Falling Off the Map (12 page)

Bhutan has long been celebrated as perhaps the ultimate Lonely Place in the world, a snow-capped Buddhist kingdom tucked away in the depths of the High Himalayas. For years at a time, nothing is heard of the secret land of archers. At the time I visited, Bhutan had no TV, no daily newspapers, no air links with the outside world save Dhaka and Calcutta; its Olympic athletes had never seen boats before they left the country, or high-rise buildings, or even crowds. And such was the isolation of the land that it seemed to belong to fairy tale. “Ghosts, witches and crawling spirits are so familiar that often valleys and
settlements are named after them,” noted a standard political survey of the country; early British explorers came back with tales of bloodthirsty arrow duels in which the spectators would tear out the liver of the loser, eat it with butter and sugar, mix the fat and blood with turpentine in order to produce candles, and turn the bones into pipes on which they could play strange melodies. Even relatively prosaic books like
Two and Two Halves to Bhutan
, a relentlessly matter-of-fact account of a British doctor taking his family (and a teddy bear called Aloysius) through the unpaved wilds of Bhutan during the 1960s, contained sentences like the following: “The head lama of the dzong, the omze, is assisted by a Lopon Kudung in charge of discipline; the champen instructs gaylongs in dances, music, reading and writing.”

What facts did occasionally emerge from the sequestered kingdom, moreover, served only to confirm its air of other-worldliness. Bhutan had not been part of the Universal Postal Union until 1969, yet since then it had invented steel stamps, three-dimensional stamps, talking stamps (in the shape of records), and stamps made of silk. A woman I had never met, in Denmark, wrote to inform me that a man named Rob Roy had recently put on a production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
in the remote Bhutanese settlement of Tashigang. A U.N. official in North Korea filled my ear with tales of the intoxicating substances grown by foreign advisers based in Thimphu. And at the Olympic Games in Seoul, mysterious snippets about Bhutan kept catching my eye: first, the secretary of the Bhutanese Olympic Committee acknowledged that “Many athletes thought we were in Central America or Africa,” and then—not coincidentally, perhaps—an item in
The Olympic Villager
told how a Bhutanese guest of the Bhutan-Korea Friendship Society had gone into a local hairdresser requesting a “light wave on the side” and come away with an Afro. One month later, on the
“Descending Day of Lord Buddha from Heaven,” just two weeks before the king’s thirty-third birthday, on the day of the “Meeting of Nine Evils,” word trickled out that His Majesty Jigme Singye Wangchuk, the “Precious Ruler of the Dragon People” and long the most eligible bachelor in Asia, had made formal his marriage to four local sisters (in part, perhaps, because they had already borne him eight children).

The most singular fact of all, though, was that Bhutan had never opened its doors to the world. Cut off entirely from planet Earth until a generation ago, Bhutan had always been an area so remote that it hardly seemed to appear on any maps. Taken over—and united—by a fleeing Tibetan lama in 1616, it had never enjoyed any contact with reality until, in the early nineteenth century, the British government in India had begun annexing it. After the Bhutanese retaliated, rejecting ultimatum after ultimatum, they were finally given some tribute in return for the territory and, in 1907, with the blessing of the British, they found themselves with a hereditary monarchy, ruled by King Ugyen Wangchuk (great-grandfather of the present king).

But having seen change come so violently to Tibet (when the Chinese invaded in 1950), and so suddenly to Sikkim (with the incorporation of the tiny kingdom into India in 1975), and so surreptitiously to Nepal (with the gradual influx of global villagers), the Hidden Kingdom had decided, in recent times, to barricade its doors ever faster. In all its history, Bhutan had never seen more tourists in a year than Disneyland sees in a single hour; its first and only foreign minister once told me that too many visitors were “not very high-class people.” Just before I arrived, moreover, it had raised the price of entry for tourists to $250 a day and, in addition, forbidden all tourists from visiting the only tourist attractions in Bhutan—its monasteries. I, however, was in a special position. Because Bhutan depends so much on India for its independence, Indian passport holders
are allowed to come and go in Bhutan as they please, to stay as long as they wish, to make themselves at home inside the world’s remotest kingdom. It sounded to me like an irresistible opportunity: to live for a while, as a native, inside the “world’s last Shangri-la.”

