From Himalayan Roads: Chapter Two - Crossing Bhutan - Kanglung to Bumthang

Part One: Kanglung to Mongar

From Trashigang in eastern Bhutan to Bumthang at the center, the roads are best thought of on a vertical plane. These are the foothills of the Himalayas. Once you finish the low and flat traverse of the Dangme Chu river from Chasm bridge to its confluence with a tributary whose name I do not know, the road begins its precipitous switchbacks into the sky. This should not be mistaken as a frictionless ascension into heaven. No, the road is under significant construction and has been mangled and destroyed in the name of purported expansion. The rumors of expansion seem ridiculous at times, when nary a miniscule Maruti Alto can fit between the carved out cliff pushing against the passenger side and the perilous drop kissing the driver’s side tires. When the road is ample enough for two cars, it is reduced to dirt, stones, drops and ruts befitting a four wheel drive rally course. This is the way you climb up into the clouds. Battered, dusty, constantly vibrating. It’s even worse on a motorcycle. Then you get the tropical cold whipping at your face, you suffocate on the dust, and the incessant shaking gets you down to the marrow.

There is a mental preparedness that is needed for these long journeys on a bike that I am yet to learn. All attention should be focused on the task at hand. Adding to the road’s disrepair, there are always cattle casually meandering down it, stray dogs sunning themselves, and darting troops of monkeys that, if you are distracted, could send you swerving off of the cliff side. It’s a shame really; there is little time and space to notice the beautiful villages punctuated with orange trees and rice paddies, their stewards at work in the glow of the day, adorning traditional dress and weathered from years of labor. These are the relatively untouched Bhutanese villages, as close to five hundred years in the past as I’ll ever get. Because of the road, I could only process all of this in my periphery. It’s all a memory that, as a visitor, I could only brush up against, a life that I’ll remember as swaths of color and blurry images punctuated by brief clarity: the smile of a grandfather as he rises from his field work to watch me pass by, the glance of a beautiful village girl in an ersatz Adidas jacket, selling oranges at a roadside stand. I wanted to collect those moments of clarity and hold onto them as my last contact with eastern Bhutan. But I quickly forgot, and returned my attention to the road.

It was dangerous how I was driving. I was preoccupied with the pain of leaving a place I had called home for the last year. Kanglung was often times lonely and there was little to do other than play soccer with my colleagues and teach the hapless curriculum to my students. The dearth of food options, with seasonal scarcities of fresh fruits and vegetables, even left my taste buds bored. Entertainment in the Boys’ Sick Room, especially in the monsoon season, included watching the growth of incubated wall molds and flushing out scorpions, spiders, and rats that came in looking for refuge from the rain. But somehow, as the months wore on, I began to grow comfortable with the place. Now I was doing something, starting a real adventure, and I found that I was already nostalgic for that Kanglung boredom.

As I clunked along the national highway and rose up into the temperate forests, with wild poinsettias in full bloom and rhododendrons in their winter sleep, my mind processed the growing distance between me and Kanglung. It was a distance that had momentum, one that would likely take me away from my friends forever. For a year I had sat in people’s homes, eaten meals and drank with them while assuming a false-state of permanence. My neighbors would sit outside with me in the sun and we would chat trivially, without a rush, no need to say it all. Time was abundant. Shopkeepers in the village knew me by name and offered me betel nut and, when I’d politely refuse, gum or some other candy. My students, always cordial and polite, would bow and wish me a good evening when I meandered around campus. I stood out as the only foreigner in the area and yet felt part of a community. It was a sensation I had not felt for years. To leave such a place left a regret that gnawed at me as I climbed the steep grades toward Mongar.

What’s more is I had fallen in love, secretly and at a distance. There was a woman that I wanted nothing more than to stay with, who I imagined a future with, but who I was now willing myself to forget because to remember her would mean to carry a great pain with me. As I had just begun the journey, I could not forget her, and every few minutes I found myself whispering her name, wishing it out into the forested peaks so far away. Her very presence there in her small village pulled on my back and I made impossible plans to return to her in a month, or to fly her to Kathmandu, or to come back in years, still in love and hopeful that she was too. Moving up and away from her felt wrong. But I told myself that logically it was right. As I arrived at the first high-altitude pass, I found that I couldn’t breathe and I knew that it was not because of the thinness of the air. 

By midafternoon, I rolled into the eastern hub of Mongar. I was covered in dust and ached from the endless barrage of washboards and ruts. I was in sore need of a rest and a good meal.

On a global scale, Mongar would be considered a small village, but by eastern Bhutanese standards it’s a thriving metropolis. You can buy exotic items there, like olive oil and almonds. It has a town center with multicolored, multistoried, cement buildings, self-consciously attempting to look traditional. There is traffic; a car or two on the main thoroughfare went by every minute by my calculations, something almost unheard of in Kanglung.

The town was even busier when I arrived because, as luck would have it, it was time for the annual tsechu. Mongar was alive and bustling, concentrated in the local dzong, an imposing fortress with white walls and ochre tops that exuded a history of monarchical power. A tsechu is a thing to behold, not just because it is steeped in isolated, tantric Buddhist history, but because of the sensory overload that it emits, quite different than the routines that characterize much of daily village life.

