‘The government said that, you know, we cannot stop the development of the country for 20 birds. But we found 80 of them.’
He gives a smile of satisfaction.
‘And today there are 270.’
He is certain that his close relationship with the King helped. King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, educated in Britain, succeeded to the throne after the death of his father in 1972. He was 27. Before that, I get the impression that he and Benji had some pretty good times together, a sort of Falstaff-Prince Hal relationship. As Benji puts it to me.
‘I was his court jester. I used to make him laugh.’
‘So saving the cranes was a payback for the times you’ve cheered him up?’
Benji nods. ‘I believe that. I believe that very strongly.’
We aren’t far from the village when we have our first sight of them. In the brilliant morning sun, some 30 or 40 birds are pecking around for grain and insects in a recently ploughed field. They stand about three feet tall (1m) and look to me like a cross between a goose and a heron, with slender, pale grey bodies, black tails and, of course, black necks. The only splash of colour is a tiny red cap. They aren’t arrestingly beautiful by any means, and I suppose I’m a little disappointed that rare doesn’t necessarily mean resplendent. Indeed, Benji, in his red and green check kho with black, knee-length stockings and pristine white trainers, is a lot more exotic than the birds we’ve come so far to see. But their rarity has won them respect and the black-necked crane is thought to have great religious significance, proven by the fact that when they first arrive in the valley they always circle the monastery on the hill three times.
Benji takes me up a lane past timbered houses, fenced green paddocks and piles of fresh-cut wood, which looks like Switzerland in old photographs. He points out darting finches and snow pigeons with fawn backs and black and white tails, which, he says, are usually to be found much higher up.
At the end of the lane, beside a tumbling stream, is a modern, well-equipped, decagonal building, which houses the Black-Necked Crane Information Centre. Here I learn a little more about these celebrated creatures. Like the shelducks of the Brahmaputra, they mate for life (which adds to religious status, I’m told). They can live for 30 or 40 years.
Two or three mounted telescopes are trained on the swampy valley floor below us. A river dawdles through it, full of brown trout that are never fished, it being against the Buddhist religion to take life. A number of black-necked cranes are already gathered, and more fly in, until there must be 150 birds down there. J-P and Nigel become very excited and discreetly move the camera into a closer position. It’s very hard to catch the birds in flight and it’s not until Peter walks right round the far side of them (ruining a pair of trousers in the process) that they take, languidly, elegantly and prematurely, to the air.
‘I didn’t see you do that,’ says Benji in his capacity as founder of the Black-Necked Crane Preservation Programme.
In the afternoon we ride a pair of small and very truculent horses up the hill to get a wider view of the valley. Last night’s snow lies crisp and even up here, and we unpack our lunch and make a fire.
Benji, once again, didn’t see us do this. So strict are the environmental laws in Bhutan’s national parks that timber and branches must be left where they fall, and cannot be moved by anyone without special permission. As 28 per cent of Bhutan is designated national park, there’s a lot of firewood going begging.
Benji points above us, to the hanging lichens that cover the trees like dust sheets in a shuttered-up house.
‘This is an indicator of good-quality air, you know. Shows the air is very good up here.’
We return the horses to the park-keeper and walk back through the village. The houses are good-looking, rectangular in plan and usually of two storeys, the lower one for livestock, the upper for the family, with an open loggia below the roof, not for cocktails or deck chairs at sunset, but for drying crops and storing wood and cattle fodder.
As in Tibet, decoration of the houses is of great importance. In Bhutan an added refinement are the finely drawn paintings on the white, half-timbered walls, some of which are not for the prudish.
I counted about half a dozen painted penises in Gantey village, erect and beribboned, and often emitting a thin trail of cosmic sperm. They seem to be as unremarkable here as a box hedge in Dorking. Francoise Pommaret’s Odyssey Guide to Bhutan explains that they were inspired by the teachings of one of the country’s most popular religious figures, Drupka Kunley, who lived around the turn of the 16th century and was known as the ‘divine madman’. He was from a distinguished family and, though he refused to take holy orders, he wandered the country with his own brand of Buddhism, which put the sexual act at the centre of religious experience, and from what we know, he practised what he preached. The fact that his phallocentric ideas are still celebrated says a lot for Bhutan’s relaxed attitudes to sex. If you painted a penis on your house in Dorking, you’d probably be arrested.
