From Himalayan Roads: Chapter Five - Thimphu to Phuentsholing

Now the beginning of the real trip. This time I’d be venturing into uncharted territory. I didn’t know these roads, and I wouldn’t know anyone along the way until Phuentsholing. I had sent all my excess possessions back to the US (souvenirs, my ghos, gifts for my family) and had all that was left for the next six months on the road.

I lashed my forty-liter backpack to Solivagant, secured my computer satchel to the side, and mounted up, ready to start the adventure. But Solivagant reminded me that it wouldn’t be that easy. I tried to start the bike, and he gave me a weak groan in return. On a prayer and a dozen attempts at a kick start, he finally grumbled to life, a curmudgeon barely willing to get moving.

The first stop was an easy decision. I needed a new battery. I found a garage and a young kid who called me Bro with every interaction swapped out the battery, oiled the chain, and sent me on my way.

“Have a good trip, Bro.”

“A’ight, homie,” I rejoined. “Keep it real.”

Though I was heading toward the Indian plains and descending the emerald mountains punctuated with wild poinsettias, I thought of what a transition it must have been for those coming here from the opposite trajectory, rising into the foothills of the Himalayas. With very few exceptions, as soon as you hit flat land, you’re in India. To rise from those plains, steeply, quickly and into the cool and unpolluted air of the temperate jungles is like coming to a different planet. Water falls vertically; you can touch the clouds; there is snow on the higher peaks.

Bhutan has changed significantly in the last century. The road is paved now – yes, this section too, paved – but not too long ago a traveler here would have to follow single-track trails through the forests, climb up relentlessly high ridgelines and stumble down dangerously steep descents in order to get into the heart of the country. It is easy to understand why Bhutan was so isolated. Who would endeavor such pains in order to find the tiny villages and occasional fiefdoms hidden among the hundreds of peaks? Part of me wished that I could have visited Bhutan when it was still so shrouded in mystery, before electricity, television, and internet came. But I was also satisfied with my little adventure, and I knew that for me, heading toward India and out of Bhutan was the right direction, though the pain of leaving such a place was beginning to take hold.

I arrived to Phuentsholing by early afternoon. It was much hotter, the altitude lower than I had been all year. The long underwear and extra layers I had worn to protect me from the alpine breezes became clammy and oppressive.

I had skipped lunch and was in a desperate search for food. I found some women who were selling puri and momos sitting at a large prayer wheel. I ordered two plates of each and they invited me to sit with them and their rambunctious children, who all watched me, fascinated by the foreigner in winter clothes who was wolfing down a meal that could have satisfied their whole family.

The food was a blessing and a curse in that it sated my appetite but also brought to the fore that reality that had started to build on the road. It was a reality that I had conveniently been able to put aside for the more pressing need to be hungry. But with basic homeostasis established, the feeling in my chest became unavoidable. It told me with cold certainty that this was it: I had less than twenty-four hours left in Bhutan.

I had said many goodbyes already. Too many. Over the course of the last month I attended separate farewell events for both my class eleven and class twelve students. Then I said goodbye to each individual class again, giving them pictures of us together. They, in return, said goodbye yet again and gave me gifts. That was just the students. The staff held a “Gents Farewell” where the male staff gathered in the school mess where the giant cook stoves heated the room. We got drunk and gave speeches and they bid me a safe journey and said their goodbyes to the other teachers leaving to teach at other schools. Finally, the whole staff gathered one more time, men and women, on another day to have an official farewell ceremony.

This approach to saying goodbye was a cultural phenomenon that I didn’t adapt well to. Despite the whole intent behind such ceremony, the overall effect lacked closure. With almost every goodbye I didn’t have to feel any finality because I knew that there were more goodbyes coming. I could say, “Goodbye … but I’ll see you next week in class.” Or, “Goodbye, but we’ll meet up again in Phuentsholing.” The goodbyes were never anything permanent.

All that was changing now. I would head into India and would not be able to return to Bhutan for the foreseeable future. The goodbyes that I would say in the next few hours were the real ones, the kind that sit with you a long time, the kind that make you feel hollow.

I met up with seven teachers from my school that night who were in Phuentsholing to correct the National Board Exam. They treated me to a final Bhutanese meal and I ordered the pork prepared the Bhutanese way: more fat than meat. I remembered when I arrived to Kanglung on Losar and first had the dish. I was appalled by how gluttonous it was and choked it down. Little did I know I would start enjoying it, craving it even, and when I had it then each piece melted when it settled on my tongue and I felt complete satisfaction.

We went to karaoke late in the night. K.D. and I sang either Billy Jean or Smooth Criminal, I can’t remember now. It was a poor performance, of that I’m sure. We stumbled home and I slept poorly, thinking of leaving Bhutan and of what the Indian roads would be like. I had glimpsed them from the border and I was terrified.

