here. It seems that in winter it’s so dry that Bhutan has to buy power back from India. His job is to work out how they can manage the load so this doesn’t happen.
At this point he couldn’t say how this will be done, which lowered my level of confidence in him, but I guess it’s the same as my meeting with UNDP the other day when I didn’t want to give away too many ideas on how to get people to use their new team spaces. With those tools in hand, they may have said they could implement them themselves, without checking which meet their needs most appropriately and blamed me for the mess.
Another interesting fact I learnt last night, at dinner with friends, is that recipes have to be adapted for use at altitude. The higher you go, the more water and less sugar you need. Since Marie and I never use recipes, this never occured to us.
The temperature at which water boils changes at higher altitudes, too. American recipes often include boiling time differences for Colorado residents.