So it was that one winter day I went along to the Calcutta office of Druk Air, to ask about buses to Bhutan. Locating at last the dusty staircase in an apartment building where the office is situated (squashed between the Royal Customs Office of Bhutan and the Consulate General of Bhutan), I waited for an hour outside an emphatically locked door. Then, suddenly, a large man with a heavy mountain air above his Lakers T-shirt appeared before me. Hurry, hurry, he said, the plane was leaving in two hours—maybe less. But I wanted to go by bus! Yes, yes, he said, but this was a special plane—the first jet ever to land in his country! The British Aerospace 146 had enjoyed its maiden flight just three days earlier, and upon landing in Bhutan had received a formal blessing and
shugdel
ceremony from the entire monk body (I later saw pictures of the occasion—a group of bewildered-looking Englishmen in ties, surrounded by chanting monks, all seated cross-legged on a runway in the middle of nowhere). Today was going to feature its first commercial flight! A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a historic occasion! If I didn’t move quickly, I would have to go the usual way—on an aging, sixteen-seat propeller plane.

And so it was that one hour later, I found myself standing in Dum Dum Airport, in front of the booth that Druk Air shares with JAT (the Yugoslav airline), now entirely empty. And standing. And standing. Then I noticed a tiny line of Bhutanese passengers checking in at the Thai Air counter, down the hall. It seemed a simple enough procedure: hand the attendant your case, watch him smash himself in the leg, wait for his curses to subside, then proceed to the departure lounge. A few hours
later, I joined twelve disoriented passengers scattered amidst the eighty seats of a spotless new $30 million jet, the fiery red-and-gold dragon of Bhutan leaping across its tail. “I’m in civil aviation,” a Canadian next to me explained. “We’re trying to make it safer to land in Bhutan.” I see. “Yes,” offered a Bhutanese man nearby. “They’re only charging fifty percent for this flight. That’s because there’s only a fifty percent chance of surviving.” Oh, really? “You see, the minimum for a safe landing is around four thousand feet,” the civil aviation expert continued. And how long was the runway at Paro? “Around forty-two hundred feet.” Oh, excellent.

Ahead of us all, as the plane took off, were the highest mountains in the world, mysterious and snow-capped in the blue, blue sky. Below us, a few huge monasteries—massive, whitewashed, multistory fortresses—were tucked into the folds of lonely valleys. No roads were inscribed across the hills, no settlements or people: just huge white blocks in a sealed-off world, and shafts of sun like giant searchlights.

Slowly, almost shyly, the plane began to descend over mountains with monasteries perched improbably on their tops. Then, very slowly, it veered in upon a tiny opening in the mountains and touched down. Around us all, in the empty valley, was nothing but silence. A few villagers gathered wordlessly beside the two-room airport: pink-cheeked peasant women, runny-nosed toddlers with woolen caps pulled down over their eyes, sturdy men in multicolored dressing gowns. A girl called Karma, or Universal Law—the sister, it mysteriously appeared, of the Lakers-loving official in Calcutta—quietly checked us into the “Lotus Garden of the Gods.” And then we were outside, in a Druk Air minibus (its only decoration, a sticker for Thai Air), and alone in a soundless world.

An hour or so later, the bus started up, and we set out on the winding two-hour trip into town, hugging the edges of the
narrow mountain road. Occasionally, we passed buildings—giant, terraced Tudor-seeming fortresses, their shingled roofs held down with stones, their white plaster walls dotted with rows of perfect bay windows—twenty or thirty openings in all—and their frames painted with flowers or the tails of snarling dragons. Then night began to fall, and lights came on in the forbidding buildings, shining like candles in the dark.

Finally, we came round a corner, and there, before us, at our feet, was a fairyland of lights. We descended into the valley and drove past rows of many-windowed towers, as if into the heart of some enormous Christmas cake. Then the van stopped, a door opened, and I was released into the chilling night. The streets were cold and empty, save for a few hooded figures shuffling past. On every side stood heavy mountain fastnesses. A few faint lights shone in small arched windows. I was alone in a city of candles.

The only particular sights for a visitor to see in Bhutan are its dzongs, the huge whitewashed seventeenth-century fortresses cum monasteries cum administrative centers—constructed without nails or plans by the country’s first Tibetan rulers—which tower above every settlement in the country and are themselves overbrooded by watchtowers. My second morning in Thimphu, therefore, I set off to visit Simtokha Dzong, which guards the hillside five kilometers out of town. Five kilometers—a little more than three miles—is, however, a long distance in Bhutan: three hours by foot, I was told, and roughly half an hour by car. (Yuri Gagarin had circumnavigated the globe before Bhutan had installed its first road.)

