One thing they don't mention in the pre-flight itinerary for Druk Airlines is that you fly past Mt Everest. I mean it. You float right beside it. However if they were to mention that you pass the highest mountain on earth, they would also have to mention that this is really only relevant for one side of the plane. That is the left side. The right side gets to look down on the smoggy floodplains of Northern India (according to one study, air pollution in India takes three years off of the lives of 700m people). That was my side. I gazed longingly across the laps and turned heads of the smug left-siders through the inadequately sized peephole at what was, I am sure, a spectacular sight.
However this was but a small, inconsequential fly in the glorious, smothering ointment of flying into Bhutan. After flying along the Himalayas, the plane turns North and glides closely over gently ascending, crumpled, snowcapped hills and down the Paro Valley into Bhutan's International Airport. The plane comes so close to the slopes on each side that someone told me that there are only ten or so pilots in the world qualified to do it. I wonder what would happen if one of them were to get married. What if all ten were invited to the stag party? Would there be no flights that day?
Druk Airlines is a fair preparation for the country. I was in business class on account of the extra luggage allowance it provides. Even with the ample, delicious food and cheerful, polite service, there is no escaping the ad hoc amateurishness of the operation. The footrest of my seat was out of order and the back of the seat in front of me was decorated with little smudges and smears. The in-flight magazine was sprinkled with spelling mistakes and askew grammar (“Desire you looking for a spuerlative place for souvenirs & highly sought Thang paintings in Bhutan?”). I couldn't imagine anything like it on Singapore Airlines, or on Emirates. I loved it immediately. It was impossibly endearing.
After a night in Paro I travelled with the other new teachers to Thimpu, the capital, for ten days of soporific orientation and leisurely purchasing of the oddments and miscellania we would need to acquire before we left for our rural placements. Thimpu is a quaint place, tiny by world standards with a population of 100,000, and notable as being apparently the only world capital without a traffic light.
Encountering it now is an interesting experience. Another of the teachers in our group, who had taught here for two years and left before finding herself drawn to return this year, said that even in the three years since she had first been to Thimpu it had changed substantially. The range of products available for purchase in stores, for example, had increased noticeably. On the streets, traditional dress is worn alongside leather jackets. Men meet in the evening for archery matches, Bhutan's traditional game, using new carbon-fibre compound bows. Women sit on the pavement selling local vegetables and home-made soup while coiffed-haired youths kick dust by the clock tower in the town square. Power lines accompany prayer flags on the hills. It is an odd mixture and one that is changing fast.
For us there were all sorts of curiosities. A group of us spent one evening at a bar where we were the audience for a band of local teeny-boppers doing a comprehensive and very tidy set of Western pop-rock covers from the last fifteen years. We could drink very creditable local whisky and beer over the bar, but the bathroom was covered in puddles and had no functioning taps. We were then taken by a friendly local to Thimpu's only club: A chrome and neon-lit affair with deafening electronic music. From inside, judging by the music and décor, we could have been in any city in the world. Afterwards we were dragged to a small, dark upstairs bar with an enormous snooker table. We played a game with two sharply dressed and extensively tattooed men. It was very easy to forget where we were, until we stumbled back out into the night onto the cobbled side walk. We were in Bhutan, a country that didn't get either television or the internet until 1999.
Western culture has diffused into the country without many actual Western ambassadors. Bhutan has kept itself firmly off the mass-tourism track by charging visitors $250US per day for visas. Exemptions, like mine, are very difficult to obtain. I can bring two people to visit per year, visa free, but only family members and only after I have worked for six months. As a result, in 2013 Bhutan hosted 44,241 tourists. In the same year Thailand welcomed twenty-six million.
Besides the twenty teachers brought here from Canada, the United States, Australia, South Africa and, now, New Zealand by the Bhutan Canada Foundation, there are twenty or so Japanese volunteers working as PE teachers, a smaller number of ex-pats working in private schools and six Australian special-ed teachers. There are also miscellaneous others here with the UN and other international agencies, a smattering of doctors and a handful of Thai agricultural consultants. That constitutes the entire foreign community, besides Indians. According to most people whom I talked to, there are probably not more than two hundred non-Indian foreigners based long term in the whole country, almost all of whom live in Thimpu.
The prevalence of Indians is rooted in geopolitics. With a billion Chinese to the north and a billion Indians to the South, Bhutan opted to throw in its lot with India after seeing China's muscular takeover of neighbouring Tibet in 1959. Squeezed between the world's two most populous countries, Bhutan (population: 700,000) has become a chess-piece in this continental power game. It still has no diplomatic relations with China, with whom it shares almost half of its border, a section of which is disputed and still the subject of friction between the two countries. Only India and Bangladesh have embassies in the country; All other countries maintain diplomatic contact through New Delhi and Dhaka.
