From Himalayan Roads: Chapter Four - Thimphu and Paro (on Foot)

I’m not a motorcyclist, or biker, or whatever they call themselves. Truth be told, except for that heavenly stretch of paved road in Punakha, I haven’t really enjoyed being on the bike. This story is not solely about the road. It will not be one daunting ride after another (though there will be plenty of those). There are times where the momentum stops. As it must.

Robert M. Persig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, writes, “On a cycle the frame [of a car] is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.”

I couldn’t disagree more.

Though I’d like to imagine myself as a man marinating himself in culture, getting so close to it that it works its way into his pores, when I’m on the bike I’m so gripped with worry about potholes, cows, monkeys, and oncoming cargo trucks, that my sense of presence is limited to a single, and I think important, focus: Don’t die. It’s an overwhelming strong distraction. I can barely even watch the scene, let alone feel a sense of connection to it, such is my fear of colliding with a primate. No, I must dismount first, sit down, take a breath and strike up a conversation with a stranger before I feel like I can be present again in these foreign places, before I can see the beauty around me and make some small connection that ties me to a place.

In Thimphu, I left the bike alone most of the time. Either in Solivagant’s agreement with my philosophy or as revenge, he failed to start on the few occasions when I did try and take a ride. I didn’t worry about it then, though it would remain a problem.

I had visitors to entertain, or really, to entertain me. I was also a tourist in the western part of Bhutan, having not spent any significant time there, and Vishal and I toured Thimphu like profligate kings. That’s how it seemed to me anyway. Since I had been holed up in village life for a year, the sudden options and expenses were extravagant. I could buy espresso, pizza, and curries whose primary ingredient wasn’t processed cheese. To Vishal I must have looked like Country Mouse in the big city. And I felt it, mostly through an insatiable appetite. By the time we made it to Paro to pick up another friend, Horie-Sensei from Japan, I imagine I had gained more than a few much-needed pounds.

In Paro we stayed a few nights at a boisterous and cheap hotel filled with Indian tourists. The dining room was always alive, dishes of chicken korma, puri subji, and aloo paratha served up nonstop to the crowds who berated their unrestrained children, yelled good-natured anecdotes across tables, and otherwise built the cacophony to crescendo through the clanging of serving spoons and plates and general bonhomie shared among them. The kitchen made for excellent olfactory pleasure, for entertaining people watching … and for very poor sleep once we were tucked away in our room and we realized that the walls were paper thin.

But refuge awaited us on the Druk Path Trek, a five or six-day journey that we planned to whittle down to two, our time being limited. Horie-Sensei, who had just arrived from sea-level, received the award for perseverance. He braved the climb to four thousand meters gasping for air but plugging along nonetheless. For Vishal and I, trekking together was an old hat. We had been through the Huayhuash range of Peru, around Cerro Torre and Glacier Grey in Patagonia, and down California’s Lost Coast. This was just another outing in one sense; it was comfortable and challenging in the way it should be. But in another sense, we both felt fortunate to be the only people traversing the higher regions of such a remote country.

Vishal was the one who had first told me about Bhutan, and his fascination became mine. We were real life characters now who had materialized from a conversation from nearly six years ago.

“I’d love to live in Bhutan someday.”

“If you do, I’m definitely coming to visit.”

“We’ll go hiking through the villages and into the mountains. There’s got to be some cool treks there. It sounds like an amazing place.”

With the white leviathan of Mt. Jomolhari in the background, the Tibetan peaks rising and following to the northeast, Horie-Sensei, Vishal and I could look out on the country now from a sentinel’s perspective. Yes, it truly was an amazing place.

We camped at thirty-eight hundred meters, next to a lake which had Ngultrum bills frozen in the ice on the banks, offerings made by those who regard the lake as a local deity. Horie-Sensei, as if prescient of our eating trends, revealed that dinner would be a gelatinous ramen, complete with vacuum sealed pork cutlets, dripping in fat. We had hiked more than twenty kilometers that day and sat with our faces warming to the fire and our backs chilling in the frigid night air. The ramen was accompanied with tea and then coffee, and despite the richness of the meals in Thimphu, I think that one at the lake was the best one yet.

In the morning we marched on. We reached more than four thousand meters another few times, passing old sky burial sites, places where, in lieu of cremation, dead bodies are cut to pieces and fed to birds of prey. We passed more lakes and walked over high passes garlanded with prayer flags. By midafternoon we were finally overlooking Thimphu, confirming that it was more of a big town than a capital city. It was a long descent back into the center, characterized by unrelentingly steep downhill that made the soles of our feet burn. Eventually, in the dark, all of us exhausted, we found a bus that could take us close to our hotel. The ride was long enough that both Vishal’s and my muscles stiffened and we limped the final stretch to the hotel. Horie-Sensei, the oldest of all of us by nearly two decades, was now adjusted to the Himalayan air it seemed; he leapt up the hotel stairs, fit as a fiddle.

A Bhutanese friend, Yonten, joined us the next day to see the sights around Thimphu. Yonten was one of the most hospitable friends I had while in Kanglung, inviting me over for lunches, dinners, or just to share a beer or two. Again, extending his hand of hospitality to my friends, he took us around to the Golden Buddha and the Memorial Chorten.

Having three friends from very different stages in my life created an interesting dynamic. Vishal and I have had rambunctious, often debaucherous times together when we were younger. Whereas with Horie-Sensei, when I lived in Japan, I had been a more disciplined, quieter person. And this past experience in Bhutan had made me someone else, in between the two maybe, but also outside of it, someone newer and different still. Their presence initially made me think that I’d have to pick one way-of-being, perhaps at the risk of seeming like a stranger to all of them. But the result was really that I could mix-and-match. Reminded of a time when I was more ambitious, I zealously struck up conversations about future adventures. When Yonten generously offered us handwoven textiles that his sister had made, I refused and refused until, as the custom requires, I accepted with humility. And when it was time to sing ridiculous songs for no apparent reason other than being slap-happy, I provided a good chorus (if I do say so myself).

Living abroad has this effect on a person. You not only get to explore the far-flung areas of the world and how people live differently, but you also discover the far reaches of your own personality, places that you never knew existed. In some cases the discovery is empowering. You learn that you are brave and honest and good. In other instances, the lessons are hard. You find that you are fearful, stubborn, prejudiced.

We should all be explorers, whether it be to mountaintops or a foray into the complacent regions of one’s own mind. So long as we’re open to making mistakes and, in turn, learning something, the act of exploring will always be virtuous.

At five in the morning I said goodbye to Vishal and Horie-Sensei, bleary-eyed, in Thimphu. Vishal was headed back to Kenya, where he lives, and Horie-Sensei back to Japan. With friends scattered around the world I wondered when and where I’d see them again. But, as I know with all my good friends, I knew that I would likely see them in neither of those countries because all of us are still ready and willing to meet up for some other adventure, somewhere else in the world. That is, we’re always ready to explore.