Falling Off the Map

by Pico Iyer

  Sometimes, I knew, the strangeness I found in Iceland existed only in my head. The flaxen-haired girls I took to be paragons of Icelandic purity turned out to be from Iowa, or Essex. I did, finally, spot a dog one day, though whether he had—by law—an Icelandic name, I do not know. Every day, in the lobby of my hotel, I saw an old man marching up and down in red ceremonial costume, carrying a huge bell. When I asked an Icelandic friend what arcane custom he embodied, she, not surprisingly, shrugged—unaware that he was, in fact, the Town Crier of Lambeth, in London, sent here by the British Department of Trade and Industry.

  Other times, though, I knew that there was something going on in the chilly, haunted silences. After a while the preternatural stillness of the treeless wastes can get to you, and inside you, and you can feel a Brontëan wildness in the soil. With its uncommonly beautiful people, its island curiosity, its closeness to traditions and tales, Iceland resembles nowhere so much as Java, its spellbound air charged with an immanence of spirits. Cold winds whistle through rows of white crosses in the black moor outside Akranes. The distinctive feature of the Icelander, for Sir Richard Burton, was “the eye, dark and cold as a pebble—a mesmerist would despair at the first sight.” From my bed, at night, I could see nothing but a white cross shining in the dark.

  Something in Iceland arouses the most passionate feelings in me, and picks me up, and will not let me go. On my first trip to the island, disoriented by the never-ending light, I stayed awake all night in my hotel, uncharacteristically writing poems. But this time, too, in the emptiness and dark, I could not sleep, and found myself alone at night with feelings I could not scan, the wind so fierce outside my window it sounded like the sea. Sometimes it feels as if the forty miles or so that people can see across the glassy air here they can also see inside themselves, as if, in this penetrating emptiness, you are thrown down and down some inner well. Sometimes it feels as if the land itself invites you almost to see in its changing moods a reflection of your own and, in the turning of the seasons, some deeper, inner shift from light to dark.

  “Especially at this time of year, people have many different feelings here,” a car mechanic called Oluvi explained to me one night. “In the dark they have much time to think of God—and of other things in that direction.”

  Bhutan: 1989

  HIDDEN INSIDE THE HIDDEN KINGDOM

  The baying of dogs woke me up my first morning in Bhutan. Otherwise, the main town square outside my room was empty, and silent. A huge full moon sat atop the golden mountains in a sky already blue. To the west, strips of mist snaked in and out of the hills as if to heighten an air of unreality. Below, workers in hoods, carrying scythes—like refugees from some biblical tale—were marching towards the fields, and schoolchildren too, in their traditional gray-and-purple jerkins. Around the golden stupa at the edge of town there was already a loud muttering of monks, and old women in turquoise beads and plaits circling around, counting their rosaries as they walked, and candles fluttering in musty antechambers. Already, the warm Himalayan sun was bathing the medieval buildings in light.

  Thimphu is the only real town in Bhutan, yet its population is no bigger than a crowd at Shea Stadium when the place is half empty. It takes just a morning to explore the capital. There is only one main street, and all its shops are numbered. One reason for the numbers, perhaps, is that all the names are identical. As soon as I walked out of the Druk Hotel, I came across the Druk Liquor Shop. Also the Druk Variety Corner. Just around the corner, Druk Jewelleries. A little farther down, the Druk Medical House (which specializes in shoes).

  Just past the huge display of 1988 Thai Air advertisements that guards the Druk Hotel was the office of Druk Air, the national airline of Druk Yul (or the Land of the Thunder Dragon). Inside, however, there was little decoration. Just a Thai Air ashtray, a whole display of Thai Air destinations, and a life-size cardboard cutout of a Thai Air stewardess joining her hands together in the traditional Thai wai of greeting. I went into Yu-Druk Travel, but it was empty—save for a huge cardboard cutout of another Thai Air girl. I passed through a dark archway, over a plank placed above some sludge, up a narrow, unlit staircase, and past an enormous padlock, into the office of Tee Dee U Car Rental. Its main feature was a pretty picture of a Thai Air hostess bowing her respects. By eleven-fifteen on this weekday morning, a sign was already up outside Druk Consult: CLOSED FOR LUNCH 1–2:30.

  Thimphu, I would later find, is a roaring, crowded, feverish metropolis by Bhutanese standards. By any other standards, it is a miracle of calm. Shopkeepers sat outside their stores, serenely knitting in the sun. Monks rested their heads on green benches in the plaza, soaking up the rays under a tall Swiss clock. At the town’s main intersection—its only intersection, in fact—a policeman directed traffic with the straight-arm precision of an archer, hands extended toward the occasional car as if he were holding a bow. The only talkative things in Thimphu were the trash cans. WHOEVER YOU MAY BE, announced one receptacle of dirt, USE ME TO KEEP THE AREA CLEAN.

