My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere

by Orlean, Susan

  I was thinking about this one afternoon, while I dangled from a sort of traction device at the deep end of the thermal pool. I had huge lead weights around my ankles that made my legs hang heavily, pulling my torso down while I was suspended from a contraption with bars and hooks that was wedged under my arms. This is called “subaquale traction” and is recommended for, among other things, “congenital or acquired disturbances of motion.” I felt really tall while I was hanging there, but once the trainer fished me out and unbuckled the weights, I shrank back to my normal height. Then I went and got massaged by a Hungarian valley girl, who was snapping her gum and listening to a radio station playing Tom Jones singing “Delilah” while she worked on me. At the same time, she was carrying on a conversation with another masseuse, who was on the other side of a muslin curtain and slapping around another pasty tourist. I rather liked the no-nonsense style of the massage: nothing mystical, nothing spiritual, no need to gaze up at the masseuse when she finished and mutter something about how in touch I felt with my energy, which is what I usually feel obligated to do whenever I get a massage from a post-hippie body works expert here in the United States.

  So, does the water work? The Romans were the first to come to Héviz and float around in the pond, and then the Hungarians, and then, apparently, the Germans and Austrians and Swiss. My mother, after a few soaks, still looked like my mother, but I confess I felt younger every day I stayed around the lake. If you walk at even a decent clip, you fly by everyone who is shuffling toward Lake Héviz. When I went running, I felt Olympian. One afternoon, I ran through town, past those cocoa-colored alpine cottages and the tour buses from Munich, and a little girl scampered after me and then smacked me on the butt. I guess if I looked spankable to a four-year-old, something must have happened. It was our last day in Héviz. I cut my run short, went back to the hotel, ate more chocolate pancakes, and jumped into the pool.

  Shooting Party

  When I went to Scotland for a friend’s wedding last summer, I didn’t plan on firing a gun. Getting into a fistfight, maybe; hurling insults about badly dressed bridesmaids, of course; but I didn’t expect to shoot or get shot at. The wedding was taking place in a medieval castle in a speck of a village called Biggar. There was not a lot to do in Biggar, but the caretaker of the castle had skeet-shooting gear, and the male guests announced that before the rehearsal dinner they were going to give it a go. The women were advised to knit or shop or something. I don’t know if any of us women actually wanted to join them, but we didn’t want to be left out, so we insisted on coming along.

  We were not outfitted like an Edwardian shooting party. One woman was in a denim minidress with red, white, and blue platform shoes. Another was wearing pedal pushers and wobbly pumps. I was in something lightweight and was tripping around in rubber flip-flops. The caretaker must have been horrified by the sight of us. He had small dark eyes and a tragic manner and was wearing a proper field jacket with suede patches in the right places. He handled his gun with a wary tenderness, as if it were a baby alligator; it was about the size of one, with a double barrel and a thick wooden stock. None of us had ever done this before. We were gunless, gun-fearing city people, writers and filmmakers and art historians—sissies, in fact, who cringed when the caretaker raised the shotgun, wordlessly indicating that it was time to begin. He muttered a few instructions, then held out the gun, waiting. No one stepped up. After a moment, we turned on the bridegroom and shoved him forward.

  It was just one of those things—dumb luck, probably—but the bridegroom had perfect aim, and he exploded the clay pigeon into a million pieces. The caretaker nodded and released another pigeon, and again the groom hit the target. It was inspiring. We all crowded up to take our turns. The guest in platform shoes went next and missed by a mile. An usher in Ray-Bans winged a few. One bridesmaid had perfect form but a hot finger on the trigger. Finally, it was my turn. I hadn’t expected to like the feel of the gun, but I did: It was warm and smooth and knee-bucklingly heavy, with two triggers that were set so far apart that they might have been fitted for a giant’s hand span. The caretaker sized me up and then spoke quietly. “You want to hold it as tight against your shoulder as you can,” he said. “It has a very powerful recoil.”

  I squeezed the gun against my body.

  “Tighter,” he said.

  “That’s as tight as I can get it.”

  “A little tighter.”

