We Came, We Saw, We Left

by Charles Wheelan

  Katrina and I basked in victory on the drive back—until the taxi overheated halfway to Bagan. The driver pulled over to the side of the road in a tiny hamlet and told us that we had to wait for the engine to cool. “Maybe we eat?” he said, pointing to an open-air restaurant with a thatched roof. As Katrina and I walked in, the other patrons stared as if our spaceship had broken down while we were passing through their galaxy. We could not read the menu, and the taxi driver did not speak enough English to explain it to us. Katrina pointed to what looked like a large flatbread on a patron’s plate at a nearby table. “How about that?” she said. We soon had two enormous slabs of soft, warm bread with a chickpea sauce that was so good, we ordered more the moment we tasted it. The other customers watched intently as we ate, smiling and laughing when it became apparent that we were enjoying the food. Our driver was relieved that the breakdown had evolved into a culinary adventure. Eventually the taxi’s engine cooled sufficiently for us to continue on. We arrived back in Bagan roughly twelve hours after we had set out on our visa retrieval mission.

  The next day, we were finally able to be tourists. We borrowed bicycles from our hotel to explore the temples spread across the city, some of which are a thousand years old. Bagan was center of a kingdom from the ninth to thirteenth centuries that eventually would become Myanmar (formerly Burma). There are over three thousand remaining temples spread across the flat landscape, like elegantly carved artifacts spread on a huge table for display. As the temperature cooled down in the afternoon, bicycling was the perfect way to get around. We rode along dusty roads past the small temples and pagodas and stopped to go inside some of the big ones. Near sunset, Leah and I climbed up one of the largest temples, giving us a remarkable view as the sun set behind temples on the horizon. I turned around and looked behind me: scores more temples were brightly illuminated by the golden, almost orange light of the setting sun.

  The logistics for getting to our trek in Bhutan were modestly complicated. We would fly from Yangon to Calcutta in the evening and then to Bhutan the following morning. However, since only Katrina and I had visas to enter India, Leah, Sophie, and CJ would have to spend the night in the transit area of the Calcutta airport. We had spent extensive amounts of time in airports in Dubai and London; these places are like shopping malls with airline gates attached. The three of them would be able to get something to eat, perhaps do some shopping, and then find a comfortable place to sleep for the night.

  That was not how the night unfolded.

  Upon arrival in Calcutta, Katrina and I, armed with our multiple-entry visas that we had worked very hard to get, went through immigration and entered India. Our job was to retrieve the luggage, which could not be checked all the way to Bhutan. We passed through immigration and collected the bags, after which we had a nice dinner and settled into a “retiring room” that was convenient, clean, and comfortable. As Katrina and I drifted off to sleep in our private sleeping quarters, we wondered why the rest of the family had not texted us to offer an update.

  Apparently there is no Wi-Fi in the bowels of the Calcutta airport. Nor, it turns out, are there restaurants. Or shops. Or chairs. Or carpeting.

  The Calcutta airport does have some rudimentary transit facilities, but Leah, Sophie, and CJ were not able to access these facilities because they did not have a boarding pass for the morning flight to Bhutan. The attendant who was supposed to issue these boarding passes was not at his post. As a result, the three of them were relegated to a hyper-air-conditioned, mosquito-infested hallway. They put on whatever clothing they had to protect against the cold and the mosquitoes. (Remember, their luggage was with Katrina and me.) CJ covered his extremities with a towel and went to sleep on the tile floor. The others struggled to get any sleep at all.

  The next morning, Katrina and I still had not heard from the rest of the family. We checked in for the Bhutan flight and passed through immigration and security. In theory, the others, having spent the night in the airport, should have been waiting for us at the gate. They were not. I asked a representative of Bhutan Airlines where they could be. He pointed down a long staircase that led into darkness. “They’re probably down there,” he said.

  “How do we get them out?” I asked.