  Under the startling blue of heady winter skies, I took in the exotic roll call of store names in what may well be the world’s most indigenous land: Dolly Tshongkhang Shop No. 15, Sonam Rinchen Beer Agency cum Bar, Llendrup Tshongkhang Cement Agent (Shop No. 31, Thimphu), Tipsy Tipsy (Deals in Tipsy Extra Special; Tipsy Strong Beer). Many of them had a curious kind of offbeat innocence: Tshewang Fancy Store, SPARK Fashion Corner, Etho Metho Handicrafts, Hotel Sam Druk (“Fooding and Lodging”). SALESMAN: MUST LOOK HONEST, pleaded a less than reassuring sign in one shop.

  And though the most famous fact about the Forbidden Kingdom was its young king’s love of professional basketball—the “Fearless Lion” could traditionally be seen almost every afternoon practicing jump shots in the middle of town, while dressed in ceremonial robes—there was not much hoop action in sight. The liveliest thing in town, in fact, seemed to be the posters of Phoebe Cates—Phoebe Cates pouting, Phoebe Cates smoldering, Phoebe Cates smiling. A local video store was advertising Paradise, starring Phoebe Cates. (If only, I thought, Phoebe Cates worked for Thai Air, how simple Bhutanese decoration would be!) And then, a little farther on, up a small rise, I saw an octagonal white cottage with a spotted red toadstool outside and cacti around its walls. Inside was a chuckling mechanical monkey that announced the time, a set of dollhouse chairs, a sign that said MODUS: CASH-DOWN, and a pink button with which one could summon the proprietor, a white-haired Swiss man who looked as if he were on his way to see the Brothers Grimm. Here at last was the most famous establishment in the “Land of Hidden Treasures”: its only Swiss bakery!

  Bhutan has long been celebrated as perhaps the ultimate Lonely Place in the world, a snow-capped Buddhist kingdom tucked away in the depths of the High Himalayas. For years at a time, nothing is heard of the secret land of archers. At the time I visited, Bhutan had no TV, no daily newspapers, no air links with the outside world save Dhaka and Calcutta; its Olympic athletes had never seen boats before they left the country, or high-rise buildings, or even crowds. And such was the isolation of the land that it seemed to belong to fairy tale. “Ghosts, witches and crawling spirits are so familiar that often valleys and settlements are named after them,” noted a standard political survey of the country; early British explorers came back with tales of bloodthirsty arrow duels in which the spectators would tear out the liver of the loser, eat it with butter and sugar, mix the fat and blood with turpentine in order to produce candles, and turn the bones into pipes on which they could play strange melodies. Even relatively prosaic books like Two and Two Halves to Bhutan, a relentlessly matter-of-fact account of a British doctor taking his family (and a teddy bear called Aloysius) through the unpaved wilds of Bhutan during the 1960s, contained sentences like the following: “The head lama of the dzong, the omze, is assisted by a Lopon Kudung in charge of discipline; the champen instructs gaylongs in dances, music, reading and writing.”

  What facts did occasionally emerge from the sequestered kingdom, moreover, served only t
o confirm its air of other-worldliness. Bhutan had not been part of the Universal Postal Union until 1969, yet since then it had invented steel stamps, three-dimensional stamps, talking stamps (in the shape of records), and stamps made of silk. A woman I had never met, in Denmark, wrote to inform me that a man named Rob Roy had recently put on a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the remote Bhutanese settlement of Tashigang. A U.N. official in North Korea filled my ear with tales of the intoxicating substances grown by foreign advisers based in Thimphu. And at the Olympic Games in Seoul, mysterious snippets about Bhutan kept catching my eye: first, the secretary of the Bhutanese Olympic Committee acknowledged that “Many athletes thought we were in Central America or Africa,” and then—not coincidentally, perhaps—an item in The Olympic Villager told how a Bhutanese guest of the Bhutan-Korea Friendship Society had gone into a local hairdresser requesting a “light wave on the side” and come away with an Afro. One month later, on the “Descending Day of Lord Buddha from Heaven,” just two weeks before the king’s thirty-third birthday, on the day of the “Meeting of Nine Evils,” word trickled out that His Majesty Jigme Singye Wangchuk, the “Precious Ruler of the Dragon People” and long the most eligible bachelor in Asia, had made formal his marriage to four local sisters (in part, perhaps, because they had already borne him eight children).

