Here I Yam: In the Land of the Thunder Dragon

And now, a break from our regularly scheduled programming: a brief report on my sojourn in Bhutan.

Why did I travel to Bhutan? Well, it was Christmas, and I wanted to get away from my village, from Nepal. But not too far. I wanted to stick to the Himalayan kingdoms. So, making a financially imprudent decision based on obviously infallible logic (When am I going to be in this part of the world again?), I arranged to spend seven days in Bhutan on a cultural tour.

I won't bore you too much with the travel logistics from my site to Kathmandu; it's a tale you've heard many times before on this blog (think clown car, vomit, and moments of terror). The trip really began with the hour-long flight from Nepal to Bhutan. The plane climbed and climbed above the fog enveloping Kathmandu until, all at once, it burst into a clear blue sky, the Ganges Plain on our right and the Himalayas on our left.

I was sitting next to a former Drukair pilot who had flown this route many times before. Our acquaintance began in the airport when he asked me to watch his bag while he stepped away for a minute. When he returned, he struck up a conversation: we went through the preliminaries--where are you from, what brought you to Nepal, what brings you to Bhutan? I learned that his daughter lives in Hicksville, only 30 minutes from my hometown and the place where one set of my great-grandparents met. Small world.

When we boarded the plane and found it half-empty, he moved a few rows forward to sit next to me and continue the conversation. For the flight's duration, I received the VIP experience. He knew the lead stewardess (and her husband, the pilot), who brought us special coffee from first class. He took me to the rear window to have a better view of Mt. Everest, explaining that 150 mph east-west winds over the Himalayas this time of year cause the snow to evaporate, exposing bare rock (a process I now know is called sublimation). As we threaded through the hills during our descent, he pointed upward so that I could see we were flying below a monastery.

Here's Bhutan. Lili says the landscape
looks like Idaho.

I was greeted at the airport by Norbu, my guide, and Prakash, my driver. Prakash hailed from southern Bhutan and is a member of the Lhotshampa, people of Nepali background who settled in Bhutan as laborers starting in the early 20th century. Norbu and Prakash spoke in Nepali to each other, and since I was off the clock, so to speak, I downplayed how much I could understand (and at times I asked myself, am I understanding anything? It was a different accent than I'm accustomed to). So much for escaping Nepal on this trip.

Something to know about Bhutan: tourism is highly regulated in a system that prioritizes sustainability. Tourists (excluding those from India) are required to pay a $100/night Sustainable Development Fee, which supports the country's free education and healthcare for its citizens. It is also required to travel with a guide to any monasteries or dzongs (more on these later), as well as anywhere outside the cities of Thimphu and Paro. There are hundreds of tour operators in Bhutan, most offering very similar itineraries. I chose the most reputable at the cheapest price point.

The tour brought me to a few different areas of western Bhutan: Thimphu, Paro, Punakha, and Gangtey/Phobjikha Valley. Dare I say something completely ridiculous (I'm a bit in awe of how privileged I've become to make this comparison): Thimphu reminded me of Swiss towns; the dzongs of fortresses along the Rhine, especially near Koblenz; and the Phobjikha Valley, of Bavaria. Bayerische Rundfunke, a German public-service broadcaster, made a documentary about the valley and its winter resident black-necked cranes, so there's an affinity there. I'm not the first to notice these similarities, but how much of a jetsetter have I become that those connections even occur to me?

Lauren, Elle, Helena: tell me this doesn't look like Koblenz!

I saw too much to cover in one blog post; instead, I'll focus on a few highlights. The Punakha Dzong was one, due to its sheer size and fantastically scenic location. I keep mentioning dzongs without any explanation, so let me provide one: dzongs are the political and religious centers of each of Bhutan's districts. Originally built as fortresses starting in the 15th century to protect against Tibetan invasions, each dzong has its own quirks, but there are basic unifying elements that are found in all:

Location: A commanding position that follows the contours of the landscape, often only accessible via river crossing or steep mountain roads.
Layout: A series of 2 or more courtyards paved with flagstones, divided between government and monastic offices.
Architectural motifs: a three-story central tower, called utse; imposing whitewashed stone walls; and covered walkways.
Religious Spaces (open to the Bhutanese public and sometimes to tourists): A temple containing the "three guys" (I'll come back to this), offerings, and murals depicting the Wheel of Life, the Four Harmonious Animals, the Six Symbols of Longevity, the Four Heavenly Kings, and the Life of Buddha.
Code of conduct: All Bhutanese people must wear their national dress (gho for men and kira for women) within the compound. Together with monks in their red robes, this really contributed to the dzong feeling as if it were from an earlier era. I felt disrespectful and certainly out of place in my cargo pants and fleece jacket.
A tendency to burn: Seemingly all dzongs I visited had burned down at some point, with priceless relics lost in the blaze, and were rebuilt piecemeal over the years like the Ship of Theseus. Wooden structures and thousands of butter lamps do not mix.