Benji’s enthusiasm for the rural way of life - and over 80 per cent of Bhutanese still work on the land - seems to be greater than his powers of mobility, but he insists in clambering up steps cut out of a tree trunk to show me the interior of one of the village houses.
A bright girl called Dawa Zangma, which means ‘moon’, lives here and helps the family income by weaving. She can make a kira, with all its complicated colours and patterns, in eight days.
Dawa Zangma is 13, apple cheeked with straight, thick, dark hair. She’s about to leave the home and the loom to go to boarding school.
She lays aside her work and helps her mother prepare butter tea, which we drink sitting cross-legged on a small carpet, which is rolled out specially for us. There are, as far as I can see, no chairs in the house, which she shares with her mother, father and two sisters. Benji confirms that in a traditional Bhutanese house where there is little money around life is lived on the floor (which is why they move with much more agility than myself). There is no cutlery and no glass in the windows, which are covered at night by sliding bamboo shutters. Everyone eats or sleeps in the one big room, dominated by the stove at its centre.
The attractive appearance of the houses belies the condition of the villagers. We are still in the Bhutanese winter and those inhabitants who can afford it will have packed up everything and moved to lower slopes with their livestock. Those who stay on may be employed in the reconstruction work at the monastery, but that’s about it. A woman, well wrapped up, sits behind the counter of the single local store. On display is a pretty meagre selection of chillies (the sine qua non of Bhutanese cuisine), cabbage, cauliflower, beans, potatoes and dried fish from Bangladesh. Though they seem to enjoy eating meat and fish, the Buddhist prohibition on taking life means that it all has to be killed by designated butchers within the country or brought in from outside.
As night falls and the warm sun is replaced by steadily falling snow, we sit around the stove, eating red rice and yak stew and a fierce plateful of what must be one of the oddest national dishes in the world, hemadatsi, chillies in a cheese sauce.
Bhutan, which has only had a king since 1907, must now rank as one of the most successful monarchies in the world. The current ruler is a widely respected, modest man who prefers to live, not in his palace, but in a log cabin in the grounds.
He tours the country regularly, consulting local people and hosting big meals at which he himself serves the food.
‘He’s not a king who goes on European holidays,’ says Benji.
He is, nevertheless, an absolute ruler. Though he himself is working on a constitution that will limit his power, King Jigme is, to all intents and purposes, free to do as he likes. Benji sees no problem with this.
‘It’s very important to have an absolute monarch, a guy who cares for the country, who knows where he’s taking us. Left to ourselves …we’d be squabbling.’
His policies are all geared to the preservation of Bhutan’s cultural identity, and this has
led to allegations that outsiders, particularly Nepalese immigrants in the south of the country, are not allowed the same rights as the Bhutanese. Benji sees this as justifiable.
‘Small countries like Bhutan, surrounded by larger countries with fast-growing populations looking for land…have to be on the lookout. We don’t want the Sikkim syndrome, where Sikkim was just overpopulated by Nepalese. The original people of Sikkim became a minority in their country…they got voted out of power, and then they all voted to become a state of India.’
Bhutan’s survival after the war was a triumph of diplomacy and timing. Independence from India was agreed in 1950, just before the Chinese invasion of Tibet. If it had been after the invasion, Benji thinks India might well have wanted to keep control of Bhutan. As it is, the two countries have maintained good relations. Bhutan’s biggest export is hydroelectric power, all of which goes to India, and recently the Bhutanese army flushed out insurgents who were using the country as a base for operations into north India.
Benji positively glows with pride.
‘Led by our King…we took these terrorists on and in one swift fall knocked them all out in two days. It’s amazing how we did it.’
