The Bhutan Bulletins

By Peter Methven

In 2002 and 2003, the author lived and worked in the little-known and seldom-visited country of Bhutan, which sprawls along the Himalayas between India and Tibet. A century ago, the country was a mediaeval kingdom, with no roads and little contact with the outside world. Today it is in transition to becoming a modern democracy, with an elected government, universal health and education services, full electrification and 21st century communications. During his stay, the author dispatched regular newsletters to an ever-growing circle of relatives and friends overseas. In this volume, they have been compiled and re-edited. They present an affectionate, witty and light-hearted picture of a country struggling to modernise while maintaining its historical values and traditions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Methven
• Release date: Jan 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9780473136307

Peter Methven

Former teacher, outdoor education instructor, community education organiser, public servant and international consultant, now somewhat retired. Lives in Wellington, New Zealand, with partner Clare.

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Foreword

February 2000.

Brett L phoned. He was supposed to go to Bhutan in March, to gather background material for an Asia Development Bank contract. He was committed to singing in the International Festival opera. Could I go instead?

Could I what! Bhutan? The Forbidden Kingdom? Oh, yes!

So in March 2000 I went to Bhutan. For six days. Later in that year, for three more weeks. In 2002, for nine weeks, then for five months. In 2003, for three visits totalling seven-and-a-half months.

In 2001, I spent eight weeks in an equally remote but totally different corner of the globe, the tiny atoll of Nukunonu (pop. 365) in the Tokelau Islands. From there, via e-mail, I despatched a weekly bulletin on life on a Pacific dot to friends and relatives, called The Tokelau News.

This was well enough received that on my next visit to Bhutan, the third, I inaugurated the Bhutan Bulletin, which over the next two years ran to forty editions.

What follows was a collated and expanded version. The pre-Bulletin section was compiled in similar style from travel diaries and e-mails. Some overall editing was needed to eliminate typos, repetition and personal embarrassment (not necessarily mine). Otherwise, the text remains pretty much as it was written at the time.

The Bhutan Bulletins

Vol 1 No 1 4 March 2000

Preparing for the worst

Apart from a couple of goes-with-the-air-fare stopovers, the closest I’d ever been to Asia before was seven kilometres, straight up. Time for some research.

My first move was to look for a Lonely Planet guide to Bhutan in all of my favourite bookshops. It appeared that not too many Kiwi consumers have the Kingdom at the top of their preferred destinations list, as the shelf space between Bangladesh and Delhi was universally unoccupied. After much expenditure of time and shoe-leather I ran down a copy at Unity Books (advt.).

‘Bhutan’ has to be among the best of the Lonely Planet’s guides. Lucidly written with excellent illustrations, and ninety-nine per cent accurate, it offers a comprehensive introduction to the country’s history, culture, geography and amenities. The Kingdom lies on the southern slope of the Himalayas, north of Bangladesh (go to Nepal and turn right!). Its area is half that of the North Island (about 46,000 km²) and the mainly Buddhist population is roughly the same in numbers as the Wellington conurbation (650,000). Bhutan has never been successfully invaded, nor ruled by outsiders

I was fascinated, reading well into the night. Which became insomniac when I got to Health. Three major varieties of travellers’ diarrhoea and several minor. Tuberculosis, hepatitis A and B, polio, cholera, typhoid, enteric fever, Japanese encephalitis, rabies and other medical horrors were endemic. Along the Indian border lurk squadrons of malarial and dengue-laden mosquitoes. Don’t’ drink the water and don’t breathe the air. And don’t pat the dogs. I lay awake until dawn, mentally reviewing my will.

My doctor looked grave when I acquainted him with this cornucopia of health hazards. We decided that rabies shots were probably not essential, but a course of three for polio was, as I couldn’t recall receiving the Salk dose as a youth - nor, consulted by international telephone, could my mother, although she was ever so pleased to hear from me. A prescription for antibiotics and intestinal concrete tablets was written. Appointments were made and kept with the practice nurse and her ever-ready needle. Leaking expensive serum into a variety of strategically located band-aids, I continued my preparations.

