So Close to Heaven

by Barbara Crossette

  With the luxury of time to spare, this trip should be made in Aum Rinzi style, with ample stops to absorb life and refresh the traveler. Otherwise, one’s eyes get riveted on the terrifying road, and precipices are all you remember, or dream about at night. In an underpopulated country, there are almost no impediments to choosing a place for lunch, a walk, a nap, or an al fresco bathroom stop. A foreign woman in Thimphu told me she took to wearing an ankle-length kira for the privacy and convenience it gave her on long trips. “You don’t have to wear anything under it,” she explained.

  The inner Himalayas, mountain ranges that run north to south, through deep, dark valleys and high passes, are forested spurs of the greater Himalayas. Their permanently frozen peaks stretch in an east-west direction along the border with Tibet. The inner Himalayas are an environmental wonderland for the traveler because the prolific vegetation, bird life, and animals vary as the twisting road rises and falls and rises again from fertile woodlands to subalpine meadows and back down into vine-tangled glens sprayed by waterfalls. More than 60 percent of Bhutan is forested, and much of it is virgin. With the help of the World Bank, the country was the first to set up a trust fund to protect its environment in perpetuity, citing its Buddhist commitment to nature and wildlife. There is no similar environment on this scale left anywhere else in the region. But this terrain has to be savored slowly, and Aum Rinzi would advise that right from the start, you rein in the driver assigned to your car, who wants to be able to boast at the other end about how fast he made the trip.

  Although the hillsides around Dochhu La, an hour or so from Thimphu, display the richness of Bhutan’s forests and, in the spring, its glorious tree-high rhododendrons, it is not until well after Wangdiphrodang that the road disappears into real uninhabited wilderness. As I approached Wangdi with Vinod, who had been a model of restraint since Dochhu La, he suddenly reverted to a display of motor showmanship, which entails driving recklessly through populated areas, scattering pedestrians and animals, and careening to within inches of market stalls. This behavior, if not caused, as in Thailand, by the consumption of tonic stimulants that blunt judgment and perception, can probably be explained as a subconscious or maybe conscious effort to demonstrate who has the power of life and death, or the great distinction of knowing how to drive—and a car to go with it. In Wangdiphrodang, it seemed particularly irrational for a young man from faraway Kalimpong, clearly not a Bhutanese by dress, language, or physical appearance, to be barreling through a busy bazaar in a military garrison town, where he stood to be mobbed if he struck a local resident. Hostility toward people from the Indian border areas runs deep among the mountain Drukpas, who see the roots of all the country’s ethnic distress planted in the lowlands, whence come also greed, corruption, violence, drugs, and disease.

  Maybe Vinod just wanted to get out of Wangdiphrodang. A lot of people feel that way, though not at the outset of a visit. The approach to the town along the road from Thimphu is lovely. A river of pale blue-green flows between sloping hillsides where villages cluster on productive farmland. On the left, a ridge rises as the road nears the dzong, giving Wangdiphrodang fortress and town an imposing elevation above the surrounding fields. After a police post at the junction of the road south to Chirang, the east-west highway crosses the Puna Tshang Chhu on a newish bridge and begins a switchback climb to the Wangdi bazaar. Wangdiphrodang had a fine, centuries-old, traditional Bhutanese bridge until the 1960s, when it washed away in a flood. Some of the iron chain from that bridge is at the National Museum in Paro. The old roofed bridge had carved slate reliefs in panels along the sides of the span, similar to the exceptional slate portraits of famous holy men, carved and delicately painted, still in place in the outer wall of the seventeenth-century temple at Simtokha Dzong, all but hidden behind a row of prayer wheels.

  Legends compete to tell the story of how Wangdiphrodang Dzong came to be where it is, although most agree the fortress was built in the 1630s under the direction of the busy Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyel. Either a local deity, Yeshi Gompo, or the fierce god Mahakala appeared to the Shabdrung and told him to construct a dzong on either the ridge with the shape of a sleeping elephant or the place where ravens fly off in four directions, depending on which story you are told. Alternatively, the Shabdrung may have named the spot for a little boy he saw playing in the river’s snow-white sand. Various accounts translate the name Wangdiphrodang in different ways, depending on the version of the town’s founding one believes, a reminder of the tenuousness of historical truth in a land of legend.

