Wangdicholing Guesthouse, where many foreign visitors to Bhutan stay, is separated from the old royal palace by a stone wall where noisy crows perch to scream at nothing in particular. Lazy dogs indifferent to the persistent cawing snooze in the sun on ledges around a caretaker’s cottage, preparing for the night’s howling sessions and dogfights. But on the bright Sunday morning that my bracelets were getting the lye treatment, about the only sound outdoors was the guttural sputtering of a hot-water heater boiling over on the back wall of my cabin, trying to keep up with Tshering Hamo.
To describe Tshering as merely the chambermaid of this establishment would be selling her short. Round-faced, beautifully rosy-cheeked, and solidly built, like most of the women of rural Bhutan, she was also the guesthouse porter, shouldering huge loads of camping gear and suitcases that would crush a pony. British political agents who first penetrated Bhutan several centuries ago, while recording in their diaries radically different judgments on the women’s comeliness or lack of it, were on the whole impressed by the physical strength of the Bhutanese of both sexes. These mountain women with their uniformly cropped thick black hair framing their weathered faces are strong, tireless, and shrewd. A British military engineer in Ladakh came to the same conclusion there, recalling in 1846 how the women carried his tent over the mountains after whimpering male coolies had complained about its weight.
Tshering could sometimes be found winging stones at stray hounds, washing dishes in the hotel kitchen, bartending, delivering room-service orders around the compound, or waiting on tables in the paneled lodge with a huge woodstove that serves as restaurant and social center. (Formal entertainment was limited, however, mostly to old Bhutan tourism videos, with jumpy pictures and scratchy sounds played on a television set whose veil-like cover was lifted only in the evening hours.) No one ever saw the guesthouse manager work as hard as Tshering, when he worked at all.
Tshering could also build a mean fire. It was firewood that first brought us into friendly small talk. She professed to be pleased that I knew good kindling when I saw it and that I was conversant about flues and drafts after years of experience with an ornery woodstove in Pennsylvania. After a while, she was bringing me choice logs dry enough to ignite, compact enough to push through the small round opening of the stove in my room, but fat enough to smolder all night—the difference at Wangdicholing between reasonable comfort and subquilt hibernation in the winter months.
The heater used here and elsewhere in Bhutan is called a bukhari, a reminder of its Central Asian origins. In essence, a bukhari is a large tin can on spindly feet with a hole in the top, over which there is a cover that fits only when the two whimsically handcrafted circumferences on the stove and its lid can be made to coincide. Sometimes they never do, and the whole contraption becomes a riot of uncontrollable drafts. At Wangdicholing, a hot bukhari on its small slab of concrete is the only source of warmth in a wood-floored, wood-paneled room devoid of fire extinguishers, unless you count the bathroom bucket. But then, much of forested Bhutan and its half-timbered architecture classify as firetraps. It is a rare monastery or dzong that has not burned to the ground at least once or twice in its history. The monks will point proudly to the distinction of having escaped the inferno when they can make that claim.
Tshering was not very impressed with my cautious paper-and-sticks method of starting a fire in the stove. She had a lot of bukharis to light at Wangdicholing, morning and evening, and she didn’t want to waste time on niceties. With compact movements of her broad, capable hands, their skin chapped crimson and cracked from work and exposure, she would stuff the little stove to its capacity with wood, then lace the pile lavishly with kerosene from a Druk Marmalade jar. To that volatile combination she quickly applied a wad of flaming toilet paper. Even before the roar had subsided, she would sweep out into the evening darkness to thaw the next freezing foreigner.
After a few years of dealing with tourists, most of them paying more than two hundred dollars a day for the privilege of staying in what was akin to an unheated motel room whose economically cut curtains didn’t always extend to the full width of the drafty windows, Tshering had begun to take the measure of the outside world from her Bumthang vantage point. Other young Bhutanese of her generation were being sent abroad for training in tourism; she learned on the job, toting trays and receiving complaints. She got accustomed to (but never could explain) the harrumphs of guests who returned to find their door keys not in the guesthouse reception office, which was usually locked anyway, but sticking smartly out of the padlocks on their room doors. Until very recently, Bhutanese never locked their houses, even in towns; why should guests? The mealtime whims of tourists didn’t make sense, either. “I bring six-o’clock breakfast; he says I want seven,” she groused one day after apologizing when I got tea instead of coffee for the third consecutive morning. “At night he says eight o’clock next day; next morning at six forty-five he says where is toast, tea. Fire is out.”