In the morning I packed up and said my final goodbye to my friends. This time, yes, final. But the men were hesitant to let me go.

“Are you sure you don’t want to just stay in Bhutan? What you are doing is very dangerous, you know. Indian roads are nothing like Bhutanese roads.”

“I’d love to stay in Bhutan. But as of tomorrow, I’ll be a tourist here. I’d need a guide and would have to pay 250 dollars a day.”

“But you can just sell your bike and take a bus or a train through India. I don’t think you understand how dangerous India is.”

“I’ve traveled through many dangerous countries. In fact, I’m from a dangerous country. It’ll be fine,” I told them.

They finally abated, not because I had convinced them, but because we all realized that leaving was inevitable.

“I’ll miss you all,” I told them. “This has been an amazing year.”

“We’ll see each other again, Josh.”

“Yeah. Within ten years.”

“You come back with a wife and a family, okay?”

“Okay. I’ll try my best.”

“And be safe.”

“Yes. I will.”

“Enjoy the adventure.”

I hugged all of them. We stood there for a moment, looking down at the gravel. What to do? We had to part ways, though I don’t think any of us felt like it should be so. This is the life I have chosen, I reminded myself. I’ve said a lot of goodbyes. That hollow feeling set in, now to stay for a long time. I’ve given up finding a remedy for it. I just move into a new future feeling like a shell and hoping that the next experiences would fill me with as much goodness as Bhutan had.

I rode away, my friends watching until I turned a corner and disappeared. Then I do not know what they did nor where they went. And I may never know.

But, perhaps with an unconscious awareness that facing the pain of this new loneliness would be too much, I set my focus on the next challenge, the biggest challenge yet: the Indian roads.

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. 

From Himalayan Roads: Chapter Three - Crossing Bhutan - Bumthang to Thimphu

The Bumthang morning was just above freezing but there was no waiting until it warmed. I had to get to Thimphu in one push and it could take anywhere from eight to twelve hours, depending on the road.

“How’s the highway from here to Thimphu?”

Of the people questioned, none had actually been on the road recently. Yet no one was reticent in sharing his opinion.

Opinion one: “Oh, very bad. Worst it’s ever been.”

Opinion two: “Icy. Be careful.”

Opinion three: “Not bad at all. His Majesty came through last week, so they had to make it better.”

Opinion four: “On a bike? Six hours. No problem.”

My friend Vishal met me in Bumthang and though he was traveling by bus, he verified whether I was ready for a ride through mountain weather.

“You’ve got rain pants?”

“No. I never brought any to Bhutan.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Stupid, I guess.”

“But you’ve got a good raincoat?”

“Kind of. I mean, it’ll do.”

He gave me a look of pity. Once upon a time, on our other adventures in the Andes, I was the expert, recounting how I had been camping and backpacking in the mountains since I could walk. But now I was clearly the dilettante and he was the disappointed tutor.

“Don’t freeze to death.”

“Good advice.”

Solivagant was slow to get going. The starter barely buzzed in the morning dark and cold and I had to abuse the kick-starter until I could get the engine to idle. I let it warm for nearly ten minutes, the whole time questioning the bike’s overall integrity. On all the other short trips I’d taken, something had gone wrong. I was in a state or readiness, expecting the same now. If Solivagant broke down on the way, I planned to wait for Vishal’s bus to pass and hitch a ride. But I’d have to sort out how to get back to the bike and get it working. There was too much to process, and the cold was already numbing my extremities.

I patted Solivagant. “Just make it to Thimphu, buddy. Just make it to Thimphu.”

I tolerated the cold as best as I could. I had been betting on the sun though, thinking it would only be an hour before it rose above the peaks. I suffered through that first hour of twilight, desperately watching the horizon for the sun to come out and send rays of warmth into the valley. But the sun never came. Instead, a blanket of clouds covered the sky in a grey overcast. Once I started descending into the verdant cliffs near Trongsa, I entered a thick fog that washed me in beads of dew. My hands became clammy and began to seize up.

I pulled Solivagant over in a muddy, empty forested area outside of Trongsa and I crouched next to the warm engine, pressing my gloved hands to it. The heat helped, but wasn’t immediate enough. The muffler churned and caterwauled and gave me an idea that proved essential to make it through the cold passes. I removed my glove and put the open end to the muffler, filling the glove with the hot exhaust. Instantly, the moisture in the glove began to evaporate and the glove became hot and dry. When I slipped it back onto my hand, it was like I had found a hidden sauna there in the Bhutanese forests, the heat radiated and extended from my hands into my chest. I did the same to my second glove and within minutes I was ready to go again. I repeated this process three times before finally reaching the warmer, low areas on the route.