The question is how much longer Bhutan will be able to walk this tightrope between the feudal system (officially abolished in 1953) and a forward-looking future. The King knows what he wants. In May 2004, he announced, ‘Bhutan and its people are ready to have a democratic political system.’
Day One Hundred and Five : Gantey to Thimpu
The Gantey valley has turned grey overnight. A fresh coating of snow has picked out the field boundaries and transformed the gently sloping, treeless slopes from straw brown to light silver, making this beautiful corner of Bhutan look like the Yorkshire Dales.
From my window I can see a woman from the house behind, in a blouse and long pink skirt, stepping gingerly across the ice to the public water pipe. She brushes a white cap of snow off the top of the tap and starts to wash. The flying droplets of water, back-lit by the morning sun, splash round her face like particles of gold.
Before we leave, we pay a visit to the monastery, or gompa, at the far end of the ridge above the valley.
Benji explains that Bhutan may be a Buddhist kingdom, but the sects here are different from those in Tibet. The Galupka school, the Yellow Hats, dominate in Tibet and the Drukpa Kagyu school, the Red Hats, in Bhutan. The Je Khenpo, head of the Drukpa school, is the religious authority here. The Dalai Lama has no jurisdiction in Bhutan and has never visited the country.
The monastery has been undergoing renovation for two years and outside the main door a temporary roof has been erected to shelter a timber yard and workshop. Four craftsmen are at work carving a complex decorative motif on a 50-foot-long, blue-pine beam. One man is using a dagger to carve out a dorje, a diamond thunderbolt motif that is a recurrent theme in Bhutan. It’s all done by hand, and each has a line of wood-handled tools and a portable radio laid out beside him.
An ancient gateway leads to a big courtyard, in the middle of which, in the Bhutanese style, is the impressive main temple, with the monks’ accommodation surrounding it, in single-storey cells with painted lintels, door frames and eaves. It’s a building site and looks as though it will be for some time to come.
Over the barking of a pack of dogs I can hear prayers are being chanted from somewhere. The restoration work is largely being done by gomchens, lay monks who don’t have to be celibate or live in the monastery. The monks who remain here support themselves by offering their services out for family occasions, providing blessings for births, marriages, deaths, new houses and performing any ceremonies these innately religious people require.
On our way out a dishevelled, tousle-headed young man who can barely walk, approaches us and shows us a deep and nasty gash low on his right leg. Pete, who is a saint in these matters, washes the wound and advises him to go to hospital before it turns gangrenous, but the man says it’s been like that for four years. He then starts to sing a love song to me. Benji shakes his head disapprovingly. He says the man’s obviously mad. I try not to take this personally.
We head back towards Thimpu, but conditions on the road are much worse than when we came in. Stopping to take a shot of a herd of yaks against the snow, we find ourselves victims of an admirable piece of retail opportunism. A small, doughty lady races out of her tent and sprints a couple of hundred yards through the deep snow up towards us. For a moment, we imagine she’s come to shoo us away, or demand a BBC contract, but nothing of the kind. Scrambling up onto the road, she produces a range of yak-hair tote bags and sells all three of them more or less instantly.
Once over the 11,000-foot (3350 m) pass out of the valley, we expect things to get better. Quite the opposite. The snow is deeper and the road icier and much more treacherous. Lichen-clad conifers plunge steeply down on one side of us, disappearing into a cold shroud of mist, so it’s hard to tell just how far we might fall if, as seems all too likely, the minibus slides off the road. From marvelling at the delicate beauty of the snowbound forest, thoughts turn swiftly to problems of survival. The normally nerveless Nigel, who, not long ago, was in a serious accident on the ice in Alaska, has the window open on the other side of the bus, ready for a quick exit. We negotiate a score of steep hairpin bends at a snail’s pace. The snow is falling more thickly now, and every now and then the wheels slide and we prepare for the worst. After almost an hour of hearts in mouths the snow turns to sleet and the conifers turn to rhododendrons and the dirt track to paved road and we can at last breathe normally again.
