Beyond the Sky and the Earth (6 page)

The scenery changes almost every time we turn a corner. Shadowy pine, sunlit oak and beech, dry, hot groves of subtropical pine, called “chir pine” according to Rita, dense, moist jungly forests. Sometimes the mountains roar up, steep and black and haughty. Other times they are more gentle, sprawling, spreading, dissolving into haze. In these I can trace profiles, a smooth forehead, an aquiline nose, a stubborn chin. Whenever we stop and climb out of the vehicle, I am struck by the silence. It is particularly deep and strong higher up. At the passes, when the wind drops suddenly, the silence almost hums, and I can feel the weight of the earth beneath me, intensified by the emptiness between this solid piece of ground and the nearest ridge, a short flight away. It becomes a strange mental gravity. If I stand too long, I begin to feel rooted.

We stop in the town of Tongsa, dominated by Tongsa Dzong, a massive, magnificent fortress. Rita takes us to a restaurant she knows, where the proprietor, a grave and beautiful Tibetan woman, leads us into the warm kitchen overlooking the dzong. We sip hot tea, studying the temple roofs and towers of the dzong, the ladder steps and turrets, the golden spires. Sasha makes a quick sketch. Once again, I have the feeling that I am an aberration in the face of something immense and very old. “The land that time forgot,” I say but Lorna makes a face. “The last Shangri-La. That’s starting to bug me,” she says.

“But it
does
seem like that,” I say. “Like all those stories about stepping backwards in time.”

She chews the inside of her lip. “I just think if I lived here, I’d hate to have a bunch of foreigners telling me this was Shangri-La. Especially if they came from a nice cushy life in a wealthy country.”

In late afternoon, we come over a pass into the Bumthang valley in central Bhutan, wide and gentle, full of pale gold grass and surrounded by dark pine-covered slopes. The Swiss Guest House, which Rita has promised will have pine-paneled rooms, wood-burning stoves called
bukharis,
a hot shower, and toast for breakfast, is full, so we stay instead at a tourist hotel, where the cabins have bukharis but no wood to burn in them, and the taps in the bathroom remain disappointingly dry after much-promising gurgling.

Rita corrects our pronunciation of Bumthang. “Bum—thang!” she drawls, laughing. “What is that, a disorder of the backside?” Bumthang, pronounced boom-tahng, is also called Jakar, which means place of the white bird. Jakar Dzong, looking stern and remote on a knoll above the town, started out as a monastery in the sixteenth century. Construction of the building had already begun at a different site when a white bird was seen circling the knoll. This was taken as an omen, and the monastery was moved. The valleys of Bumthang, Rita tells us at dinner, are considered very holy, full of monasteries and temples and pilgrimage places. No animals may be slaughtered in the valley, and smoking is banned. This is where Padmasambhava, also known as Guru Rimpoché, arrived in the eighth century to help a king who had fallen gravely ill after offending a local deity. Through meditation, Guru Rimpoché subdued the deity, turning it into a fierce protector of the Dharma, and the king was restored to health. The cave where Guru Rimpoché meditated still bears the imprint of his body. Rita says that Guru Rimpoché is worshiped in Tibet and Bhutan as the second Buddha. “The Buddha apparently predicted he would return to teach a more evolved form of Buddhism,” she says. “Guru Rimpoché is seen as that incarnation, and any place where he meditated is considered extremely sacred.”

Bumthang is also the birthplace of the
terton
Pema Lingpa, who dove into a lake in the next valley with a burning lamp and emerged with religious treasures and the lamp still lit. I want to hear more about the hidden treasures, but this is all Rita knows: that
terma,
religious treasures—scriptures, scrolls, statues, ritual objects—were hidden by Guru Rimpoché, to be discovered centuries later by
tertons
, treasure-finders. Another thing on the List of Things to Look Up.

We are woken in the early morning by the rusty call of crows. The sun has not yet risen over the ridge, and a cold mist hangs over the valley. The dzong of the white bird lies in shadow. It looks like the Bhutan of long, long ago, I think, remembering Rita’s history lessons. An older, colder, forbidding Bhutan. Our breath makes frosty clouds as we shiver and squirm into our clothes, which are stiff and cold. There is still no water, and we brush our teeth without it, outside under a stubby pine tree. We drive up to the Swiss Guest House for breakfast, and it does include toast and honey, just as Rita promised. “This is the last time you’ll eat toast in a while,” Rita says, “unless you can bake bread.” She begins an elaborate explanation of how to bake using some ridiculous pot-in-a-pot-on-a-kerosene-stove method. Lorna and Sasha write it all down. “It’s too complicated for me,” I say. “Anyway, maybe they sell bread in Pema Gatshel.” Rita lifts her eyebrows at this but says nothing. The sun has hoisted itself over the rim of the mountains and the mist in the valley turns gold as it breaks up and floats away, but we are reluctant to leave the warm, pine-scented room, and order more toast and coffee.