A bit of Bumthang during the day.

Opinion one was the closest to being correct. The road was not good. But, relative to the whole eastern end of the national highway, it was not that much worse. Again I rattled down to river gorges and up minor passes, averaging thirty kilometers per hour, my ass taking the brunt of the battering.

There were more Indian cargo trucks on that section of road, a sign that I was getting close to the capital. Getting caught behind the behemoths always meant a face full of black exhaust. After several encounters I better understood the nature of Indian emissions, explained to me once from a mountaintop by a southern Bhutanese friend.

“You see those glaciated peaks to the north? That’s Tibet.”

“Oh, yes. Beautiful.”

“And you see that blanket of pollution to the south? That’s India.”

Passing the barreling cargo trucks was always a dance with destruction. I’d try to move into sight of their side mirror, bleating my minuscule horn like a timid lamb, and rev on by. Most times they would see me and move as far to the side of the single lane as they could. Sometimes they wouldn’t see me and I’d have to gun past before being closed in, either against the cliff, or worse, off the road. 

Occasionally they’d see me and would still close me in, a game to them perhaps, or a demonstration of their power. Truck drivers and kings aren’t so different. Both have to choose between benevolence or malevolence. Kings rule kingdoms. Truck drivers rule the roads. On the grand scale of things, my plebeian self, puttering along on 220ccs of Solivagant, was insignificant.

Passing the belching beasts was made that much riskier since I also had to avoid the potholes, errant stones, and insidious ruts. My whole history on a bike had been on those terrible eastern roads and I began to believe that such an experience was just a fact of riding a motorcycle in the Himalayas, something I would have to get used to. In the last six months, the rickety plastic siding on Solivagant had wiggled loose, screws and bolts had been shaken, thrown to the dust and lost, the center stand was bent and gnarled, and the shocks had become a very faint suggestion of absorption. But in Punakha an extraordinary thing happened. After crossing the bridge over the gaping and blue Puna Tsang, an angel of mercy descended from the overcast skies and commanded: “He has suffered enough; the road shall be paved.”

Testament both to the horrid condition of the roads prior and to a year of bachelorhood, transitioning to that freshly finished asphalt, double-lane road, was almost sexually satisfying. Thirty kilometers per hour turned to forty, then fifty, sixty! And it was as smooth as the curves on Venus de Milo. For the first time, riding was enjoyable. Not just enjoyable. It was a slip into another state of being, a transcendental experience. Later that night in Thimphu I would eat a succulent mutton curry with butter naan, I would indulge in a full-bodied Red Panda hefeiweizen, and I would sleep on a sumptuous hotel mattress with sheets that smelled like sunshine. But nothing felt so decadent and satisfying as that rise up to Dochu La pass on the newly-paved Punakha road.  

The booming metropolis of Thimphu as seen from the Druk Path trek.

I made it to Thimphu in ten hours. My fatigue was such that the shock of suddenly having to navigate traffic and choose from more than one road is only a dull memory. I sought the Khamsum Inn, found it, turned Solivagant off and prepared for the aforementioned treats once Vishal arrived. It wasn’t until much later that night that I realized I had already traversed one whole country, a small country, but a country nonetheless. Five hundred kilometers isn’t much – not even a full tank of gas – but the dream was happening. I just had to get from point A to point B. Something so intimidating was now simpler.

Perhaps the ultimate point B, Leh, some four thousand kilometers and six months away, could be reached by that simple of a process too. The realization was a little disappointing really. It didn’t take any real courage or skill to make it happen. You just had to move forward, one section of road at a time. Sometimes the road was rough, sometimes it was smooth. All I had to do was turn the throttle back and move forward.

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

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.

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.

From Himalayan Roads: Chapter One - The Gods Made Me Do It

Some context: I really don’t know what I’m doing.

The dream of traversing the Himalayas on a motorcycle hit me suddenly and irrevocably when I had just settled into my life in Bhutan. I hadn’t been there but two months when euphoric flashes of Nepali peaks, coupled with nightmarish images of frenetic, dirty Indian cities, began keeping me up at night. As I began researching the feasibility of such a plan, a few limits surfaced. But limits are good, encouraging even; they indicate that adventure is afoot.

Limit One: If I bought a motorcycle in Bhutan, I wouldn’t be able to take it out of the country. Since my plan would take me through West Bengal, Sikkim, Nepal, Himachal Pradesh, Ladakh, and Kashmir, I’d need a bike with Indian plates and registration. In Bhutan, especially in the remote areas of the east, coming across such a bike was nearly impossible.