The people had gathered in their best national dress. Men who are hardened and swarthy, walked in like noblemen adorning their finest silk ghos. The women forget their worries and responsibilities and arose to the status of queens in their intricate kiras, most with flowers woven into them, as is fit for the occasion. They could be models on any runway in the world, carrying themselves with the pride of possessing a beauty hidden faraway. I, as a visitor here, both then and for the entire time I have been in Bhutan, watched stunned. Sure, it’s easy to fall in love here. Take your images of Victoria’s Secret and Ralph Lauren models and tear them to pieces and let the scraps fall to the floor. This is a beauty that is pure and absent of pretentiousness, one that could fare equally well on a pedestal as harvesting rice in the autumn sun. It is a beauty sans filters, imperfect, and in being so it is interesting, alive, and filled with humanity. Watching the tsechu crowd was just as captivating to me as the tsechu itself.

Masked dancers.

But a tsechu is something to behold. The masked dances were going on and furls of color topped with demonic faces spun and darted about in the central ground. I tried to piece together what Mahayanist stories they could be portraying, but came up empty handed. The clangs of the cymbals and cry of the gyaling were haunting and arcane; I grabbed ahold of something so as not to drift into a trance.

A group of French tourists had assumed a front row position for pictures. Despite being the largest concentration of westerners that I had seen all year (and a bit intimidating for that very fact), I glommed onto them in order to get some good photos too. In response to my proximity, they gave me critical, sideways glances, as if questioning what right I had to join them. So I moved away and befriended some Bhutanese who welcomed me with smiles, making me feel much more at home. 

I also found Valerie, a fellow foreign teacher who was placed in Mongar. A UK native, Valerie claims that she’s 111 years old. You wouldn't guess she's a year above 49. When we arrived here, she and I chanted “We’re in fucking Bhutan!” over and over, excited about the year of teaching ahead. Now we were both trying to define the roil of feelings that comes with departure. 

Valerie was waiting with her friend to receive a tsechu blessing that must have been a doozy because the line went for miles. Once of the blessing was through, we all left together, the vibrant crowd and Mahayanist noise continuing to chase spirits away behind us.

Tsechu crowd in line for the super blessing.

That night the center of the universe was the Mongar soccer field. For the tsechu, it became covered with a hodgepodge of tossup shops selling wares, inviting the lucky and unlucky in for gambling, and stirring up curries, snacks, and liquor for patrons. We were joined by a third teacher, Dan, who was about to begin his second year teaching in Bhutan after a brief hiatus. The Druk 11000 beers (eight percent alcohol) called to us and we found a nice little hovel with a gas heater to sit next to.

As is always the case in eastern Bhutan, a friend is never hard to find. Dan happened to know the girl working the shop as one of his students from a summer camp, and the librarian from Valerie’s school happened to also be there and she plopped down next to us. Conversation came easy as the heat was soothing and the Druks were very effective, as they always are. Since Dan also has an affinity for posing philosophical questions and couples it with a tendency to be contrarian, the conversation slipped into debate which, once finished (but never concluded) left us drunk and hungry.

We changed venues for dinner, and were joined by strangers willing and ready to become lifelong friends. One woman, a full-figured, dark complexioned Sharchop woman, held a baby to her bare breast while simultaneously drinking a beer and flirting unabashedly with Dan and I.

“You are both porab,” she said.

Dan, who has independently studied the Sharchop language, translated. “Handsome. She thinks we’re handsome.”

We responded with thank yous, unwilling to return the compliment despite the Druks. 

She winked and laughed so big as to reveal an absence of more than a few teeth. Her friend, another matronly woman, of a similar build and tooth-count, chided her on.

I bought another round of beers, not because I condoned the breastfeeding mother’s alcoholism, nor because I was trying to build an attraction to our suitors, but because, as a good friend in Bhutan, that’s just what you do. We became more drunk. There was a third man there who I thought must be the husband of one of the women, and very well could have been, but that didn’t stop him from being extra friendly with Dan and I. I was caught unaware when he reached out and kissed my hand.

“Is this a new Bhutanese greeting?” I asked ignorantly.

Valerie whispered to me, “He’s as camp as they come.”

He clung on to us. When he saw he didn’t have a chance with me, he moved to Dan. Dan spoke to me in Spanish to convince me to leave and the man pretended to understand every word of our conversation. When asked if we wanted to buy another round, I politely declined, much to the dismay of our friends. We escaped back to Valerie’s, all of us eager for rest.

Our coquettish friend made me wish that courtship with the Bhutanese ladies were that easy. I guess it was that easy with the breastfeeding mother and her friend. But that’s not quite what I had in mind.

The first day and the first leg of my journey were complete. I was drunk, full, and terribly tired. I had watched a tsechu, drank with locals, and even got hit on—by both women and a man. Sure, I was lovelorn, but that’s a feeling for me as quotidian as hunger. If this wasn’t a good way to begin the journey, I’m not sure what else would be.