The occasion for this outburst was the impending arrival of a German tour group, whose list of demands and special orders had preceded them across the Black Mountains. Wangdicholing was being cleaned from one end to the other with Teutonic thoroughness by a staff that had worked out what each nationality expected of a hotel. Malingering guests had been evicted or forced to double up so that the staff would be spared having to tell the arriving Germans they were staying somewhere else. Somewhere else in Bumthang can be a bleak experience best symbolized by outdoor latrines and cold-water washes, if not tents hastily pitched in meadows to the astonishment of cows. This Sunday, the grounds had been scoured for minute bits of trash, and a general stoning of stray dogs had cleared the yard of animal life.
Nonetheless, by midday the situation had started to deteriorate. The guesthouse was out of bottled water, a sad-faced waiter announced, noting that “Americans drank it all.” It was just as well he didn’t catch the brief return of the most despised of all the outcast dogs—a pretty, long-haired, reddish mongrel whose appearance among the pack of regular kitchen-door beggars inexplicably provoked the staff into a special frenzy of shooing. Dogs everywhere in Bhutan recognize an insistent “Ssh! Ssh! Ssh!” not as an order to be quiet but as an invitation to get lost. This pariah dog, in the ultimate get-even gesture, sniffed its way to the benches arranged in a small square under a warm noonday sun on the lawn outside the dining room and chose a strategic spot, just easy enough to miss but certain to be stepped on, in which to deposit a generous pile of feces.
The water-guzzling Americans being evicted from rooms in the face of a German advance that Sunday were the kind of tourists Bhutanese consider most fascinating. There were twelve of them in this group, and they had come to study Bhutanese Buddhism. It was their great good fortune that Robert Thurman, the Tibetan scholar and head of Columbia University’s religion department, had joined the trip as mentor. A Buddhist, he was also on a journey of discovery, making his first trip to Bhutan after a lifetime of studying Tibet and Tantric Buddhism. A few others in the group considered themselves Buddhists but had never experienced life in a Buddhist environment as pervasive as this, particularly in rural settings where religion is marked by unexamined ritualism and unself-conscious practice.
The theological core of Buddhism was embellished here long ago with the enthusiastic worship of unorthodox spirits and legendary local saints, a bewildering prospect for the Western intellectual whose understanding of the religion is more spiritual or cerebral. Predictably, some of the Americans had brought their metaphorical hair shirts to don when bemoaning the lack of spiritualism in the materialistic West—only to run into uncomprehending young Bhutanese who had had enough of material renunciation and wanted nothing more than the chance to wallow in consumerism. As if to illustrate the point, one of them stole an American pilgrim’s Walkman.
Older Bhutanese, even when critical of the corrupting influence of foreign guests, are often the most appreciative of outsiders who come to learn and share. Aum Rinzi to
ld me that she is cheered by even the half-understood or intrinsically therapeutic Buddhism of mainstream America and Europe. “I don’t think our religion will ever fade; that is impossible,” she said. “It can only grow and prosper, because nowadays you’ll find followers in Western countries. I am very interested to see that wherever in the Buddhist world there is a sermon being preached by a famous lama, Westerners go there and listen. Some have taken religious robes. They know that only ignorant people—fools—will ignore our beliefs.”