  Wangdi always seems like the perfect place to take a break and enjoy the view over the aquamarine river and spacious (for Bhutan) fields before moving on toward the dark forested roads and passes that lead into the Black Mountains. This is when the disappointment sets in. The town has but one small guesthouse, welcoming but exceptionally unappealing. If there is running water that day, it may flow out of control and you have to wade through it to the toilet. Electricity is scarce, as are candles. The staff is usually willing to rustle up coffee or tea, to be served in a dismal, windowless hall or (if that’s pitch-dark) on a claustrophobic enclosed porch abuzz with flies if it’s fly season. Dragging a chair out into the front garden to enjoy its commanding view seems to be regarded locally as an indicator of insanity, though this aberrant behavior is tolerated. A few steps from the garden gate is the town center, famous for its gas pump. The village is a ramshackle affair whose wooden lean- to shops resist all efforts to perceive them as quaint.

  Beyond Wangdi, however, the scenery is again fine. The road east, blacktopped only in the mid-1980s, spirals out of a large valley, winding around and finally above substantial two-story farmhouses standing in terraced fields. In winter, at isolated farmhouses, the gently sloping rooftops made of loose wooden shingles anchored with rocks occasionally wear a mantle of bright red, as baskets of chilis are spread out neady to dry in the sun.

  After Wangdiphrodang, there is one detour to be made before crossing the mountains that divide western Bhutan from the central and eastern parts of the country, geographically and linguistically. A few miles after the hamlet of Nobding, a side road turns off to Gantey, climbing into a forest of oak, magnolia, and giant rhododendron. In April and May, the trip to Gantey is a drive through a natural botanical garden splashed with color. In this forest, as in so many other wild places in Bhutan, nature evolves and passes through cycles of life and death in full view of passersby. Trees die, fall, and decay, to be claimed by ferns, mosses, fungi, and sometime orchids, clinging in profusion to disintegrating trunks left untouched by villagers, who are forbidden to pillage or scavenge in protected forests—and who in this area are in any case few and far between. “To cut a fresh tree we consider a sin,” an administrator told me, “because a tree also has life.” The woodland floor is deep in a damp compost of leaves and twigs, through which new trees rise, nourished, to look for light.

  The side road ends on the rim of the Phobjika Valley, a serene open space of perfect natural proportions in a perfect enclosure of hills. Here one can picture the genteel tea parties or night halts of Aum Rinzi’s youthful travels. In the spring, this high valley (over nine thousand feet in altitude) is a bowl of emerald fields; in winter, a dun-colored haven for black-necked cranes, one of the few safe places left for them in Asia. A scattering of farmhouses and flocks of prayer flags rest on the valley floor. Overseeing all this from its perch on a hill at the valley’s northern edge is the Gantey Gompa, the largest Nyingmapa monastery in Bhutan. According to Bhutanese legend, Gantey was built in the seventeenth century by a grandson of the saint Pema Lingpa. The monastery invites pilgrimage, standing as it does at the end of a narrow lane that wends through a cluster of houses and up a gentle incline to the gompa walls, where novices roughhouse in the grass and dogs snooze under trees.

  A royal government permit allowing me to enter monasteries closed to foreigners, a document that wasn’t always honored by abbots, passed muster with a senior monk at Gantey.
The abbot, he told us, was halfway through a three-year meditation at a retreat on a nearby hill. The monastery had a somnolent air. A few more novices were messing around in the first courtyard we entered. The monk said that boys came here to study at the age of ten; their childish restlessness seemed to be tolerated most places. Everywhere boys seemed to be racketing around monastic compounds, often in rubber flip-flops. They don’t always pay attention during prayers, and nothing in a temple moves faster than a novice at the end of worship or a ceremony.