Getting there is half the fun

Travellers to the Kingdom are admitted only if they are top-end tourists prepared to pay US$200 a day for a visa, or if they have been invited by the Royal Government of Bhutan (hereinafter referred to as the RGoB). I was in neither of these categories, and there was a delay of several days and countless e-mails before arrangements were made for me to fax my passport details to the Thimphu office of the National Technical Training Authority (the NTTA), my official hosts. It soon became apparent that the Bhutanese telephone system is not constituted for receiving foreign faxes, and I had to seek the assistance of the Telecom operator, who extracted a promise from her Himalayan counterpart that the line would be kept open long enough for my message to get through. Which, eventually, it did, yielding in return an ornate document, written partly in elf-runes, that granted me entry to the Kingdom from 29 February to 9 March.

Obtaining the visa was a doddle compared with buying a ticket. The only airline flying into Bhutan is the national carrier, Royal Druk Air. It is on no accessible database and its offices do not respond to e-mails. My travel agent did her best but could find no way of extracting a seat from the system. I e-mailed my Bhutanese visa contact, who returned the Internet address of a Thimphu agency, Atlas Travel Services. This was when I learned that the plastic variety of Visa has yet to penetrate the Kingdom - I could book a seat but not pay for it on the Net. Stalemate. Atlas resolved our mutual dilemma by e-mailing, Your ticket will be at the Druk Air counter when you check in at Bangkok – pay us when you got here. I decided there and then that I was going to like these people.

I couldn’t believe the fare, though. US$680 return, or NZ$1500 – about the same cost as the many-times-longer journey from Wellington to Bangkok.

The packing list grew. Long-johns and down jacket against the Himalayan winter. Lord of the Rings in one volume for airline and hotel reading. Stemetil, Dia-stop, Gastrolite, Kyo-dophilus, iodine (for sterilising the water) and vitamin C (to kill the taste of the iodine – a new one to me, but it works).

Up, up and away

A pleasant 737 flight to Auckland, with many cockpit announcements relaying the state of the America’s Cup (which, as the world knows, we won, that time). A lost young Malaysian woman attached herself to me at the domestic terminal and hung on determinedly until we reached International Departures. I asked if she was travelling on holiday and she told me that she was going home for her father’s funeral. So much for light conversation.

Singapore Airlines was an okay way to fly, though the Singapore Girls weren’t as lissom as advertised – the one in my part of the 747’s steerage could best be described as motherly. I appreciated the Kris-world mini-TV in the seat-back before me, and its user’s-choice selection of programmes, until the seat’s occupant decided to take some Zs and slumped into full recline. This placed the entertainment ten centimetres from my sternum. Hunched like Quasimodo, I watched The Lion in Winter and The Bone Collector in extreme and oddly coloured close-up.

Ten hours passed, not to mention Australia and Indonesia. S-l-o-w-l-y.

Singapore’s Changi terminal was very, very long. I got lots of exercise tracking down the smoking room (small and fetid) and the more accommodating outside terrace (large and humid).

From Singapore to Bangkok it was very dark and jungly below, with occasional scattered lights but no real sense of habitation. At Bangkok, where we landed at close to midnight, there was another very long terminal and more exercise. After exploring a number of the vast building’s levels and extremities, I tracked down the entrance to the Amari Airport hotel, a minimally signposted lobby halfway down the departure terminal. Up in the lift, across a long pedestrian bridge over railway tracks, and down an escalator (descelator?) to Reception. The staff on duty had difficulty in locating my reservation and even more in processing my travellers’ cheques. The quoted room price of US$120 turned out to be US$141 with local taxes – that was NZ$320, and outrageous.

I had a restorative brandy-and-dry in the Zeppelin Bar, which entailed another lengthy and meandering transaction. An unknown tipple in those parts, it seemed. What I got was a not-altogether-unwelcome, industrial-strength cognac-and-dry. Thus anaesthetised, I staggered off to my over-priced room, and slept intermittently for four hours.