  I have never been kicked by a mule, so I can only imagine that it would feel a little like the gun slamming into me after I fired. My teeth rattled, and my head rang like a school bell. I was hysterically excited, as breathless and thrilled as if I’d just robbed a bank. Having missed, I begged for another shot. The caretaker released another pigeon, and I followed it, my arm aching from the weight of the gun and the shock of the recoil. I missed again, but I was close. The second recoil was just as bad as the first. I shot again and again and again, sending not a single clay pigeon to its reward but each time getting closer. Me! Firing a double-barreled shotgun! And I couldn’t stop! The caretaker was egging me on, murmuring that if I had a gun that fit me properly, I’d be hitting everything.

  I didn’t stop until the groom pointed out that we were being charged about a pound sterling per shot and that at the rate I was going he wouldn’t be able to afford a honeymoon. Shooting enchanted me; this is my sport, I thought. I wondered where in Manhattan I could go to fire a gun. The next morning—the day of the wedding—I woke up nearly unable to lift my arm. The bruise extended from my armpit to my elbow, and it was black and green and a deep imperial purple. I was wearing a sleeveless dress, as all the women in the wedding were, and they were all bruised to varying colors, depending on how enthusiastic they’d been about the sport. We considered covering our injuries with undereye concealer, but there was not enough to go around. Fortunately, single-malt Scotch was available in huge quantities, and by the end of the night we were showing off our bruises like tattoos.

  Fertile Ground

  The penises in Bhutan amazed me, there were so many of them. I didn’t see them right away when I arrived in the kingdom of Bhutan’s one airport, a narrow drive shaved into the Paro Valley’s shaggy green grass. I might not have noticed them anyway, because I was so woozy from the flight—the scariest one in regularly scheduled commercial aviation, mastered by fewer than a dozen pilots in the world, which requires a right-hand turn at Mount Everest and then a sort of swooning, tree-trimming slide through the high Himalayas to the airstrip. I was so preoccupied with making landfall that I didn’t take note of anything about the airport, really, not even the paintings of curly-tailed dragons and birds, whose beaks are curved like meat hooks, and blue poppies and auspicious Buddhist symbols—conch shells and endless knots and golden fish.

  It wasn’t until my second day, when I was some distance from the airport, that I first saw the penises. I was driving through a ten-thousand-foot mountain pass called Dochu La when I came to a big farmhouse, broad hipped and white walled, with a traditional Tibetan-style beamed roof and a huge wooden doorway twice as tall as anyone who might ever walk through it. In the rocky front yard, a thousand or so chili peppers were spread out to dry in the sun. On either side of the door, someone had painted a huge phallus—peachy pink, with a matte finish, poised in a salutatory arc with little wisps of whatever curling from the bottom and the top. I happened to be in Bhutan with a group of American women who were hoping to get pregnant by being blessed at Bhutanese fertility ceremonies, so the penises were a big hit—a particularly auspicious symbol for those who were looking for that particular kind of good fortune. The owner of the house stepped out as we were taking photographs. He was a wiry and windburned little man, wearing blue knickers, a woven jacket, a red skullcap, and rubber boots. At first, he seemed puzzled by our attention, but after studying us for a moment, he nodded knowingly, then arranged himself by the doorway and puffed up with pride for our cameras. Whether it was pride in his house or his red hot chilies or his fertil
e mural, we would never know.

  From then on, the penises were everywhere: sketched on houses in Wangduephodrang and in Punakha, on walls in Trongsa, and on a storefront in Jakar, where they were painted above muslin sacks printed with the Bhutanese population control slogan: SMALL FAMILY HAPPY FAMILY. At the monastery at Chime Lhakhang, which is the most auspicious of auspicious places to be blessed for fertility in Bhutan, the monk performing the ceremony had two penises on the altar. One was of hand-carved ivory, and the other was a piece of wood that was anatomically credible and is said to have grown into its shape naturally in a forest in Tibet, where it was found in the fifteenth century by Drukpa Kunley, the most popular saint in Bhutan.

