So Close to Heaven (34 page)

“I
N
THE
OLD
DAYS
before they built the motor road, travel by horse was much more fun,” said Aum Rinzi, a septuagenarian who was once a member of the royal court. “There was a lot more pomp to it all,” she recalls, as she sits surrounded by old photographs from the days when India was under the British Raj and the Bhutanese were a little-known, exotic people living in a Himalayan kingdom at the juncture of heaven and earth. The Bhutan of her childhood and young adulthood has not entirely vanished, she says, but those who traverse the kingdom now need sharp eyes and a scaled-down sense of urgency to appreciate the old life. We need to tarry more in the splendor of magnificent temples and the peace of gentle meadows.

On trips from west to east and north to south, I thought of Aum Rinzi often and tried to imagine what she had seen, or would see now, along the new roads that weren’t there until late in her life. These few roads, merely narrow ribbons of tarmac barely denting a wild landscape of dark forests and bottomless gorges, nonetheless have too quickly become the parameters of contemporary life, preempting many choices for visitors of what to see or where to go. But the few highways do make travel viable in Bhutan for those whose time is limited to something short of a grand expedition, so there is no point in being Luddite about them.

When British political agents, attached first to the East India Company and later to the colonial government of India, toured a wary Bhutan in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they and their extensive
entourages of military aides, doctors, ecological specimen collectors, watercolorists, and occasional spouses traveled a rough road, when there was a road at all. They trudged along perilous narrow trails over passes as high as seventeen thousand feet and suffered altitude sickness, snow blindness, and a catalogue of fevers. They swung on rope-and-bamboo bridges over ravines hundreds of feet deep, slid along glaciers, and watched pack animals, provisions, and porters plunge over cliff faces. Mules died from eating poisonous plants.

In 1909, when John Claude White wrote the introduction to
Sikkim and Bhutan
—one of the best books ever written on the region, despite its author’s arrogant, even insufferable, attitude toward many of the locals—he explained that he was devoting a good deal of space to the history and culture of the Bhutanese to counter the negative impressions left by his predecessors. He quoted this dismissive bureaucratic summary of Bhutan from the preface to an 1894 British gazetteer: “No one wishes to explore that tangle of jungle-clad and fever-stricken hills, infested with leeches and the pipsa fly, and offering no compensating advantage to the most enterprising pioneer. Adventure looks beyond Bhutan. Science passes it by as a region not sufficiently characteristic to merit special exploration.”

This dyspeptic and uncharitable colonial scribe would hardly have anticipated that a century later, time and the experiences of his successors would prove him wrong on all counts. In the hundred years that have passed, Bhutan has become more, not less, of an attraction. Because it has preserved its jungle-clad hills and forested mountains while other Himalayan regions have stripped and eroded theirs, this small kingdom is a wonderland for environmentalists. Many epidemic diseases have been conquered or controlled, though leeches still flourish (and abdominal and lung infections are still killers of children, the weak, and the elderly in remote villages). For the adventurer, mountain peaks remain unsealed, and sometimes also unnamed. Ecologists and naturalists come to marvel at nature and wildlife: groves of tree-tall rhododendrons, butterflies of amazing size and coloration, exotic birds flying free, and endangered animals found in few other habitats.

Culturally, you are there the moment the plane touches down on land that might otherwise be rice fields. There is no town, no airport highway. There is no necessity or requirement, as with travel to Sikkim or Ladakh, to traverse the wholly different, encircling, dominating cultures
of Hinduism or Islam to arrive at the gate of this mountain nation. One arrives in Bhutan without excess mental baggage picked up from facilitators: the Kashmiris running the buses and taxis to Leh, the Bengalis and Biharis who deliver you to Sikkim. There is no colonial history or architecture to get in the way of what is Bhutanese. Except for the small airport, and lately a few new hotels, the Paro Valley wouldn’t have looked much different decades ago to Aum Rinzi, or to White half a century earlier.