  He spoke rapidly in Hindi into a walkie-talkie. “They are coming,” he told me. Minutes went by, and then half an hour. Still, the rest of the family did not appear. From time to time, the man would speak into the walkie-talkie, his voice growing more agitated.

  Eventually Leah, Sophie, and CJ appeared at the top of the staircase, escorted by a woman in some kind of uniform. They looked as if they had spent the night in an Indian prison. CJ’s face was covered with mosquito bites.

  “Katrina and I were able to get the bags,” I offered. “How was it?”

  “It was horrible—a living nightmare,” Sophie said.

  “It was a frozen-over hell with mosquitoes—the worst night of my life,” CJ added.

  Leah, the most chronically upbeat person I have ever met, said, “It was long. It was miserable. It was freezing cold.”

  Our plane took off and climbed toward the Himalayas. The day was clear. Not long after we reached altitude, the pilot announced that Mount Everest was visible out the left side of the plane. There it was: the distinctive sharp peak jutting up above the clouds. We crowded around the window and stared admiringly at the highest mountain in the world, a view that went a long way toward erasing memories of a night spent in the bowels of the Calcutta airport.

  * In my journal, I referred to him slightly differently, but there is no reason to dwell here on the part of the human anatomy he most closely resembled.

  Chapter 14

  A Punjabi Shortcut

  I did manage to get a photo of two monkeys having sex, which had been on my bucket list. In that respect, Sundarbans was not a complete bust.

  THE INDIAN GOVERNMENT had not played its last card. Our plan from the beginning of the trip had been to spend time in Mumbai with our longtime friends Sumer and Sonali Shankardass and their twin daughters, Saira and Simran. We’d met the Shankardass family when they lived in Chicago for a stretch; Saira and Simran went to school with Sophie from kindergarten through third grade. After their family moved back to Mumbai, we visited them there and had a lovely time. As a result, we fixed a date for a return visit; we scheduled the Mumbai stop after Saira and Simran’s national exams—tests that are required of all high school students in India. Who or what could disrupt this plan? The entire government of India.

  First, the Election Commission in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) called elections. India has a parliamentary system, both at the national level and in its twenty-nine states. As in most parliamentary systems, there is a window of time during which elections can be held, rather than a fixed date. The Election Commission scheduled elections earlier than expected. Roughly a hundred million people in UP, India’s most populous state, would be voting. The government needed schools as voting centers, but many of those schools were already booked to be testing sites for the annual Indian Certificate of Secondary Education (ICSE) exam. Therefore, Indian Prime Minister Modi postponed the ICSE exam to facilitate the UP elections. The Shankardass twins would be taking their exams a month later than expected.

  At the end of this long chain of events were the Wheelans. We would have to put off our visit to Mumbai and do something in the meantime. “You should take a Punjabi shortcut,” Sumer Shankardass advised.*

  “What is a ‘Punjabi shortcut’?” I asked.

  “It’s the shortest distance between two points via any third point in the opposite direction,” he explained. (I suspect the Punjabis may not use this term.) We had a new plan: India to Africa and back to India again.

  The Punjabi shortcut still lay in our future as we prepared to trek in Bhutan and then dispatch Katrina to Germany for treatment. Bhutan, a small kingdom in the Himalayas, is one of the more beautiful and untraveled places on the planet. The Bhutanese government limits the
number of tourists by requiring that every visitor spend a minimum of two hundred and fifty dollars per day. We could afford to visit Bhutan—just not for long. Sumer, architect of the Punjabi shortcut, had connected us with a university friend of his who ran a tour company. We booked a three-day trek leaving from the city of Paro, not far from the capital Thimphu.

  The Bhutanese government requires every trekker to buy a license; there is a steep discount for students. CJ and Sophie were traveling with their school IDs, but Katrina was in student limbo. She had graduated from high school but did not yet have a college ID from Williams. Neither the tour company nor the Bhutanese government grasped the concept of a gap year. In a series of e-mails with the tour company, I struggled to explain how Katrina could be a student without being a student. “Perhaps you can obtain a provisional ID from her college,” my contact suggested.