On the way out of the valley, we stop at a shop to buy cheese and apple juice, produced in local factories started by the Swiss twenty years ago. The air smells of woodsmoke. Dorji returns from the petrol pump looking grim. There is no diesel in Bumthang, he reports.

“Do we have enough to get to Mongar?” Rita asks.

“Mongar also no diesel,” he says. “Maybe Tashigang.”

Even I know we don’t have enough to get all the way to Tashigang, almost two hundred kilometers away. I am about to suggest that we return to the Swiss Guest House to see if there are any rooms available,
instead
of getting back into the vehicle, why is everyone getting
back
into a vehicle that doesn’t have enough fuel to get us to the next petrol pump which is at any rate
empty,
do people want to be stranded on the top of some godforsaken mountain in the snow and mist where we would freeze or die of starvation before anyone would even think to look for us? It is too late. Everyone is back in the hi-lux already, and they are waiting for me.
I don’t understand,
I want to wail. But I climb in.

This morning we are on our way up to Trumseng La, the highest pass we will have to cross, almost four thousand meters above sea level. Patches of old snow begin to appear along the road, becoming fresher and deeper as we ascend until we are toiling through winter. Dorji slows the hi-lux down to ten, fifteen kilometers per hour, honking at every corner. We stop when we reach the top, climb out, shivering in the cold and ghostly mist under wind-blasted trees, to read the sign erected by the Public Works Department: “You have reached Trumseng La, Bhutan’s highest road pass. Check Your Brakes. Bash On Regardless. Thank you.”

On the other side of the pass, we are surprised by an enormous truck parked close to the mountain wall. The driver has lit a fire under the fuel tank. “The diesel freezes,” Rita explains. I ask her why this method of thawing the fuel doesn’t blow the entire truck off the side of the mountain, but she says she doesn’t know.

Shortly after Trumseng La, Dorji slows down again and points ahead. The whole mountainside collapsed there last year, Rita informs us, the cliff falling away suddenly, killing 247 road workers who were camped at the site. It looks as if someone has taken a very large, very sharp knife and sliced off the side of the mountain, leaving only a narrow ledge, like decorative trim, on the rock face. Surely we aren’t going to drive across that, I think. There’s no
road.
The whole thing will fall away under the weight of the truck and we will end up dead at the bottom of the ravine. This is just plain foolishness! This is for the birds! But no, we are to bash on regardless. We cross it very, very slowly. This gives us ample time to study the details of the catastrophe, the deep cracks in the raw, naked rock above, the slide of stone and mud and tree roots straight down a thousand, thousand meters into the ravine below.

I feel worse, somehow, when we are over it. Now there is
that
between me and Thimphu. Why didn’t I ask to be posted in Thimphu? At least you can’t fall off the road there, at least it has hotels, hot running water, the bakery. Why can’t I live in a hotel in Thimphu for two years? Thimphu is only an hour and a half away from the airport. From Thimphu, I could get to Calcutta, to international airline offices. From Thimphu, I could get home. But every kilometer takes me farther away. Farther and further, I sing myself to sleep, farther and further on a nearly empty tank.

I wake when my sweater slips to the floor and I bang my head on the window. We have stopped outside a collection of windowless bamboo huts. Dorji disappears inside. “He’s asking for diesel,” Rita tells me. Oh yes, of course, I think sourly. They’ll obviously have some in there. Rita is clapping. “He got some!” Everyone is clapping, and Dorji grins as he holds up a jerry can. I clap too, especially loudly.

We stop at a shack made of planks, woven bamboo mats, tin sheets and plastic. FOODINGS AND LODGINGS the sign says. We climb out, stretch and yawn. Inside, from blackened pots on a mud stove, a women serves plates of steaming rice and tiny bowls of bones in broth. “Aren’t you going to eat?” the others ask. I shake my head and sip bottled water. They exchange glances. I know what they are thinking. They are thinking I won’t make it. I won’t last two months, let alone two years. Later, when I have gone home, they will tell stories about me. Remember that girl from Sault Ste. Marie, what was her name, she’d never been anywhere in her life? She was afraid of everything, remember? Is that the one who only ate crackers? What was she thinking when she decided to come?