When White went to Bhutan as political officer for the first time, in the spring of 1905, it had been decades since the last British agent, Ashley Eden, had visited the hermetic country—and he had been roundly humiliated by the Bhutanese in subtle and unsubtle ways. London had to maintain a relationship with Bhutan because of its location on the tricky northern rim of British India, where a Himalayan version of the Great Game was played by Tibetans, Chinese, Russians, and assorted other parties. For generations, the Bhutanese made the job of diplomacy as difficult as possible for foreigners, a story gracefully and authoritatively told by Peter Collister in
Bhutan and the British.
But attitudes on both sides had changed significantly by 1904, when Ugyen Wangchuck (then Tongsa penlop and later the first king) decided to cooperate with the British against the Tibetans, and so a year later White and his party, complete with pipes and drums “and the usual following of chupprassies and servants,” were struggling across the snowy passes from Sikkim through Tibet’s Chumbi Valley toward a lavish Bhutanese welcome. “The arrangements were so good they augured well for the future welfare of our mission,” White wrote. He had come to present Ugyen Wangchuck with the title and insignia of a Knight Companion of the Indian Empire, and to explore ways to further improve ties between the Bhutanese and British.

Visitors arriving nearly a century later no longer enter Bhutan over mountain passes from Tibet, which the Chinese, Bhutanese, and Indians have declared off limits to foreigners for a variety of strategic and diplomatic reasons. But tourists do land not far from where White first tarried for a few days of rest after his arduous trek from Sikkim, and where he was assigned a comfortable tent and given “tea, oranges and fruit for our refreshment.” From there he went to Tashichodzong, in what is now Thimphu, the national capital. Most tourists start with the same itinerary, and as they proceed from one “night halt” to the next across the
country, they measure their journey in dzongs: Punakha, Wangdiphrodang, Tongsa, Jakar, Tashigang. The distinctive silhouettes of these fortress-monasteries are still the major landmarks of the kingdom. Their architecture is unique: the high, thick walls may slope inward as they rise, as they do in the palaces and monasteries of Tibet and Ladakh, but Bhutanese buildings, more or less perennially under repair, are now probably the richest of any in craftsmanship inside and out. Only the new gompas of Kathmandu would rival them in artisanship, though not in the value of their antiquities or the timeless magnificence of their sturdy half-timbered walls and chambers.

The small British BAE-146 aircraft—there are a total of two of them (both blessed by lamas) that compose Druk Air, the national carrier—slip almost noiselessly between forested hills as they approach the airstrip at Paro, probably the longest straight stretch of paved surface in Bhutan (if you don’t count the mysterious runway the Indian military built for itself in the middle of nowhere off the road to Kanglung in eastern Bhutan). To someone sitting on the lawn of the Olathang Hotel in Paro, the appearance of the small plane in the afternoon sky is always a little startling and incongruous, as if it had wandered in from some other universe and was looking for a place to rest. For those trying hard to avoid a clichéd allusion to the tale of Shangri-la, the experience of landing in Paro is pretty much irresistibly evocative of James Hilton’s fictional account of a landing (but without the crash) in that hidden valley in Tibet. Like British expeditions of old, arriving foreigners are still met by a guide if not a welcoming party. The Bhutanese see their guide-escort service as partly a manifestation of their traditional hospitality to the outsiders they have decided to admit, and partly a way to keep foreigners under what in other, less friendly countries would be called surveillance.

The journey from the Paro airport to anywhere else begins with a brief but ethereal passage between rows of willows along a rushing stream. The narrow lane meets the main road at a ramshackle collection of shops that the newcomer frequently mistakes for Paro town. Unless you have asked to stop over or spend the night in Paro (coming or going from Bhutan), you will not see it, or its magnificent dzong and museum. The broad Paro Valley is noted for its rich farmlands and its appropriately better-than-average houses. Although most homes in Bhutan share the same half-timbered architectural style, the houses in Paro are often grander and are almost always distinguished by windows of three tiers
(instead of the usual two) in height. To understand this arrangement, imagine a large picture window perhaps six by eight feet, divided into nine smaller windows, stacked three to a row. Each small window is framed in Bhutanese style, rectangular except for a trefoil pattern at the top, rather like an elaborate Moorish arch. The outer wallspace of a house devoted to windows generally shrinks in proportion to the distance traveled from Paro, though there are all kinds of exceptions. Relatively spacious windows can be found on the better houses of Bumthang, half a country away. And once on a morning walk along a hillside above Thimphu, the center of wealth and influence, I saw a traditional window rendered in
trompe l’oeil
on the side of a very small cottage where, perhaps, the budget didn’t extend to wood and glass. Outside the major towns, most Bhutanese do not have glass. Windows are not covered, except by shutters or sliding wood panels that close from the inside at night and during cold or wet weather.