  Eventually, we began seeing penises that weren’t really there at all or were only vaguely suggested—the result, I’m sure, of that first, startling, two-pronged annunciation at Dochu La and also of the self-referential nature of the human mind. Any woman trying to get pregnant will swear that everyone she passes on the street is pregnant, just as anyone driving a new red Ford will swear that everyone in the world is driving a red Ford these days. At an immigration checkpoint on the way to Trongsa, we clambered out of the bus and took a turn around the village. In front of a café, there was a concrete piling or stone column, or something like that—an erect object about knee-high and rock hard, which might have insinuated a little of the silhouette, proportion, and character of the male organ. In any case, it was enough insinuation to make it, for this group, exciting. Within a minute, the Americans had gathered around the stone, examined it, discussed it, and shot off a few rolls of film. After the photo session, we killed time by visiting a shop in the village. The proprietor was a stout woman, and she had a half-dozen children of different sizes on her and around her and beside her. A couple of feckless-looking men loitered at the back of the store. We ordered tea and surveyed the place while she heated water on an electric burner. The children were unusually beautiful—dark haired and dark eyed, with skin like polished oak. We admired them and made gestures and signs to the woman: Were these her children? Yes, she indicated, all of them were hers. So the stone phallus works? one of our group asked, pointing outside. You have lots of children if you pray to the stone? The woman giggled and shook her head, and soon the men at the back of the store were giggling, too, and then the children started in, and the woman laughed even harder, and the men poked one another in the ribs and howled. It was a riot. When the woman finally caught her breath, she peered over the counter and waved her hands: That stone? No, that has nothing to do with having children. That’s where we clean the mud off our shoes.

  THERE WAS A BABY at the center of this particular trip—a ten-month-old seventeen-pounder from California, with ash blond hair and blue green eyes, named Rachelle (for her maternal great-grandmother, Ruchel, and her paternal great-grandmother, Ruggia) Tashi (at the bidding of the Bhutanese monk who had conjured her) McKellop (her father’s last name). For the few weeks we were in Bhutan, she was the most famous baby there. This was because she was the first American baby—actually, the first western hemisphere baby—to be born after her mother was blessed, in 1996, at the temple at Chime Lhakhang and the following year at a festival in Jakar. The efficacy of Chime Lhakhang and Jakar for getting people pregnant is old news in Bhutan—nice old news, of course, but not remarkable beyond the usual gladness that attaches to good but unastonishing news, like finding out that you’ve been approved for a mortgage. It would be bigger news outside Bhutan, because most people have never even heard of the place, and because many people are curious about anything that helps someone get pregnant, and especially because most people don’t associate Himalayan Buddhism—austere, solemn, anticorporeal Himalayan Buddhism—with issues like fecundity and sex.

  In Bhutan, the real news was that a Westerner had been blessed. Bhutan wasn’t formally opened to tourists until 1974. Even then, the opening was more theoretical than actual. The airport wasn’t built until 1983, and the sole Bhutanese airline services only Bangkok and Kathmandu and Delhi, but only on a rotating schedule, and only when the weather in the Paro Valley is flawless, and only during daylight, and only when one of the scary-landing-qualified pilots is scheduled for the trip. You can’t just pop over to Bhutan when the spirit moves you. The Bhutanese airline has no competition, and flights are expensive. Tourists have to travel with a licensed guide, and they also have to pay a daily fee, which is now two hundred and forty dollars per person. The fee covers hotel and food costs but is intentionally steep, to discourage the sorts of aimless backpackers who tramp through India and Nepal on a nickel and with an open-ended itinerary.

  Even though it sits in the gorgeous saddle of the Himalayas and has a charmed and intriguing culture, Bhutan has had few foreign visitors. In 1997, twenty-three years after opening to tourists, Bhutan had a total of only 5,363 tourists. That same year, Nepal had 421,857 visitors. Tourism was viewed by most Bhutanese as an interesting, mildly significant development, but possibly a troublesome one. There was a certain dread of Westerners in hot pants and bush shirts traipsing through the ancient monasteries and a question of whether they would contribute to the king’s stated goal of increasing Gross National Happiness rather than Gross National Product.