  The most singular fact of all, though, was that Bhutan had never opened its doors to the world. Cut off entirely from planet Earth until a generation ago, Bhutan had always been an area so remote that it hardly seemed to appear on any maps. Taken over—and united—by a fleeing Tibetan lama in 1616, it had never enjoyed any contact with reality until, in the early nineteenth century, the British government in India had begun annexing it. After the Bhutanese retaliated, rejecting ultimatum after ultimatum, they were finally given some tribute in return for the territory and, in 1907, with the blessing of the British, they found themselves with a hereditary monarchy, ruled by King Ugyen Wangchuk (great-grandfather of the present king).

  But having seen change come so violently to Tibet (when the Chinese invaded in 1950), and so suddenly to Sikkim (with the incorporation of the tiny kingdom into India in 1975), and so surreptitiously to Nepal (with the gradual influx of global villagers), the Hidden Kingdom had decided, in recent times, to barricade its doors ever faster. In all its history, Bhutan had never seen more tourists in a year than Disneyland sees in a single hour; its first and only foreign minister once told me that too many visitors were “not very high-class people.” Just before I arrived, moreover, it had raised the price of entry for tourists to $250 a day and, in addition, forbidden all tourists from visiting the only tourist attractions in Bhutan—its monasteries. I, however, was in a special position. Because Bhutan depends so much on India for its independence, Indian passport holders are allowed to come and go in Bhutan as they please, to stay as long as they wish, to make themselves at home inside the world’s remotest kingdom. It sounded to me like an irresistible opportunity: to live for a while, as a native, inside the “world’s last Shangri-la.”

  So it was that one winter day I went along to the Calcutta office of Druk Air, to ask about buses to Bhutan. Locating at last the dusty staircase in an apartment building where the office is situated (squashed between the Royal Customs Office of Bhutan and the Consulate General of Bhutan), I waited for an hour outside an emphatically locked door. Then, suddenly, a large man with a heavy mountain air above his Lakers T-shirt appeared before me. Hurry, hurry, he said, the plane was leaving in two hours—maybe less. But I wanted to go by bus! Yes, yes, he said, but this was a special plane—the first jet ever to land in his country! The British Aerospace 146 had enjoyed its maiden flight just three days earlier, and upon landing in Bhutan had received a formal blessing and shugdel ceremony from the entire monk body (I later saw pictures of the occasion—a group of bewildered-looking Englishmen in ties, surrounded by chanting monks, all seated cross-legged on a runway in the middle of nowhere). Today was going to feature its first commercial flight! A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a historic occasion! If I didn’t move quickly, I would have to go the usual way—on an aging, sixteen-seat propeller plane.

  And so it was that one hour later, I found myself standing in Dum Dum Airport, in front of the booth that Druk Air shares with JAT (the Yugoslav airline), now entirely empty. And standing. And standing. Then I noticed a tiny line of Bhutanese passengers checking in at the Thai Air counter, down the hall. It seemed a simple enough procedure: hand the attendant your case, watch him smash himself in the leg, wait for his curses to subside, then proceed to the departure lounge. A few hours later, I joined twelve disoriented passengers scattered amidst the eighty seats of a spotless new $30 million jet, the fiery red-and-gold dragon of Bhutan leaping across its tail. “I’m in civil aviation,” a Canadian next to me explained. “We’re trying to make it safer to land in Bhutan.” I see. “Yes,” offered a Bhutanese man nearby. “They’re only charging fifty percent for this flight. That’s because there’s only a fifty percent chance of surviving.” Oh, really? “You see, the minimum for a safe landing is around four thousand feet,” the civil aviation expert continued. And how long was the runway at Paro? “Around forty-two hundred feet.” Oh, excellent.

  Ahead of us all, as the plane took off, were the highest mountains in the world, mysterious and snow-capped in the blue, blue sky. Below us, a few huge monasteries—massive, whitewashed, multistory fortresses—were tucked into the folds of lonely valleys. No roads were inscribed across the hills, no settlements or people: just huge white blocks in a sealed-off world, and shafts of sun like giant searchlights.