From Tshering Hamo’s point of view, the Americans at Wangdicholing that weekend were distinguished in more practical ways. At dawn, the California writer Sam Keen, one of the leaders of the group, would go out and select and chop his own firewood. He had some tips for the hotel on how to better utilize the woodstoves. In fact, he recommended that they should be replaced with more efficient and environmentally sound American models. Tshering had not known that some Americans heated their homes this way. Sam—author of the best-seller Fire in the Belly and a recognized founder of a post-feminist male self-esteem movement, who had been described all around town as rich and famous—seemed an unlikely candidate for a bukhari. He soon told us that he heated a thirty-two-foot West Coast living room with wood. In talking about this, Tshering and I didn’t get into the question of the size or price of Sam’s bukhari—or of the necessity of chimneys in places like northern California. Most rural Bhutanese houses don’t have them. The smoke just collects in rooms, stinging eyes and polluting lungs, until it can find its way out a window or through the roof of an upper story, blackening the whitewashed outside wall as it goes.
Coincidentally, that same week Bumthang (in its role-model role) had been playing host to a group of women from around the country who were being taught to build and operate smokeless cooking stoves. Camped out in a fallow field a mile or so from town, the women, from unmarried teenagers to middle-aged householders, were digging clay from the earth, packing and pounding it into molds made of boards, and scooping out tunnels for air to circulate and exit cleanly through an exhaust system made of tin sheeting.
Wood burns slowly in these clay stoves, saving fuel while radiating heat from earthen constructions that can be built (or replaced) at a very low cost almost anywhere in the country. The women, a couple dozen of them who were expected to pass on their knowledge of this economical and health-enhancing technology to their neighbors after returning home, lived together as students in dormitory-style tents, attended study sessions in another tent heated by a homemade barrel stove filled with smoldering sawdust, bathed in a pool warmed by hot stones, and ate in the sun near a mess tent where tea always bubbled and rice steamed.
Chatting with visitors as they worked beside rows of finished stoves that would be broken up and recycled into the earth when the course ended, the women said they had not met resistance from husbands or fathers when they were chosen for training that would take them far from home for several weeks. But the presence of so many attractive women camped out in a meadow in his bailiwick gave the dzongda of Bumthang, Pem Dorji, some cause for concern. So he let it be known around town that the campsite was off limits to curious and predatory local men. Bhutanese are not puritanical about sexual relations, and physical relationships are easily formed and broken, with or without marriage. The dzongda had devised a policy that balanced his responsibilities with the realities of youth.
“I put up a notice that says, ‘No Men,”’ he said. “And I came down here and told the girls if you see any man apart from the instructor on the site, you can catch him, beat him up, tie him down, and bring him to me for punishment. I’ll put him in jail.
“But on the other hand,” he added, “if you go to the Sunday market and see a boy you like, and your minds click and your bodies click and you become pregnant—well, that’s your problem.”
That crisp and sunny Sunday in Bumthang had begun with meditation for the Americans. Gathered in the Wangdicholing Guesthouse’s largest suite, its curtains drawn and a warming fire in a rather more substantial bukhari (the fire courtesy of Sam), the Americans, with eyes closed and legs akimbo, were at work trying to see inside their souls from outside themselves. Members of the heterogeneous group—a psychologist, writers, a retired businessman, and at least one Wall Street financier among them—had more or less auditioned by essay for an expensive trip that promised to immerse and instruct them while trundling them across more than three hundred miles of Bhutanese wilderness. Like many Americans encountered in the Himalayas and India, at least a few of these travelers seemed to be looking for themselves as much as for that elusive, superior Eastern sense of priorities we seem to think leads to contentment and fulfillment. Indeed, part of the tour was devoted to seminar sessions in which they were asked to tell their life stories with brutal honesty and candor—“their hungry hells as well as better times,” explained Brent Olson of Inner Asia Expeditions of San Francisco, who organized the esoteric trip and came along to direct the logistics. Brent, who had been making several visits a year to Bhutan for nearly a decade, was obviously the arbiter and soother of ruffled feelings among his high-sensitivity charges. But then, almost anyone could have trouble coping all at once with high-altitude mountain terrain, intense introspection, and mind-draining meditation, punctuated by cold nights and hot chilis.