  The monk in charge at Gantey, who was seized from time to time by a racking cough, didn’t want to talk very much about the origin and significance of the religious objects and symbolic decorations that filled one temple after another in the monastery, except to say that he thought some of the paintings were “about two thousand years old” and that restoring them was forbidden. He nonchalantly pointed out the urns holding the remains of reincarnates of an important early abbot. But he became animated when we came to a set of big old trunks, handworked with brass finishings. In those, he said, were Gantey’s temple festival costumes and the animal masks worn by the monks.

  He said that children were taught to pay close attention to the animal dances so that they would be prepared for the variety of beings they might meet in succeeding lives. He drew us to a painting that illustrated the many intermediary deities of varying dispositions and powers a pilgrim encounters en route to heaven. In one corner of the mural were small white figures still awaiting a decision on their fate, poor writhing souls. He looked at them with pity.

  It was spring when I first saw the Phobjika Valley—not with Vinod, but on an earlier occasion, with a cheerful Bhutanese driver who plucked rhododendron blooms and tucked them under the windshield wipers to beautify the journey. This seems to be a seasonal custom, since to the Bhutanese rhododendrons are just another wildflower, with plenty to go around. The day was balmy, so we stopped for a picnic of boiled potatoes, eggs, bread, and cheese on a grassy slope with Gantey to one side and the Phobjika Valley in front of us. No sounds of modernity penetrated this place; it was a brief taste of life in Aum Rinzi’s era. At least until Michael Bloomen’s sputtering jeep came along.

  Michael Bloomen is an artist. To be more specific, he is an art teacher in England who works hard to save for periodic trips to Bhutan, where, like his predecessors on British expeditions of old, he is systematically sketching and painting the country’s people and regions. Systematically is the hope, anyway. On this trip, the good-natured artist had seen just about everything go wrong, or at least not according to plan. A skilled trekker and climber, Bloomen had intended on this long-awaited visit to cross the roadless subalpine belt from Laya to Lunana, a grueling march at the best of times. The whole expedition collapsed when his porters and pack animals suddenly went home to do other work. That scotched not only the Lunana trek but the hope of walking down to Jakar, in Bumthang, along an old Tibetan trade route from the north. So he retraced his steps to Thimphu and set out along the Lateral Road for Bumthang to salvage what he could of his solo expedition. That’s when his four-wheel-drive vehicle developed coughs and wheezes.

  He was philosophical. “But this is what we expect,” he said that night at dinner in Tongsa. “This is why we come here!” His reworked schedule had already proved serendipitous. He had holed up in towns unknown to foreigners, and had been rescued from one by a very high-ranking army officer, who told him fascinating tales of Bhutanese high life. In Gantey he had seen bright yellow rhododendron blooms for the first time, and was enthralled. He had made some fine sketches of chortens and other small landmarks along the way. Able to see something interesting wherever he became marooned on this unplanned expedition, he was content to stay in Tongsa while a search party tried to scrounge up a more reliable car or fix the one he had been assigned.

  There were fewer than half a dozen foreigners sharing dinner in Tongsa’s small hotel that night, and we were all fascinated by Bloomen’s accounts of his earlier visits to Bhutan. The company was, as always, pleasant, because this remote and rugged country has developed a small fraternity of devoted followers drawn back again and again despite the expense and the inevitable hardships. Almost never have I heard tourists complain in Bhutan, even at the end of very difficult days. Bhutan charms and entraps its guests with simple and honest hospitality.

  Taking good care of travelers is a traditional priority, particularly if the guest is someone who commands special respect. On various trips, I stopped to admire the natural rest quarters villages had erected along the road for King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, his peripatetic uncle Prince Namgyal, or other important people. Typically, a dense fence is woven of sweet-smelling evergreen (sometimes arborvitae) supported by bamboo or wood poles to create an enclosure that becomes a private garden or a roofless room. There may be a short maze leading to a completely hidden latrine. Occasionally, there will be more than one chamber with evergreen walls, allowing a meal to be prepared and served away from the main rest area. When a ceremony or a sporting competition of some kind is due to take place in larger towns, the Bhutanese erect large white fairy-tale tents festooned with colorful drawings of dragons.