Limit Two: I didn’t know how to ride a motorcycle. Some might argue that this should be considered Limit One in terms of importance. I beg to differ. If I couldn’t attain a bike, my ability to operate one would be irrelevant. I have no access to a helicopter either, so does it matter if I can fly one or not? I was sure that if the perfect bike somehow became manifest, I could learn to ride it. I was encouraged by the sage wisdom of a friend of mine who, pondering the idea, told me: “Even stupid people can ride motorcycles.”

As if a sign from the gods (Hindu or tantric Buddhist, I know not) the “ideal” bike did exist. In 2014, another foreign teacher residing in eastern Bhutan traveled to Guwahati, India to buy a 2012, 223cc, Hero Karizma. There he registered it and got Assamese plates. He used it for a year to explore the more remote regions of Bhutan. When he left in 2015, he sold it to another foreign teacher, Holly, living in western Bhutan. She rarely used it, and it sat at the Bhutan Canada Foundation office collecting dust. When she sold the bike to me for five hundred dollars, I could hardly believe my luck. There it was, the perfect bike. And it was all mine.

Oh shit. Limit Two.

Signs from the gods.

I picked up the bike in the middle of Bhutan, in the dusty, alpine town of Bumthang, famous for its rock-hard cheese, its Swiss-influenced Hefeweissen beer, and the copious amounts of wild marijuana growing all around town (the locals know it as “pig feed”; the pigs think it’s great).

A few more limits surfaced upon reception of the bike.

“How do you start it?” I asked Holly.

The looked at me skeptically, brows furled. “Do you know how to ride?”

“Theoretically,” I replied.

I had studied several videos online, and had, in fact, ridden a motorcycle once, five years ago. It was an 800+cc sport bike that a gung-ho, Marine friend of mine had told me to give a shot. The ride lasted all of an hour, mostly with me shooting down Denver side streets revving dangerously high in first gear, white-knuckled and unable to release the throttle because of the instinct to grip down when terrified. I dropped the bike twice, which I never confessed to the Marine; he kept a handgun on his coffee table and live grenades on his bookshelf.

After some skeptical tutelage from Holly, I had two days to learn how to ride on the Bumthang streets before I would take the bike the two-day journey back to eastern Bhutan. It was monsoon season, so the roads were slick with rain and the characteristic Bumthang dust turned to a thick mud. Despite the conditions, Bumthang proved to be a perfect learning ground. The road had very little traffic and was yet to fall victim to the road expansion construction that had mangled many parts of the national highway. I wended through pine forests fecund with moisture, up to prominent fortresses and hidden monasteries, and after two days I felt that I was ready for the challenge of a cross-country trip.

Again the gods were in my favor. Over the course of the two-day journey, it only rained briefly, right as I arrived home. Though I had to fjord a few rivers, slip through some mud-trenches, dodge cattle, and pull off several leeches from my legs, the ride was mostly uneventful and I made it home unscathed. It turned out to be true: Stupid people can ride motorcycles.

I’ve had the bike for six months now. My luck lasted as long as those initial days. For the next few months my bike sat stationary due to either a reoccurring flat or awaiting new front brake pads that took five weeks to arrive from China to the village I was living in in Bhutan. During those fleeting moments when the bike would work, other problems befell the poor stallion—a loose chain that popped off repeatedly on the way to Rangshikar, a tendency to stick in neutral when shifting down to first gear, a bunk battery that couldn’t hold a charge.

But when the gods offer a gift it’s best to take it, whatever the condition. There is something to be learned from it. I’ve repaired the puncture (five times), bought a new tire (to avoid further punctures), and fixed the front brake. I can kick start the bike when the battery is dead and once I’m in a place that has new batteries on hand, I’ll gladly replace the old one. I have enough experience now, I think, to start the journey. I’ve given the bike the moniker of Solivagant, a word that I’m told means “to wander alone.” My plans will assuredly give me plenty of time alone, and I have no real itinerary, no schedule. I will wander these Himalayas and see what comes. My contract has ended in Bhutan and I have six months to kill before starting work at an international school somewhere in the world. The first limits are gone, testament to their nature. If you don’t really believe in them as limits, they can easily be surmounted. But new ones have surfaced: What will the chaos of Indian traffic be like, especially for a novice like me? How will I navigate a road system that lacks consistent signage? How will I carry the things I need to survive? What will I do when Solivagant becomes cantankerous once again and breaks down? Is this safe?

And, as is the plague of the wanderer, other existential questions have started to arise too: What purpose does this adventure serve? When will I grow up, settle down, commit to something stable? What is the effect of such long-term loneliness?

So I’ll start the journey hoping for both Solivagant’s integrity and for answers to these questions. Both hopes are guaranteed to fail. But there are many chances ahead for a smooth ride, for new discoveries, and if not for answers, then for many more questions that will be compelling and worthy. All of this will happen, gods willing.