India sponsors Bhutan to the tune of 60% of its government's budget. The first foreign trip Narendra Modi made as Prime Minister was to Thimpu, less than a month after being sworn in. The Bhutanese ngultrum is pegged to the Indian rupee. The shelves of shops and general stores are stocked with Indian products and India is the source and destination of the vast majority of Bhutanese imports and exports. Indians do not need visas to travel to Bhutan (and therefore pay no visa fee). Every significant infrastructure project is bankrolled by the Indian government and almost anything you see built here is constructed by Indian labourers. I can't recall having seen a single Chinese since arriving here.
This, however, was not foremost in my mind when, early on a bright Thursday morning two weeks ago, I am loaded, along with another BCF teacher, Fraser, and all our worldly possessions into a truck to leave the rest of our fellow teachers behind and drive to our placements. After winding our way East out of the crisp air and sparse, pine-forested slopes of Thimpu, we turn South towards Bhutan's muggier lowlands. Soon the road is descending into valleys of subtropical jungle. The land drops steeply away on one side and climbs out of sight on the other. Both are tangled with dark, broad-leaved trees covered in the fine red dust of the dry season. After stops for roadblocks we drop deeper into the warm valleys, passing the skeleton of a hydropower project, one of many in the country intended to send electricity to energy-thirsty India. Cars become less and less frequent the further South we go.
According to all whom I have asked, Fraser and I are almost certainly the first white people ever to live in this part of Bhutan. In fact, as far as anyone knows, the only other possible Western visitors to the district may have been a few brief tours by World Bank officials. It is not mentioned a single time in Bhutan's Lonely Planet. Dagana, the minister of education told us, is one of the poorest parts of the country. According to the Statistics Bureau, “Most settlements are remote and do not have road connectivity. This combined with the rugged terrain makes the delivery of services difficult and costly.” In 2010, only 13% of households used electricity for cooking. The rest used wood.
Like the rest of the country, agriculture is the main source of income, which employs almost three quarters of people here. It's climate is warm and wet enough for banana, passionfruit, pear, avocado and oranges, in addition to the ubiquitous chillies, potatoes and rice. Of these, oranges appear the most important. The district is 83% under forest cover (even more than the national proportion).
Despite its relative lack of development, the burgeoning bureaucracy keeps statistics on all sorts of wonderful things. I can tell you with certainty, for example, that there are 23 pit latrines in Dagana's schools and five schools with 'no toilet'. Similarly, health workers distributed 57,105 condoms to the residents of Dagana in 2010 (presumably with a roguish grin and playful wink). Also that year there were 587 vasectomies (sans winks) and 110 tubectomies. There are no yaks in Dagana, but 48 bufalo. There are two bus stations, two post offices and one bank.
After we cross the Sangkosh Chhu river to officially enter Dagana district, orange and banana trees begin to appear. Some time later, after a day's winding, rattling drive, never surpassing thirty kilometres per hour, we reach Drujeygang, a dusty, one-street village at the end of nine potholed kilometres above the paved artery road through Dagana.
I help to unload my things from the back of the Hilux: a benchtop gas stove and cannister, a small fridge, a water filter, buckets filled with cleaning products, my pack and a few small parcels of food from Thimpu. Karma and Fraser help me deposit it in my new quarters. We connect the stove to its gas, speculatively turn a few taps on and off and trial some light switches. And then they are gone.
I spend the first night shuffling around my new house, quietly moving things in and out of cupboards and making my first meal. I light some incense, unwrap my mattress from its plastic covering and burrow into my sleeping bag. The nearest person I know, and the closest Westerner, is over two hours' away by road. The thought strikes me as both unfathomable and strangely thrilling.
In the morning I open my curtains. Dogs lie in the sun on the basketball court below, beyond which I can see a couple of tin-roofed homes before the slope drops out of sight. Birds flit and twitter and busy themselves in the dirt. Across the valley and partially obscured by cloud, terraces are visible where small-holding farmers scratch out a living growing rice and fruit amongst the jungle.
To the north, Bhutan transforms from lush green foothills into the ice-capped peaks of the world's highest mountain range, beyond which is the Tibetan plateua. Head east and you pass through Gelephu, where you will find elephants, Malaria and Dengue fever, before eventually arriving in Burma. To the South lies India, Bangladesh and the Bay of Bengal. Fly West and in minutes you will be above Nepal. Keep going and you will soon find yourself over Kashmir and then Pakistan. Here, in this peaceful backwater of the Himalayas, I am making myself a home.
References
- 'Annual Dzongkhag Statistics, 2012- Dagana', National Statistics Bureau, 2012
- 'Annual Dzongkhag Statistics, 2010- Dagana', National Statistics Bureau, 2010
- 'Pollution in India and China: Indian Winter', The Economist
- Tourism Council of Bhutan Official Website (Thimpu)
- 'Bhutan At A Glance 2014', National Statistics Bureau, Thimpu
- Thailand Department of Tourism. Department of Tourism. 2011. Retrieved 16 November 2013. http://tourism.go.th/index.php?mod=WebTourism&file=details&dID=7&cID=276&dcID=621
- The Tribune, India, http://www.tribuneindia.com/2002/20020301/budget.htm