Four hours? Yes, the Druk Air flight check-in is at 0500, so be there, ‘cause it’s the only one today!

On the wings of the thunder dragon

Valiantly attempting to keep both eyes open at the same time, I trudged back across the footbridge at five in the morning and found the Druk Air counter, contained within an enclosure resembling a large cattle pen. There was an exceptionally paranoid security check before I was admitted. Some of my fellow passengers appeared to had been on the shopping trip of a lifetime, as they were burdened with boxed stereo systems, rolled mattresses, brown paper parcels and sundry plastic bags. Others, of the trekking persuasion, staggered under gigantic packs hung about with stuff-bags. I speculated about the cargo capacity of our aircraft as this weighty miscellany chugged along the conveyor belt and disappeared down the slide at its end.

My ticket was not, in fact, at the check-in counter, but was eventually retrieved from the Druk Air office in an adjacent building. I paid my Bt500 departure tax and moved through to the huge departure hall, which is largely devoted to mechanisms for separating travellers from their cash. Declining numerous opportunities to acquire a new camera, a bottle of whiskey or a foot massage, I located Gate 1, which was at ground level, and there awaited the transfer bus. My fellow passengers were variously clad in suits and ties (consultants), very old tweed jackets (English consultants), saris, intrepid explorer gear, tracksuits (Bhutanese) and, here and there, what look like shortie dressing gowns (Bhutanese in national costume).

Our Bae 146, a fat four-engined bird known to Ansett NZ travellers (remember Ansett?) as the ‘Whisper Jet’, was sequestered like a poor relation in a distant corner of the airport that, judging by the length of the bus journey, lay closer to Phnom Pen than Bangkok. A well-worn interior awaited us at the top of a flight of battered aluminium steps. I had a window seat, which was good, and a hobbit’s leg-room, which was not. Between the aisle and me was a large and loud American in a multi-pocketed safari suit, accompanied by a pneumatic young woman half his age, undoubtedly his daughter. I learned a great deal more than I wished to about his previous travel experiences, acquiring in the process a superfluity of detail about flying on small planes into remote and perilous airfields. It was comforting to reflect that our pilots were probably aware of the hazards and undoubtedly motivated by the knowledge that they are always the first to arrive at the scene of the crash.

To forestall further anecdotes, I stared resolutely out of the window at, successively, Thailand, Myanmar and the Bay of Bengal. Rice fields, tree-girt villages, jungle and grey-green sea, unreeling below like a silent geography lesson.

Calcutta. As at Bangkok, the Druk Air flight was allotted parking a considerable distance from the terminal building, while the few embarking and disembarking passengers were transferred to and fro by bus. The day was cloudless and very hot. Icy vapour dribbled from the air-conditioning vents. The only entertainment was provided by three lethargic sweepers who were slowly and carefully massaging the surrounding hectares of incandescent concrete with witches’ brooms. Every so often, one would amble across to stand panting for ten minutes in the shade of our wing.

After an hour or so, the skipper announced that Paro, Bhutan’s international and only airport, was closed by low cloud and drizzle. As he has to land by VFR (now that was reassuring!) we would have to wait until it cleared. Silence, heat, humidity, another instalment of Papa Hemingway’s life-story, another announcement. Paro was still socked-in, so we were all going to the international transit lounge for lunch and a leg-stretch. Herded onto an ancient and smelly bus, we were conveyed the distant off-white terminal.