  “Of course,” I wrote back. I told Katrina that she needed to procure an ID indicating that she would be enrolled at Williams College in the fall.

  “How am I supposed to do that?” she asked.

  “You’re going to make one,” I instructed. Ten minutes later, Katrina presented me with an “Accepted Student Identification Card” from Williams College: a college logo, her smiling photo, some purple writing, a series of random numbers, and even a bar code that she had cut-andpasted from the Internet. I forwarded it on to the trekking company.

  “Well done, sir!” the representative e-mailed back. I don’t think he appreciated how apt his choice of language was.

  Our first impression of Bhutan was delightful: clean air, no mosquitoes, cool weather, and a general calmness. The minimum daily spending requirement gave us no choice but to stay in an upscale hotel with cozy rooms and lots of wood and stone. The three members of the family who had spent the previous night in the Calcutta airport were particularly appreciative of this luxury. For the first time in a long time, we slept in a cool room without air-conditioning.

  We began hiking the next morning at seven thousand feet on steep terrain. I noticed Sophie was struggling, so I dropped back to hike with her. She insisted that we carry on a conversation to pass the time. We talked hour after hour: about her college plans, her friends back home, our family history—anything and everything to pass the time. I described the plot of the novel I was writing, including some ideas for how it might end. Sophie encouraged me enthusiastically. Eventually she found her stride and was a delightful hiking companion.

  The scenery was intriguingly diverse: forested paths, distant mountain views, prayer flags fluttering on the top of rocky peaks. We stopped on occasion to look down at the river valley we had left behind. The fields were fallow for winter—lovely geometric patterns of brown and black. There were several large Buddhist temples set amid the empty fields, which gave the country a medieval feel. There were no signs of industrial activity. From our vantage point, we could have been in the twenty-first century or the twelfth. The walled encampments surrounded by the mosaic of fields looked a lot like a diorama on feudalism I did in middle school.

  We reached camp while the sun was still high. We basked in the warmth, enjoying our post-exercise high. The cold arrived quickly when darkness fell. We put on wool hats (bought cheaply in South America) and retreated to the comfort of our tents, each of which had a brass bed inside with layers of blankets. The porters working at the campsite brought us hot-water bottles to nestle under the blankets. The temperature fell low enough during the night that my camera battery discharged. I switched to a backup battery and slept with it under my covers the next night.

  We awoke to snow flurries. As we waited for the bright sun to dispatch the cold, I decided to spend the morning trying to photograph the Himalayan monal, a turkey-sized bird in the pheasant family that struts along the ground and looks like a peacock. I invited the family to join me in this exciting quest; each one demurred. “Why not?” I prodded.

  “You’ll never see one.” (CJ)

  “I’d rather clean the outhouse.” (Sophie)

  “I don’t have to answer that question.” (Katrina)

  “I’m sure you’ll get a great picture that I’ll be able to look at.” (Leah)

  Then one of them made a weka joke and they all cracked up.

  The monals have vibrant blue and green feathers, with patches of red and orange. One website for birding enthusiasts describes them as “so beautiful that it’s hard to believe they are real.” I had seen one scurry into the brush near our camp and was determined to get a good photo. The rest of the family—no more excited about seeing a monal than they were about spotting a kiwi—waved disparagingly from lounge chairs as I set off.

  I meandered along a narrow path, reacting excitedly to every noise. I saw a flash of bright colors on the ground in the distance—definitely a monal—but it disappeared before I could get a photo. I walked on. Eventually I came over a rise and encountered four monals feeding in the long grass no more than ten yards in front of me, their exotic plumage glistening in the bright sun. I crouched down and snapped photos until I was certain I had captured an image that did justice to these majestic creatures. (No, they did not turn out to be wekas.)

