Part Two: Mongar to Bumthang
Two Druk 11000s will get me drunk. But I’ll be clear
headed the next day. A third will get me very drunk and I’ll have one hell of a
hangover. The next morning, when I was hoping to make the long push from Mongar
to Bumthang, I estimated that I had had about two and three quarters.
Valerie prepared as strong a black Nescafe as she
could and boiled a few eggs for me to take on the road. I’d be seeing both her
and Dan in the future, in Thimphu and India respectively, so there wasn’t any
need to stretch out the goodbyes.
It was important to get an early start so as to avoid
the infamous series of construction blocks before Thrumshingla Pass, the second
highest on the national highway. The Indian road workers would get started
around midmorning and they shut down sections for hours. What should be a six
hour ride would likely become an eight or ten hour one if I timed it wrong.
The Mongar roads bear no discernable difference to
those that came before. Since all my experience on a bike was on Bhutanese
roads, it was just another ride, not a fun ride, but status quo for eastern Bhutan.
By the turn off for Lhuentse, where there is a long awning and a dozen vendors
sit with fresh oranges, crispy rice, and dried corn at the ready for the bus
and taxi passengers en route to Bumthang, the dust becomes mud. I slalomed down
to the Jarung Khashor chorten, where new devotee monks and nuns had just
arrived for a special puja and were milling about. Across the Kuri Chuu river, came
the only section of good road on the national highway until just before Thimphu.
I’m wary when Bhutan is called the Last Shangri La.
But in truth, there is evidence of paradise all around the country. The Lingmethang
valley in December is one such place. There the road turns to single-lane
asphalt, bulbous and broken in many parts, but free of dust and mercifully offering
sections that are as smooth as lonely American freeway. That’s where the jungle
becomes less dense and inhabitable, where village houses spring up contentedly
among grey-blue boulders and green potato fields are blanketed with the yellow
blossoms that come before the harvest. The terrain flattens out on the river
plain, a horizontal reprieve from the ubiquitous steep inclines and declines. There
are villages in Lingmethang that don’t seem to have a word for urgency, or if they do it would be the
urgency to bask in the sun while it’s still warm, or the urgency to tell a bit
of gossip from one village over. Nothing of consequence need be rushed into, or
worse, stressed over.
As I passed through Lingmethang, the sections of black
ribbon road allowed me to finally look and see. A ray of sun highlighted laughter
shared between a mother and her daughter. A middle-aged man casually walked
through the cane, blade in hand, barefooted. Children free of parents hid some
mischief and simultaneously waved a salutation to the odd foreigner on his
battered bike.
It was all as it should be.
And then came the road block.
“One hour half,” the Indian foreman told me.
“Can I get by on the bike?”
He nodded the almost imperceptible side-nod common in
these parts, which I assumed meant, “Sure. Give it a shot.”
It almost makes the suffering in the dust worth it
when, as a motorcyclist, you get to pass by the stopped cars and go on through
blocks. The backhoe driver, who had already excavated a pile of rubble halfway
across the lane, waved me through and I inched by his swinging boom, keenly attentive
of the drop on the other side.
Freedom. I turned back the throttle and bumped around
the bend and over a bridge, assured that I was the luckiest man on the road
that morning. But there were two blocks. At the second, another backhoe was positioned
high on the hillside, dislodging boulders and sending them careening down over
the road. I stopped the bike and turned off the engine. My luck was short
lived. There would be no passing a second time.
Where I stopped, a team of Assamese road workers were
in the middle of reinforcing an embankment on that part of the road, just
before the block. Their semi-permanent slum was half a kilometer away, built
from rusted tar barrels cut and bent flat and hammered to wood planks. Slums
like those are erected all along the national highway. Where India has been
contracted for construction, they bring in migrant labor from the impoverished
areas on the border, promising wages better than in Assam or West Bengal, if
only slightly. The living conditions are a truth not advertised in the Happiest
Place on Earth leaflets, something not merely brushed aside, but ignored and,
worse, forgotten.
In between the legs of a mother hunched over and
shoveling gravel, her daughter, perhaps two years old, stood in the heat,
staring at me. She braced herself against the mother’s sari, whose colors were once
vibrant but against the child they were muted, exhausted by dirt, sun, and
sweat. The mother’s attention followed the end of the shovel in its chronic
rise and fall. On the staff of the shovel, a rope was tied, held by an aged man
who pulled up on every rise of the shovel, taking some weight off of the
mother’s burden. He was fettered to the load and both worked in a rhythm that
chanted to no end.
The child started crying. She pointed at me and hid
her face behind her mother’s stained sari. The mother, before unaware of my presence,
halted, looked at me, smiled a fog-like smile, and then returned to shoveling.
The old man didn’t even look up. I stood in the shade of a truck, the sun too
much to bear.
When it was time for lunch, the workers stopped, sat
together in the rubble and the heat, and opened their tins of potato curry and
rice. The child continued to hide from me while the workers joked with her,
encouraging her to come and say hello. She stayed close to her mother.
The backhoe also stopped its work and I was able to
cross the block and move along. I looked back at the workers, but they had
already forgotten me and sat bent over their lunch tins, grateful, I imagine,
for a moment’s rest.
The last stretch of road to Bumthang starts at
Thrumshingla Pass and rolls through a high section of the Himalayan foothills,
the part that butts up against the high peaks. Bumthang itself is the highest city
in Bhutan (though, like Mongar, town is a more appropriate description). The
country around it becomes filled with pines and their browned needles border
the road. The scent reminded me of the Sierra Nevada, and I felt I could pull
up to a mom-and-pop bakery and order an apple pie if I wanted to. But there was
no time for stopping. Evening was approaching and it was getting cold. I could
feel it in the tips of my fingers and at the knees, where the wind hit directly
and relentlessly. Gloves and long underwear did little to stop the chill.
By the time I made it to the River Lodge, I could
barely open and close my hands. Pema Dawa had the bukari ready though, and I stood next to the heat as he fed it more
firewood. He offered me tea and then I was all set, warm, comfortable, and
ready for bed. I had been on the road for eight hours. Too many, by all
accounts.
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