  CHIME LHAKHANG is situated on a round hill above patches of rice fields and a thread of a river, about fifty miles from Thimphu, the capital of Bhutan. The temple was built in 1499, after Drukpa Kunley blessed the site. It is fitting that a site hallowed by Drukpa Kunley should be associated with fertility, because he was a hypersexed kook and a libertine. He was born in Tibet in 1455 and was given a traditional ecclesiastical education, but he veered away from it because he considered the Buddhist orthodoxy too stiff. He is said to have drunk a lot, is rumored to have had sex with his mother, to have spoken lines like “My meditation practice is girls and wine / I do whatever I feel like, strolling around in the Void,” to have once tied a special “blessing string” around his penis, and to have refused to travel anywhere without his little dog, Shachi. He was an obscene and shocking show-off, but only, it is said, in order to bring attention to himself and, consequently, to Buddhist teachings. People in Bhutan really like him. They refer to him fondly as the Divine Madman. His favorite sport, archery, has been adopted as the Bhutanese national game and is the kingdom’s only entry in the Olympics.

  All over Bhutan, there are images of Drukpa Kunley—a chesty man in a predatory crouch with a bad-landlord mustache and wild black eyes, a kind of meat-eating leer on his face, and a little white dog by his side. His disembodied penis—usually a muted pink and energetically arched—is honored in paintings and sculptures and front-yard murals all over the country. Bhutan is a chaste society in which bare legs and shoulders are never seen, eyes are cast down in modesty, affection is never displayed in public, and propriety and simplicity and dignified shyness are cherished. To find the country adorned in such a way was as astounding as it might be if the Amish decided to decorate their barns with enormous breasts.

  Chime Lhakhang is popular because of its connection to Drukpa Kunley and also because it is a beautiful old temple with a broad view of the valley and the spiky mountains beyond. It is one of the few temples in Bhutan whose grounds tourists are allowed to visit, although only people wearing traditional Bhutanese clothing are allowed to approach the altar inside. A few years ago, a Japanese woman stopped at Chime Lhakhang and asked a monk to give her the fertility blessing. The request was unusual, but somehow she prevailed—the first time, as far as anyone could remember, that a non-Bhutanese had been blessed. The woman became pregnant soon afterward. She was sure that it had been due to the Divine Madman, so in appreciation she visits Chime Lhakhang regularly and donates a hundred thousand butter lamps to the fertility festival in Jakar each year. Everyone in the kingdom knew about the Divine Madman’s Japanese baby. Actually, in a country with a population of only six hundred thousand, everyone always seems to know everything about everything, and in this case everyone talked about the baby
because of its novelty and because of the lifting of the long-standing embargo on foreigners in the sacred rooms of the temple.

  THE FIRST WESTERNERS to visit Bhutan were two Portuguese Jesuits, who came in 1627, though not, undoubtedly, on a fertility mission. Quite possibly they were on a Christian mission, and they almost certainly left disappointed, since Bhutan is fully subscribed to Tantric Mahayana Buddhism, in particular the Drukpa sect of the Kagyupa school. Mahayana Buddhism preaches enlightenment for the welfare of all beings over the search for individual enlightenment; Kagyupa, one of its four major schools, emphasizes intense meditation and the relationship between teacher and disciple. The Drukpa sect is a Bhutanese variety of Kagyupa, which reveres certain favorite local saints like Drukpa Kunley. Bhutan is, in fact, the only sovereign Buddhist kingdom in the world now that the neighboring Buddhist states of Ladakh, Sikkim, and Tibet have been absorbed into India or China. Buddhism was introduced to Bhutan in the seventh century and then revitalized in the eighth century by Guru Rinpoche, the Tantric Buddhist saint whose teachings also galvanized Tibet. Since then, Buddhism has been as elemental as air in Bhutanese life. All ceremonies and most holidays are religious. All art is anonymous and sacred and follows the exacting rules of Buddhist iconography. The legal system is based on seventeenth-century Buddhist moral doctrine. Until 1907, when the absolute monarchy was established, a theocracy ruled the country.