Whatever the dimensions or number of internal components of a real Bhutanese window, it is always handcrafted by woodcarvers working on the ground before it is lifted into the wood-frame, rammed-earth, or stone-walled house. The tiered windows are carved of a pleasing golden timber from a local hardwood tree. The frames may remain unfinished, to weather as the seasons change, or may be painted in intricate patterns and folk-art symbols, most with religious significance.

One winter afternoon on the road from Paro to Thimphu, I stopped with a retired government official of Aum Rinzi’s generation to watch two local painters decorating the window frames and nearly every other piece of exposed wood on a new two-story home. The lower level of the house was, as is customary, reserved for farm equipment, animals, and crop storage and was left mostly unadorned. But the half-timbered upper story had become a limitless canvas for the artists, two young men bundled in scarves against the wind that blew over the plank on which they sat, which had been suspended on what amounted to a swing fastened to the roof. They had a small carton of assorted paints in cans and bottles, from which they both worked. The colors they used were traditional and locally made from plants, earth, and minerals. These natural paints, slightly muted in tone, have a longer life than brighter synthetics, I was told in Tongsa, where the dzongda showed me the evidence on two contrasting walls of the dzong. The store-bought paint like that used everywhere else in the Himalayas had faded in a generation; the traditional
paint had not lost its colors in a century. The subdued old hues certainly have a more pleasing appearance, not only in the decorative arts but also in woven fabrics.

The painters working on the roadside house had begun by tinting all the wooden trim either a muted gray-blue or terra-cotta: blue for the wall timbering, terra-cotta for the window frames and a foot-tall baseboard that delineated the upper story from the one below. On the painted wood, the artists then added bright lotuses or other stylized flowers, geometric designs, chains of conch shells and clouds, vases symbolizing repositories of Buddhist doctrine, and rows of white dots. All were combinations of four basic colors: the gray-blue and terra-cotta of the base paint, along with white and mustard gold. Only occasionally, a spot of green was employed or a pale blue was added for contrast. In this house, the windows had eight panels, set in two rows of four frames each. Each small frame was about two feet high and a foot wide. Using only their homemade paints, the folk artists had skillfully transformed each frame, with its trefoil top, into a miniature arch lined with gold, resting on columns, and generously capped with flowers. The eight arched inner frames were then enclosed by an outer frame trimmed in a contrasting pattern. Above the windows, where plaster walls met the overhanging roof, the end of each exposed crossbeam had also been individually decorated, as was the space between them. Thus a band of colorful shapes encircled the house at roof level. Set against the whitewash of the walls, however, this ornamentation, though intense, is never garish, perhaps because of the repetition of colors and shapes and the artists’ refined sense of balance in design. Every symbol or pattern seemed right for the surface or space on which it was painted.

Apart from the traditional architecture, there are other enticements in Paro. Instead of turning off the airport road toward Chhuzom—literally the crossroads of Bhutan, where the north-south road meets the east-west highway—the traveler can detour instead through Paro town and on to Drukyel Dzong. Paro may not be very picturesque, but it illustrates the extreme recentness of the kingdom’s commercial development. Although visitors to Paro nearly a century ago remarked that there were as many as thirty houses, there was no business quarter, and there was none when Aum Rinzi traveled these routes, then trails. Dago Tshering, Bhutan’s home minister, remembers walking as a boy from Paro over mountain paths to the new national capital at Thimphu, when
modern towns were just beginning to evolve. Most Bhutanese commercial centers have been built since the 1960s, after the construction of roads and the introduction of a cash economy. These towns, still mostly in the shadows of dzongs, function almost entirely as service areas selling fuel and provisions and offering basic health care and education.