Tipoo Sahib would have heartily approved of the Dum Dum transit lounge. Dingy, hot as a Turkish bath, furnished with adhesively tacky plastic-and-chrome chairs and a faded black-and-white mural of the Taj Mahal, it was the last word in unhygienic fifties retro. We were there for a very long time. I chatted to a couple of German fitters on their way to a six months’ stint at Bhutan’s newest hydro project and to a thirty-ish Bhutanese woman, Pema Yangzome Namgyal, on her way back from a World Wildlife Fund conference in the Philippines. She was a fount of information on the Kingdom’s languages and culture, the national dress code, how to give presents, where to eat – definitely the silver lining in Calcutta’s Black Hole. I acquired three useful phrases in Dzongkha, the major national language – kuso zangpo-la (‘greetings’ – literally, ‘may your body always be healthy’), kadinchey-la (‘thank you’) and chabsang (‘the dunny’).

The clock ticked. The Druk Air rep came in at intervals to tell us that Paro was still closed. As our hand luggage had been left on the plane, I prevailed on him to find me a paperback novel, which turned out to be full of heaving bosoms and split infinitives. What the hell, it passed the time. I drank more Coke than I ever wanted to see again and declined the free curry lunch. The bread rolls offered as a substitute had the taste and texture of cotton wadding and were binned after one bite (the German fitters, I observed, made the same choice with the identical result). Yawn. Fidget. Seven-and-a-half hours after we touched down and just as we were getting resigned to – even looking forward to – a night in a Calcutta hotel, the clouds lifted over Paro and we were returned to the plane.

Good pilots have an equal number of take-offs and landings

Once in the air, we motored up a long grey ramp of cloud spiked with cauliflower heads of cumulus, towards the world’s backbone. Which remained invisible, except for a distant glimpse of the Kachenjunga massif. I took many photos without much expectation – distance, vibration, a rather dirty window (they came out rather well, nonetheless). The cumulus closed ranks as we climbed higher until, over Bhutan itself, there was an unbroken stormscape, seemingly impenetrable.

The pilot stooged around for a while, destroying our collective equanimity by cheerfully announcing that he was ‘looking for a hole’. He must have found one, because we sank abruptly into the grey mass below, rocking sickeningly in the turbulence. When we emerged into clear air, we were in a twilit slot between precipitous brown rock walls dotted with luminous green conifers (so close you could count the pine-cones). In the next several minutes we threaded a succession of these narrow twisting corridors, past terraced fields cut into barren hillsides, whitewashed three-storey farmhouses, the sugar-cube shapes of chorten shrines, gold-spired temples clinging to cliffs and ridge-tops, and, on final approach, the rectangular bulk of a red-roofed dzong – which is to say, a combination of fortress and monastery. We swept across a last ridge (you could count the grass-blades), through a stomach-wrenching descending turn, followed almost instantly by the squeak and rumble of touch-down … and a round of appreciative applause from the cabin, perhaps not so much at the expertise of the landing as the fact that there was one.

I took a zillion photos during the descent and several more of the airport terminal, which looked as though it might have been spawned by the dzong. Inside, we zipped through immigration and customs, whose officials wore traditional gho – the aforementioned shortie dressing-gowns – in assorted tartans and stripes. When I emerged from Arrivals, and contrary to numerous e-mail messages, there was no-one from NTTA to meet me. I stood about uncertainly while my fellow passengers were hailed and whisked away in a variety of mini-coaches and Hi-lux pickups. It was cold and getting dark. Thimphu was two mountain ranges away. Welcome to Bhutan! Yeah, right!

… and just when you think the worst is over …

I was pointed by a group of English-speaking (well, sort of) friendlies at the Druk Air minibus, in which I was the sole passenger. The driver either did not understand English or was a practising misanthrope. The only words exchanged for the entire journey were at the beginning – ‘Yeedzin Guest House’ – and the end – ‘three hundred ngultrum’ (a ngultrum is the larger of Bhutan’s two units of currency and is at par with the Indian rupee, so the cost of the sixty kilometre journey was roughly ten bucks).