Punakha Dzong

Utse, central tower

Kira and gho in the Royal Textile Museum

Coming back to Bhutan and religion: although there are pockets of Christians and Hindus in the south (particularly among the Lhotshampa), the state religion is Vajrayana Buddhism. I don't know how to put this delicately, but this school of Buddhism is a little too out there for me, with its focus on deities, spirits, and demons (holdovers from the pre-Buddhist Bon religion), as well as its worship of spiritual teachers who are themselves reincarnations of revered masters from earlier ages. From my totally Western and highly judgemental perspective, it strays too far from the teachings of the Buddha.

Despite being a lifelong atheist, I was raised on Long Island and therefore have a certain affinity for Catholicism. Yet my exposure to Vajrayana Buddhism in Nepal and Bhutan has made me sympathetic to Protestants who scream at Catholics, "Where is that in the Bible?" In a way, even with my distaste for this school of Buddhism, it still has worked on me by increasing my compassion for others. Huh, look at that.

The "three guys" I mentioned earlier, who appear in most every Bhutanese temple, are Ngawang Namgyal, the unifier of Bhutan in the 17th century and the reincarnation of many Tibetan religious figures, Guru Rinpoche (a.k.a. Padmasambhava), the master who brought Vajrayana Buddhism to Bhutan and hid secret messages across the country to be revealed by treasure hunters at a later date, and, everybody's favorite, the Buddha. I heard the Buddha's life story so many times on this trip that if someday in the future I cannot recite it back to you, just know I have been replaced by an imposter or suffered a traumatic brain injury.

All three are semi-legendary figures whose lives blend fact and fiction. Reading about their feats, you realize just how lame America's founding fathers and folk heroes seem by comparison. Where would America be if George Washington claimed to be the actual reincarnation of Cincinnatus, instead of just letting others draw the comparison? I was awed by the story I read in Bhutan's Postal Museum about Garp Lungi Khorlo, a man who rode on the wind to transport messages across Bhutan in one day and defeated a demoness along the way. What did Johnny Appleseed ever do? Certainly, he didn't transform himself into a bird to spread seeds or defeat fire blight with his sword of wisdom. I guess America has Joseph Smith for a treasure hunter but...I won't comment on how that turned out.

Big Buddha

Milarepa and me in a meditation cave.
That's sort of a tongue twister.

Another highlight (this isn't the right word, unique experience is more apt) was a visit to the Fertility Temple, Chimi Lhakhang, in Punakha, which is probably the second most discussed attraction in the country after the Tiger's Nest Monastery (seriously, google Bhutan and every other image is that monastery). As my guide politely put it, phalluses were everywhere. Phallus worship is a holdover from the Bon religion I mentioned earlier. I wondered how much of it was played up for the delight of tourists, but even so, basing tourism around the phallus still reveals a certain "earthy" aspect to the local culture, as Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck wrote.*

Inside the temple, I was blessed by a young monk who held a small wooden phallus and bow and arrow to my forehead. There was a scrapbook containing photos of all the babies born after their parents visited the temple and their mothers carried a 30lb phallus around the temple courtyard three times. I gave that thing a wide berth.

The bow and arrow supposedly belonged to Drukpa Kunley, a mad monk from the 16th century who exposed hypocrisy in the monastic community through satire, sex, bawdy songs and poems, and outrageous acts. He is said to have created Bhutan's national animal, the takin, by combining the bones of a goat and a cow after a feast. Tell me you aren't moved by his teachings:

"Vaginal fluid may not vaporize under the sun's heat.

But it cannot be used to brew tea to quench thirst.

The penis may have a strong shaft and a large head.

But it cannot be used to hammer stakes into the ground.

The sacred teachings of Vajrayana [Buddhism] may be profound.

But sans practice, liberation remains far and elusive."

Follow the phallus to the restroom, please

Chimi Lhakhang

The takin. A big, majestic chiller.

I was surprised by how different Bhutan and Nepal feel. I wish I were more intelligent and better articulate because all I can really say is that the vibes were just different. Nepal and Bhutan are similar in many ways (in short, the same topography, geopolitics, and history of monarchial rule), but the outcomes are so different. Undoubtedly, the standard of living in Bhutan is leagues and leagues ahead of Nepal. Granted, I stuck to the tourist circuit in Bhutan, but I've been to touristy places in Nepal too, so I can at least make a one-to-one comparison there.

Of course, I can't help but look for explanations, despite my lack of qualifications, and the most obvious one is religion: Hinduism vs. Buddhism. But this is cheap reasoning and a trope I despise in travel writing. It's one of my biggest criticisms of Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard: he writes of the courage and hospitality of Buddhist people in the Himalayan mountains, but his tone shifts as he descends into the mid-hills, where the desperate, scamming Hindus live and give him the stink eye (hey, I'm summarizing him here. These aren't my thoughts). I object to this blanket characterization. But I have to admit (and I discussed this with fellow volunteer Shay) that there is a sort of fatalism in my mid-hill community: things are the way they are and they can't be changed. And now I am going to stop while I am way out of my depth.

And that's my trip to Bhutan. I've since returned to my site in Nepal and am enjoying the colder weather. Stay tuned for my next post, and enjoy the photo dump below.

*This post is informed by my own experience and supplemented by two great books I picked up in Bhutan: Treasures of the Thunder Dragon by Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck and Drukpa Kunley: Sacred Tales of a Mad Monk by Needrup Zangpo.