We spend the second night in Mongar at the Hospital Guest House, which belongs to the Norwegian Leprosy Mission. It is a treacherous walk down from the narrow bazaar in the dark, after a dinner of instant Maggi noodles in the Karma Hotel with syrupy tea for dessert and a shot of Dragon Rum “brewed and bottled,” the label claims, “by the Army Welfare Project, Samdrup Jongkhar.” Not a very glamorous name for a brewery, but the rum is quite good. The crowing of roosters wakes me from a warm and happy dream in which I am walking from the university library to meet Robert for coffee and croissants. My breakfast in Mongar is water and crackers. We say goodbye to Rita, who will now begin her six-hour walk to her school, and get back into the hi-lux for the three-hour drive to Tashigang.

Sasha is the first to be dropped off, at a village between Mongar and Tashigang. We help her unload her luggage, two suitcases, one large, one small, her tin box and hot-water flask. A young man appears, introduces himself as the headmaster, and leads us to his house, where we sit stiffly on hard benches. A small boy brings a wooden bowl of rice crisps and three cups of tepid tea. “Do you think the water was boiled properly for this?” I whisper to Sasha. She downs her tea in one long swallow in answer. Then we are taken to her quarters, a two-room cottage, its rough mud walls streaked with fresh whitewash. Inside there is a wooden bed frame, a desk, a chair. We stand at the doorway, peering in. Even Sasha looks unsettled. It is so starkly empty and far from home. A rooster crows outside, and I have to fight hard not to weep, overwhelmed at the thought of leaving Sasha here by herself, in this shack that is to be her home. I can’t imagine how she will survive, how any of us will. “What a great view,” Lorna says from the window, and my voice returns, false and bright and strained. “We’ll all visit each other,” I say. “We’ll only be a few hours apart when you think about it.” When I think about it, I realize I have a whole new meaning for “the middle of nowhere.”

We get back into the hi-lux and I turn to wave goodbye, but Sasha has gone inside and the door is firmly closed.

Subtropical, warm even now in early March, Tashigang is wedged into the crook of a mountain. Bougainvillea erupts over doorways and races along the top of stone walls, and tall, elegant eucalyptus sway over the stream that runs down from the mountain and through the middle of town. Tashigang reminds me of a medieval town, pictures from a high-school history book, the narrow crooked streets and three-storied, Tudor-style buildings with tiny balconies tacked on. The “lower market” is a row of shops along the road to the dzong; the “upper market” is a circle of shops around an enormous prayer wheel. Prayer wheels are cylinders inscribed with mantras, ranging from hand-held to room-sized. Spun around in a clockwise motion by the devout, they operate on the same principle as prayer flags: when set in motion, the printed mantras multiply the prayers being sent out for the benefit of all sentient beings. We sit on a bench outside a shop in the upper market and watch the traffic—horses carrying sacks of rice, two old women chatting beside the prayer wheel, children chasing a dog with a string of red chilies around its neck. Parked outside a shop, beside a blue UNDP jeep, is a battered bus with telltale streaks marring the Bhutan Government Transport Service sign painted across its side. “That must be the Vomit Comet,” Lorna says. “And look over there, that must be the fire station.” She points to four red, dented metal buckets hanging from a pole.

A white woman in a kira emerges from a shop. “Well, hello,” she says. “You must be the new Canadians. I’m Nancy. I expected you here three weeks ago but then the roads closed. What to do.” She shepherds us into the Puen Soom Hotel, a tiny restaurant in the corner of the market, and orders tea. There is a poster of the Canadian Rockies on the wall, and a miniature Canadian flag propped up among the bottles of whiskey behind the bar—signs of other Canadians in eastern Bhutan who use Tashigang as a meeting place. Nancy has a hangover, from a farewell party the night before. She is on her way out, her contract has finished, and she is returning to Canada. She has to be in Ottawa in three weeks, for an interview, for a job teaching in the Arctic, she tells us.

It must be something in the water, I think: no one here is content with a moderately difficult life. They all want to be four days off the road, and then, when they have served their time and can go back home to a nice warm apartment with a bus stop around the corner, they go teach in the Arctic!