The drive began innocuously enough, along a valley road – narrow, winding and ill-paved – between precipitous brown ridges. We passed through a couple of villages of traditional three-storey housing, those along the roadside having open-fronted shops at ground level. At intervals were the isolated and crumbling remains of burned-out mud-brick farmhouses – I learned later that it was considered unlucky to rebuild on the same site after a fire, though the ruins might be scavenged for materials. Below and to the right ran a substantial river, with tiny rice-paddies, bare at this season, along its banks. Faster traffic overtook in a blare of horns and flash of headlights, while opposing vehicles held to the crown of the road until the last nanosecond – not so bad if it was a car or a taxi, but a tad unnerving when it was a vast Tata truck or, on one occasion, a giant travelling crane.

We crossed a substantial girder bridge and the river, now on my side, dropped away in a spectacular series of rapids and waterfalls. The left-hand drop increased to ten metres, then twenty, then I-really-don’t-want-to-think-about-numbers-any-more metres. Night fell. Rain fell. Did we slow down? Absolutely not! The road climbed around a bluff at whose highest point, to avoid an unexpected Tata truck, the driver swerved towards the void, straightening up and squeezing through with the off-side wheels gripping nothing more substantial than a crumbling edge of wet red mud. I progressed from apprehension through fear to abject terror and beyond, eventually achieving a kind of zen calm. If it was my time to die, then so be it.

But it wasn’t. After an hour or so the lights of Thimphu (some of them perched in unlikely places on unbelievable slopes) emerged from the damp night. We wound down a long hill, crossed another river, and zigzagged through narrow dimly-lit streets on the further side to a gated courtyard. It was the Yeedzin. I paid the driver his Nu300, and located reception, whence a lad with little English showed me to a ski-lodge-type room on the third, or top, floor. Climbing the uncarpeted stairs was an excellent reminder that Thimphu is seven-and-a-half thousand feet above sea-level, and that the air’s a bit seldom. Wheezing gently, I surveyed my temporary home. Walls dark-panelled to chest height with whitewashed plaster above. Twin beds, a coffee table and a small desk. A tiled en-suite bathroom in the style of the late British Raj. After unpacking, I clattered down one floor to the restaurant, where I enjoyed a Singha beer and a very tasty chicken-fried-rice. Then back to my room to sleep. Hah!

The bed was your basic Indian charpoy, its rough-sawn wooden frame supporting a thin mattress stuffed, from the feel of it, with back numbers of the National Geographic. The pillow was the size and texture of the Book of Common Prayer. I slept cold and intermittently, though undisturbed by the legendary barking of Thimphu’s feral dog population. Maybe it was their night off.

Memo: buy bed socks.

Vol 1 No 2 4 March 2000

First impressions

In the morning, having mastered the bathroom’s complex array of taps and valves by a process of trial and error, I phoned home. At least, that was the intention. I got through via the hotel switchboard and a conversation in fractured English, gave Clare the hotel and room number, and waited for her to call back (if you’ve never stayed in a hotel overseas, be advised that their outward telephone charges can be three or more times the local telecom rate). Nothing happened. For a very long time. I rang again. Number engaged. Wait some more. Eventually got through, chatted for five minutes (I’m here, I’m alive, it’s amazing) and paid the hotel charge, $US36.00 (told you!).

Seen by daylight, the restaurant’s walls and ceiling turned out to be elaborately painted in a traditional (and mandatory, I discovered later) pattern of lucky symbols, legendary animals, and assorted demons and deities. The dining area was conventionally furnished with European-style tables and chairs, but the adjacent lounge featured olde-worlde backless cushioned benches arranged around flat-topped carved chests. Definitely not Kansas. There seemed to be remarkably few guests. I had a cheese omelette, ‘English’ toast and black tea. About three dollars. My daily allowance was going to go a long way.

Afterwards, in my bright green-and-yellow mountain jacket and Akubra, I took an exploratory stroll down to the main drag, Norzim Lam, then along its length northwards. Thimphu lies in the valley of the Wang Chhu (river Wang), flanked by 4000m ridges. That’s right, folks, everywhere your eye travels was already higher than Mt Cook! The river runs close to the valley’s precipitous eastern slopes, so the city sprawls up its gentler western side, a warren of narrow streets, three-storey whitewashed buildings banded with traditional artwork, narrow rubbish-strewn alleys lurking between. Dogs were everywhere, mangy and unkempt., sprawled in sleep across the narrow uneven pavements, in the middle of the street, on steps and shop verandas, under cars.