The Central Road, which is the only road connecting east and west Bhutan, is less than 20 years old, an indication of the government’s ambivalent attitude to the opening up of the country. It twists and turns dizzily around the spurs and shoulders of the mountains. They say the longest stretch of straight road in Bhutan is the runway at Paro airport.
Nevertheless, journeys that took two days now take two hours, and we are in Thimpu by afternoon, and the near white-out on the pass already seems a distant memory.
So too is the gentle timelessness of the Gantey valley.
Thimpu, the capital of Bhutan, is no rip-roaring metropolis, but it has roads and roundabouts (where policemen direct traffic with wonderfully flowing arm movements, as if they’re doing t’ai chi) and car parks and cosmopolitan restaurants and banks and hotels and, according to Benji, its very own property boom.
When Thimpu was chosen to be the capital in 1952, it was little more than a few houses clustered around the majestic Tashioedzong, and it grew slowly until 1974, when Bhutan was opened to foreigners for the first time. Since then it has mushroomed and has a current population of 50,000. To accommodate everyone, the rules on traditional house-building seem more liberally applied here and the streets of boringly respectable four- or five-storey blocks look more Mitteleuropean than Bhutanese.
At the Arts Cafe I meet Tsewang, a young actor and film maker, recently returned from showing his new film Travellers and Magicians at the Deauville Film Festival. It’s set in the Bhutanese countryside and in it he plays a man trying to get away from the restrictive world of the village.
He himself was the son of farmers and recognizes that, by many international standards, Bhutan remains backward. Literacy is a little over 50 per cent and television only came here five years ago. But though life is hard, he doesn’t think this is a bad thing. Unemployment is quite high here and this worries him more than lack of money.
‘The Buddhist version of poverty is a situation where you have nothing to contribute.’
He feels that in Bhutan there is still a strong sense of, as he puts it, ‘unison with the earth’.
‘In San Francisco I felt lost. Everywhere you go you have billboards telling you that you need to buy this or that, or the latest Cherokee four-wheel drive, but here we have different kind of billboards.’
A coach pulls up and a line of docile tourists file past us into the cafe.
‘We h
ave the prayer flags, we have the temples. These are our markers, you know, reminding you, in the Buddhist way, that you are not here for ever.’
Bearing this in mind, I end the day sampling one of the night-spots of Thimpu, a decorous, well-behaved snooker bar called Rumours. Pretty girls smash balls around the table like old pros and a television set is tuned to live coverage of England’s cricket match with the West Indies in Barbados.
Benji, who doesn’t like to miss a get-together, is sitting at the bar with me and his attractive and urbane cousin Khendum. The talk meanders round to reincarnation. Khendum admits she has ‘a little problem with reincarnation’.
She doesn’t believe in it.
‘I can’t reconcile my practising of Buddhism with that aspect of it,’ she says with an admirable directness.
Benji has definite preferences.
‘I’d like to be reborn as a black 7 foot 6 basketball player who earns a lot of money.’
Khendum gives me a wry smile.
‘He’ll be a cockroach.’
‘Thank you. Thank you very much,’ says Benji courteously.
She and Benji are both part of Bhutan’s privileged, wealthy, cosmopolitan elite. Like Tsewang, they’re outward-looking and internationalist, and though they are fiercely proud of their country’s cultural protectionism, all of them accept that change is accelerating and inevitable. As Khendum says, ‘We’re not romantic or idealistic enough to think that things will always be the way they are now, but we’d like to slow the development process up to a degree that we can handle change when it comes.’
Realistic, sensible and a trifle wistful at the same time.
Day One Hundred and Six : Thimpu to Takstang
The slopes of the Himalaya are rich in plants that have medicinal properties. Used for thousands of years by rural, mountain people, they are now increasingly attractive to an international market seeking an alternative to chemical drugs. The canny Bhutanese government, together with the World Health Organization, recognized this demand and in 1979 set up an Institute of Traditional Medicine, which researches, catalogues and produces herbal remedies. Recent newspaper reports suggest that they might have hit pay dirt, with a product already being tipped as the first ‘herbal Viagra’.
Himalaya (2004) Page 29