Some of the Americans had brought a supply of dried soup in packets to guard against intestinal tragedies while traversing the unknown culinary landscape. The instant-food packet is now widely recognized in Asia as the universal hallmark mostly of Japanese tourists, who are capable of traversing whole countries without having to order anything more in local restaurants than giant thermoses of boiling water. Newly affluent and often devout Japanese are coming to Bhutan, as they are now visiting Nepal, Burma, Sri Lanka, and India, on pilgrimages to Buddhism’s holiest and earliest landmarks. An unknown number of them apparently move around these less developed nations (relatively luxurious Sri Lanka excepted) sleeping on nothing other than their own peripatetic sheets and quilts, which they hang out to air in the morning sun. In Burma several years ago, a group of nervous Japanese sat down to dinner at a table near mine in the Strand Hotel’s pre-renovation dining room and ordered only bowls and cups with their hot water. They produced from their airline carry-on bags many envelopes of dried noodles, broths, crackers, seasonings, cookies, and tea bags. But then, unlike the smug among us, they probably didn’t have to spend a night on some cold bathroom floor after eating sliced mangoes apparently laced with invisible tap water.
The Americans in Bumthang that Sunday had sped away from Thimphu a few days earlier in their tourist vans to follow the roller-coaster Lateral Road, the country’s only east-west highway, across Bhutan to Tashigang for an important monastery festival. Bumthang was as far as they got. Carsickness had felled nearly half their number; others seemed to be in justifiable shock from the toilets at Gantey, the first overnight stop. The majority, not wanting to spend all their time on this serpentine road, had no trouble deciding to vote for mercy and succumb to the embrace of this valley of pastures, gentle slopes, evergreen forests, and a rushing stream. Temples, monasteries, and natural sites of intense holiness promised real-time seminars. Cloaked in the approval of Her Majesty the Queen Mother, who supported Sam Keen’s plan to film the trip (and Bhutan) for American television, they could enter forbidden recesses of Bhutanese worship. There was no better place to crash than Bumthang.
Bumthang can comfortably draw outsiders in small numbers into its remarkable daily life—market town, destination of pilgrims, center of agricultural experimentation—without making a single major concession to foreign guests that would alter the quality of the place. The word is getting around, however, that Bumthang offers almost everything a visitor comes to Bhutan to experience and enjoy, including gentle terrain for treks that are more like walks through a medieval landscape of hamlets and monasteries. Just arriving in Bumthang is a pleasure.
When the road from Tongsa descends from the Yutong
La and drifts into the Chumey Valley—one of four usually wide (for Bhutan) open spaces that together form the district of Bumthang—the soft beauty of the landscape is enhanced by the traveler’s relief that tortuous roads and dark mountain gorges have been left behind and that the way ahead is enveloped in broad, sunny fields of buckwheat and potatoes. Twig fences that line the road sprout shoots; wildflowers of gold and white color fallow land where animals graze on thick green grass. Small farming settlements of only six or seven houses shelter sturdy temples and monasteries. Zugney village, a town of weavers, claims a seventh-century Tibetan temple. At Domkhar, an old palace is being transformed into a Buddhist center. This is all only a preview of what is to come in the heart of Bumthang, just beyond another (but not too difficult) mountain pass, the 9,515-foot Kiki La. There lies the Chokhor Valley and Jakar, the district’s largest commercial center and base for exploring the region. The last two Bumthang valleys, Tang and Ura, both wilder and steeper, home more to yaks than cows, are farther to the east.
Jakar itself is doomed. The town—one street and a roundish empty space that everyone treats as a traffic circle, steering carefully around its circumference—is no more than a collection of a few dozen wooden shacks and more substantial two-story buildings that house general-merchandise shops, a branch bank, a struggling handicrafts store, and numerous teashops or “hotels,” which are really restaurants of sorts serving the cross-country travelers for whom Bumthang is an important stop. Off to one side, a jump across a narrow brook, is a Sunday marketplace, where traders lay out for sale dried fish from Assam, tropical produce from southern Bhutan, parkas from China, and Indian-made running shoes. The flaw is that all the activity in Jakar is concentrated between two bridges—one over a tributary brook, the other spanning the river—that define a flood plain along the tumbling, swift stream of the Bumthang Chhu. Dasho Pem Dorji, the dzongda of Bumthang, plans to tear it all down and rebuild on higher ground.
So Close to Heaven Page 31