  Slowly, almost shyly, the plane began to descend over mountains with monasteries perched improbably on their tops. Then, very slowly, it veered in upon a tiny opening in the mountains and touched down. Around us all, in the empty valley, was nothing but silence. A few villagers gathered wordlessly beside the two-room airport: pink-cheeked peasant women, runny-nosed toddlers with woolen caps pulled down over their eyes, sturdy men in multicolored dressing gowns. A girl called Karma, or Universal Law—the sister, it mysteriously appeared, of the Lakers-loving official in Calcutta—quietly checked us into the “Lotus Garden of the Gods.” And then we were outside, in a Druk Air minibus (its only decoration, a sticker for Thai Air), and alone in a soundless world.

  An hour or so later, the bus started up, and we set out on the winding two-hour trip into town, hugging the edges of the narrow mountain road. Occasionally, we passed buildings—giant, terraced Tudor-seeming fortresses, their shingled roofs held down with stones, their white plaster walls dotted with rows of perfect bay windows—twenty or thirty openings in all—and their frames painted with flowers or the tails of snarling dragons. Then night began to fall, and lights came on in the forbidding buildings, shining like candles in the dark.

  Finally, we came round a corner, and there, before us, at our feet, was a fairyland of lights. We descended into the valley and drove past rows of many-windowed towers, as if into the heart of some enormous Christmas cake. Then the van stopped, a door opened, and I was released into the chilling night. The streets were cold and empty, save for a few hooded figures shuffling past. On every side stood heavy mountain fastnesses. A few faint lights shone in small arched windows. I was alone in a city of candles.

  The only particular sights for a visitor to see in Bhutan are its dzongs, the huge whitewashed seventeenth-century fortresses cum monasteries cum administrative centers—constructed without nails or plans by the country’s first Tibetan rulers—which tower above every settlement in the country and are themselves overbrooded by watchtowers. My second morning in Thimphu, therefore, I set off to visit Simtokha Dzong, which guards the hillside five kilometers out of town. Five kilometers—a little more than three miles—is, however, a long distance in Bhutan: three hours by foot, I was told, and roughly half an hour by car. (Yuri Gagarin had circumnavigated the globe before Bhutan had installed its first road.)

  After wandering aroun
d in circles for a while, I came at last upon an ancient Indian Mahindra jeep, held together with bits of soggy tissue. The driver patted the dust off his front seat and, with a flourish, presented me with the place of honor beside him (a rather mixed blessing, I felt, since the person in the front seat had to enjoy the gearshift thrust between his legs). A woman—a rather thick peasant woman—bundled into the front seat beside me, one snot-nosed issue perched on her lap, another suckling furiously at her breast. Seven or eight other unfortunates piled into the gloom behind us. The woman held her nostrils and violently expelled the contents of her nose. A man behind me—rather inauspiciously, I thought—began muttering a series of prayers. The others tuned up with a preparatory series of coughs, groans, and sneezes. And so we rattled off toward the breakneck curves.

  Above the mirror in the jeep were some Technicolor stickers of four-armed Hindu gods; along the dashboard were two soulful portraits of German shepherds and a sticker that said “1987 Visit Thailand Year.” We drove past trucks that said “Ruff and Tuff,” trucks with illuminated Buddhas on their foreheads, trucks with slanting Nepali eyes painted eerily above their headlights. Whenever the trucks passed by, so too, very often, did songs, as the passengers seated on sacks in the back sweetened their tortuous journey with song.

  At one point, our driver braked suddenly and began fumbling desperately through a clangorous collection of antique wrenches and pliers kept below his seat. Then he got up, ambled over to a hut, and brought back some water. Opening the hood, he pressed the accelerator down with his hand, threw some water into his mouth, some more onto the engine, and some more in the direction of the thick woman’s children. At this, the large family—to my relief—disembarked. Then we started up again, jolting past neat official signs, flowering gold lettering on crimson boards: National Mushroom Development Programme, National Stove Project Training Site, Office of the Gyalpoizimpa. We drove past women breaking rocks by the side of the road, past shepherds beating along their flocks of yaks, past colored banners that proclaimed: THERE IS NO CURE FOR AIDS BUT IT IS PREVENTABLE (to a people who, in six cases out of seven, could not read a word of anything, let alone English). Mostly, we went around curves. Sometimes, when we did, I was thrown on top of the driver, rendering him almost incapable of steering; sometimes I was pushed into the woman—or, after she left, towards the door. This was unfortunate, because the jeep had no door. It was also unsettling because there is an average of fifteen curves per kilometer in Bhutan (and foreigners in Bhutan measure direction in this way. “I covered 4,500 curves going across country,” an intrepid sixty-year-old Englishwoman later told me, only to be put in her place by an international adviser who said, “That’s nothing! I covered 5,500 on the round trip from Thimphu to Phuntsholing”). I began to miss my human cushion, the snorting madonna and child.