After wandering around in circles for a while, I came at last upon an ancient Indian Mahindra jeep, held together with bits of soggy tissue. The driver patted the dust off his front seat and, with a flourish, presented me with the place of honor beside
him (a rather mixed blessing, I felt, since the person in the front seat had to enjoy the gearshift thrust between his legs). A woman—a rather thick peasant woman—bundled into the front seat beside me, one snot-nosed issue perched on her lap, another suckling furiously at her breast. Seven or eight other unfortunates piled into the gloom behind us. The woman held her nostrils and violently expelled the contents of her nose. A man behind me—rather inauspiciously, I thought—began muttering a series of prayers. The others tuned up with a preparatory series of coughs, groans, and sneezes. And so we rattled off toward the breakneck curves.

Above the mirror in the jeep were some Technicolor stickers of four-armed Hindu gods; along the dashboard were two soulful portraits of German shepherds and a sticker that said “1987 Visit Thailand Year.” We drove past trucks that said “Ruff and Tuff,” trucks with illuminated Buddhas on their foreheads, trucks with slanting Nepali eyes painted eerily above their headlights. Whenever the trucks passed by, so too, very often, did songs, as the passengers seated on sacks in the back sweetened their tortuous journey with song.

At one point, our driver braked suddenly and began fumbling desperately through a clangorous collection of antique wrenches and pliers kept below his seat. Then he got up, ambled over to a hut, and brought back some water. Opening the hood, he pressed the accelerator down with his hand, threw some water into his mouth, some more onto the engine, and some more in the direction of the thick woman’s children. At this, the large family—to my relief—disembarked. Then we started up again, jolting past neat official signs, flowering gold lettering on crimson boards: National Mushroom Development Programme, National Stove Project Training Site, Office of the Gyalpoizimpa. We drove past women breaking rocks by the side of the road,
past shepherds beating along their flocks of yaks, past colored banners that proclaimed:
THERE IS NO CURE FOR
AIDS
BUT IT IS PREVENTABLE
(to a people who, in six cases out of seven, could not read a word of anything, let alone English). Mostly, we went around curves. Sometimes, when we did, I was thrown on top of the driver, rendering him almost incapable of steering; sometimes I was pushed into the woman—or, after she left, towards the door. This was unfortunate, because the jeep had no door. It was also unsettling because there is an average of fifteen curves per kilometer in Bhutan (and foreigners in Bhutan measure direction in this way. “I covered 4,500 curves going across country,” an intrepid sixty-year-old Englishwoman later told me, only to be put in her place by an international adviser who said, “That’s nothing! I covered 5,500 on the round trip from Thimphu to Phuntsholing”). I began to miss my human cushion, the snorting madonna and child.

A little later, the driver jerked to a halt, and one of the passengers emerged from the back, eager to conquer the precipitous curves. Muttering an impromptu prayer above the steering wheel, he turned the key, pressed the clutch, and then, eyes wild, mouth bloodied by betel nut, lurched towards the chasm. Gears jammed, the jeep swerved madly between mountain face and precipice, and I recalled that the
Bhutan Motor Vehicles Act Parts I and Il
was one volume that had never—I had checked—been taken out of the Thimphu Public Library. With a terrible convulsion, the jeep screeched to a halt, and the acolyte driver, muttering some term of hatred for the jeep in particular and the automotive industry in general, returned to the darkness in back. A man handed out some
paan
to calm all our nerves, and then we were off again, wheezing past prayer wheels painted with skulls, hills still radiant with gold and copper and green, wisp-bearded old men who seemed to be
walking across the whole country.
THANKS
, said signs as we left little settlements, and
SEE YOU AGAIN
warned the mudguards on jeeps.

And so it was almost every time I moved in Bhutan, where trips are decidedly more a matter of traveling than arriving. If I was lucky, public transportation meant my own size-nine feet, laboring up mountains while shiny acronymed Land Cruisers whooshed past (though sometimes, even in the tourist center of Paro, on the only main road in the country, in the middle of a weekday afternoon, I walked for more than an hour without seeing a single vehicle). If I was unlucky, it meant a jeep, and the stench of gasoline, the suffocating dust, the endless stops and starts, the shriek of horns round every curve, the ritual emptying of noses on the floor. If I was doomed, it meant a local bus—known to foreigners as the “Vomit Express” (though “Express,” of course, was something of an embellishment).