Nearly all of the men wore the gho, a very long, very wide buttonless gown that is gathered and tucked to a wearable knee-length, and secured by a very tight belt. Long socks and sturdy shoes complete the ensemble. The capacious front serves as pockets, brief-case, shopping bag and, occasionally, cradle. The women glide rather more sinuously in ankle-length kira, a three-panelled rectangle wrapped and belted around the torso, and ornately pinned at each shoulder, over a silk shirt. On formal occasions the kira is topped with a toego, an abbreviated silk jacket, but in this wintry weather sweaters and parkas were more common. Babies hung in slings at the backs of both men and women. There were fragments of Western clothing here and there – notably on street-corner teenagers doing their damnedest to look like bad-ass gangsta rappers – but the total effect, against the background of whitewashed walls and brilliantly painted wood, was exotic.

The lowest storey of many buildings was given over to shops, narrow, dim and smelly Aladdin’s caves full of mysterious sacks and boxes. Most had shutters rather than windows. I stopped at one with bright skeins of knitting wool on display and obtained a pair of heavy socks for fifty rupees, about $NZ2.00 – the marked price was Ru42, but, hey, what do I expect, dressed like a tourist? Back at the Yeedzin I bought an English-language edition of Kuensel, the national newspaper – it is also printed in Dzongkha and Sharchop, the two major indigenous languages. Lots of clues within its pages about the economy and society. Galloping rural-urban migration. Huge government construction projects, financed by foreign aid. Minor juvenile delinquency. Much unemployment. Sits vac offered mostly government jobs with much emphasis on success in written examinations.

I was there to background a bid for a vocational training project, and kicked that off in a meeting with local consultant Sangay Penjore and two associates, who were interested in being the in-country component of the project team. Not a particularly illuminating conversation, nor did they seem to know a hell of a lot about vocational training. They did, however, know the pay rate for indigenous consultants, which is $US600 a month, or about the same as senior foreign consultants get per day! Hmmm. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.

Sightseeing with Sally-from-Melbourne

Shortly thereafter a driver from NTTA turned up at the Yeedzin to take me sightseeing. A pleasant young man named Kinley, he arrived in a brand-new white Toyota Hi-lux double-cab, which is the standard RGoB conveyance. We went first to another hotel to pick up Sally-from-Melbourne, of whose existence I was already aware from e-mail correspondence with NTTA. She was also bidding for the voc ed project on behalf of an Australian university. She proved to be a power-dressed thirty-something, much experienced in the foreign consultancy field. I feel appropriately intimidated.

Our first (and only, as it turned out) stop was at the Woodcraft Institute, a Danish-funded training centre that produces, strangely enough, Danish furniture. It was a busy wee place for a Saturday, full of blue-overalled workers and noisy machines. The 42 trainees, twelve of them women, serve a four-year apprenticeship. All have secondary school qualifications, but with insufficiently high marks to secure RGoB white-collar jobs. They live on site, with government support for the first year, after which they earn their way. Not surprisingly, there’s a limited market for austere, expensive, Scandahoovian furniture in Bhutan, however beautifully made, so most of the product ends up in RGoB offices, and in hotels. Somewhat belatedly, Bhutanese themes were being worked into the upholstery, to make the output more attractive locally. After graduation, the trainees can set up workshops of their own with government-sponsored business training and financial assistance, or they can stay on at the Institute as instructors. In order to encourage added-value enterprises of this type, the RGoB has forbidden the export of raw timber, a good example of matching policy with practice.

Sightseeing without Sally-from-Melbourne

That was the official itinerary over, but Kinley was at our disposal for the rest of the day. Sally-from-Melbourne wanted to