  Tongsa is a memorable town for several reasons, not the least of which is its spectacular setting. A traveler from Thimphu approaches Tongsa through the Black Mountains and over the Pele La, a 10,800-foot pass where the vegetation is mostly grass and scrub. On my recent trip, Vinod, the protocol officer, and I had stopped on the Pele La for a picnic lunch on the first day of our Thimphu-Tashigang jaunt. Above the pass stood a satellite dish, part of Bhutan’s new hi-tech communications network. Near it, local people had staked prayer flags, perhaps to catch the breeze on the open slope as much as to preserve the sanctity of the spot. I happened to be looking in that direction when a yak herder materialized without a sound from over the crest of the hill behind us. Drawing his wooden bowl from his gho, he accepted some tea, showing interest in the Yu-Druk’s sandwiches too. Soon he had joined us for a meal, chatting to the protocol officer, Ugyen Wangchuck, namesake but no relation of the first king. The herder said he had been told that one of his yaks had got into a fight with an animal from another herd and had been killed. He had climbed up the mountain to take a look at the situation, which was not yet resolved; it wasn’t clear why.

  Lunch over, he thanked us and resumed his task. We headed on to Tongsa over a notorious patch of road given to landslides and rock showers. Paving occasionally collapses into abysses formed in sharp corners where waterfalls pound the shallow road surface and torrents land on small concrete bridges from on high. Repairs are made by Bhutanese citizens giving time to the state under a volunteer work system known as wulah. Each family is now required to contribute two weeks of labor, ideally that of the strongest member of the household. Only it doesn’t turn out that way. There are certain predictable exemptions; civil servants, for example, don’t break rocks. And families have taken to sending along women, some of them barely teenagers, to spare others for tasks on the farm. Workers, children included, are bivouacked like gypsies, covered in dust or the soot of fires under melting tar, as they huddle in lean-tos on the edges of chasms. My companion-interpreter always made sure that we gave any excess food we had to these workers.

  Not long after the road from Pele La regains its composure on the descent to Tongsa, it passes the Chendebji Chorten, a landmark to travelers who know they have now entered eastern Bhutan. The eighteenth-century chorten, its bulk built in the rounded Nepali style with eyes looking in four directions from the square base of the stylized point near the top, was constructed to hold down a demon that had been bothering the people in this valley. All is peaceful here now, with the silence of the place broken only by the wind in the prayer flags and the gurgling of a stream running through a gorge. Less than twenty miles (but as much as an hour’s driving time) later, Tongsa Dzong bursts dramatically into view at a bend in the road—though it will take nearly another hour to reach its gates across the Mangde Val
ley. The dzong commands a ridge backed by higher mountains but overlooking the deep, wide valley at its feet. At the point that this classic dzong can be seen to best advantage, the roadbuilders have constructed one of the country’s few official lookout points, where it seems criminal not to stop for a photo.

  Tongsa’s origins are relatively recent, so its history is refreshingly straightforward. In 1541, Lam Ngagi Wangchuck, a Drukpa monk of Tibetan royal lineage, came down from Ralung in eastern Tibet and stopped to meditate on the ridge above where the dzong now stands. He established a small temple, around which a village sprang up. In the next century, the Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyal ordered a fortress built here. It grew and grew into a huge complex several city blocks long, strung along a spur overlooking the Mangde Chhu. Though its formal name is Chhokkor Rabtentse, everyone calls it Tongsa Dzong.

  “The dzong was once astride the main road that came up here over a bridge down by the river,” Dasho Phub Dorji, the Tongsa dzongda, said as he greeted us at a massive wooden gate to the fortress. “There was then a western gate and an eastern gate, and everyone had to pass through the dzong until about 1960. These gates were for the security of the dzong, so just before dark somebody would close, and open again in the morning. Anyone who wanted to continue on the road had to be here before sunset, from west to east or east to west.” He added that the dzong might seem very large from outside “but inside it is very narrow.”

  We walked from courtyard to courtyard and level to level of the old dzong. It was more than a workout. Bhutanese are accustomed to running up and down monastic ladder-stairs (and at high altitudes). After a while, even a foreigner catches on, though, and the climbs do not seem so vertiginous. We went from sanctuary to sanctuary in the monastic section of the fortress, away from the administrator’s offices. The dzongda pointed out the urns with the ashes of learned monks.