  The second day of trekking took us higher into the mountains, past temples and religious sites to a peak adorned with rows of prayer flags. Buddhists believe that these fluttering flags send compassion, goodwill, and wisdom to all places the wind reaches. The scenery was dry and mountainous, with broad stretches of forest at lower elevations. There were none of the signs of deforestation that we had seen in South America and Southeast Asia. Bhutan’s approach to economic development is unique. In 1972, the king of Bhutan pronounced that gross national happiness (GNH) would be the metric of success for the country, rather than a traditional measure of economic output like gross domestic product (GDP). To that end, the king promulgated a series of policies that were intended to make the nation’s citizens happier but not necessarily richer. One pillar of that approach is sustainable economic development. For example, sixty-two percent of the country’s territory must remain forested.

  CJ the Eco Warrior was predictably enamored of this policy. I was less persuaded of its merits. On the one hand, we ought to measure well-being using a measure that is broader than aggregate production. Gross national happiness, or something like it, is a step in the right direction. There is ample evidence that rising incomes in the developed world have not led to correspondingly large increases in well-being. On the other hand, Bhutan remains a poor country whose people might benefit handsomely from more development. There are only seven hundred thousand people in the country—about the same population as Vermont—and yet large numbers of young people migrate to neighboring countries every year in search of work. The scenery is lovely and relatively untouched, but there is no obvious long-term path to prosperity.

  I am also skeptical that governments can easily determine what makes individuals happy. One pillar of gross national happiness is preservation of culture and tradition, which sounds appealing except that it is achieved through policies that are relatively illiberal (in the classic sense of the word). For example, Bhutanese citizens must wear national dress when visiting temples, schools, government offices, and on national holidays. Just imagine the government in the United States dictating what Americans are required to wear in public on the Fourth of July.

  The final day of the trek led us toward Tiger’s Nest, a seventeenth century temple and monastery built on the side of a steep mountain face. The walk was pleasant, taking us along gentle forest paths. With all in good spirits, we paused for a group photo beneath a string of fluttering prayer flags. This became one of my favorite images from the trip, as each of our personalities seemed to leap from the photo in this lovely, exotic place. Shortly before we arrived at Tiger’s Nest, our guide changed into national dress, as required by law. The monastery is tantalizing from every angle, as it appears to be hanging off the side of the mountain. The sky was a brilliant blue, which threw into sharp relief the thousands o
f colorful prayer flags flapping in the wind. We spent several hours exploring the Buddhist temples inside, a labyrinth of dark, incense-filled rooms where monks still live and work.

  Reaching Tiger’s Nest felt like a special accomplishment, even relative to the other extraordinary places we had seen along the way. Bhutan is one of the more exotic countries on the planet. We had made it more than halfway around the world, and we had walked three days to reach this mystical, gravity-defying monastery. From now on, we would be moving in the direction of home, and the five of us would be together for only a few more days. As we contemplated these thoughts, every flutter of every prayer flag dispatched compassion, wisdom, and goodwill to all corners of the earth.

  Bhutan had offered us a hiatus from the reality that Katrina would soon be flying to Germany to be treated for a flesh-eating parasite. We flew back to Calcutta, where we had one day to spend with her before she continued on to Munich. “Let’s go full Calcutta,” Leah suggested when we landed. She asked two tourism officials at the airport, “If we could go to any restaurant in the city, what should it be?” The two officials took this challenge seriously. They had an animated conversation that we could not understand. Eventually they recommended a restaurant half an hour away by car. It was late morning; we could be there for lunch.

  We loaded our luggage into two flimsy Ambassador taxis and took off on a ride through the heart of Calcutta. India is one of the most bustling and unpredictable places in the world; Calcutta is one of the most bustling and unpredictable places in India. Calcutta, which is in the state of West Bengal, is also curious because it is run by democratically elected Communists. While most of the rest of the world ditched their Communist leaders when given the opportunity, the West Bengalis elected them to power again and again.