So Close to Heaven (39 page)

After the customary tea and a brief lecture illustrated by a scale model of the dzong in the engineer’s office, we wandered out into the work area. The workforce was a mix of local carpenters and less skilled laborers from all of Bhutan’s administrative districts, who had been requisitioned under the national shared-labor system. They were given free lodging and a small amount of money for subsistence. Several told us with obvious
sincerity that it was an honor to be here working on such a treasure as Punakha Dzong, and that they were pleased to volunteer. The carpenters, barefoot and often seated cross-legged on the ground, were fashioning huge ceiling beams with interlocking joints to connect with vertical posts without the use of nails. Where necessary, large wooden pegs were used to hold planks or beams in place. The men worked with simple instruments. No electric tools were anywhere in sight. There must have been scenes much like this around the great cathedrals of Europe as they were built over years by craftsmen camped at their feet.

Under a roof to one side of the bustling meadow at Punakha, wood-carvers were creating the ornamented window frames and interior detail. As they labored, they could see the outer walls of the great dzong rising six stories high in front of them, with some of their handiwork already in place on the upper floors. New bay windows, magnificently large and extravagantly carved, were ranged high along the third and fourth stories like the latticed balconies of a Mogul palace. Below that level, as in past centuries, the old white fortress walls (stained pinkish from the red earth of the worksite) were left solid and unbroken except for a few much smaller, utilitarian windows to let in light.

The carpenters and woodcarvers at Punakha were Buddhist, of course, but they had also taken care to respect the local spirits that lived in a grove near the foot of the dzong, land on which they worked and slept. They had built an altar of rocks and red clay at the base of a tree. On it they had placed various carefully chosen stones, many of them sedimentary rocks with colored layers of gray, black, and sometimes red. At the front of the squarish altar top, on a protruding stone, rested a kind of stick figure of dried reeds and bamboo. A foot or so behind it, plants suitable for offerings had been stuck in a block of clay. Altogether, it was a small but powerfully arresting shrine, its primitive construction a reminder that something older than the monumental, sophisticated Buddhist edifice that overshadowed it had a claim to the spirituality of this place.

S
OONER
OR
LATER
there comes the time when we all have to take the road to Tashigang. There is no other route to Bhutan’s easternmost large town except this narrow highway the Bhutanese call the Lateral Road, and no way to cover the 350 miles from Thimphu except by car (or horseback or on foot). Nearly all the great dzongs and temples lie along or near this road, which follows valleys and gorges across the inner Himalayas, where most Bhutanese live and farm whatever land can be terraced, plowed, and planted. Everybody—tourists, pilgrims, government officials, and farmers with produce to sell or goods to buy in Thimphu or the southern border town of Phuntsholing, the gateway to India—uses the Lateral Road. I got to picturing it as something akin to a fragment of the Bayeux tapestries or a medieval woodcut describing events great or small in two-dimensional, linear progression: car following truck following bus meeting yak, with occasional buildings or natural landmarks sketched above or below the main story line. Here is a man dragging home long bamboo poles suspended from his head and back like the long tail of a peacock. Here is a caravan of traders with strong Bhutanese ponies bearing huge baskets. Here is a weaver, working in her dooryard. Here are the prayer wheels spinning in front of shops. And so on.

With the luxury of time to spare, this trip should be made in Aum Rinzi style, with ample stops to absorb life and refresh the traveler. Otherwise, one’s eyes get riveted on the terrifying road, and precipices are all
you remember, or dream about at night. In an underpopulated country, there are almost no impediments to choosing a place for lunch, a walk, a nap, or an al fresco bathroom stop. A foreign woman in Thimphu told me she took to wearing an ankle-length kira for the privacy and convenience it gave her on long trips. “You don’t have to wear anything under it,” she explained.

The inner Himalayas, mountain ranges that run north to south, through deep, dark valleys and high passes, are forested spurs of the greater Himalayas. Their permanently frozen peaks stretch in an east-west direction along the border with Tibet. The inner Himalayas are an environmental wonderland for the traveler because the prolific vegetation, bird life, and animals vary as the twisting road rises and falls and rises again from fertile woodlands to subalpine meadows and back down into vine-tangled glens sprayed by waterfalls. More than 60 percent of Bhutan is forested, and much of it is virgin. With the help of the World Bank, the country was the first to set up a trust fund to protect its environment in perpetuity, citing its Buddhist commitment to nature and wildlife. There is no similar environment on this scale left anywhere else in the region. But this terrain has to be savored slowly, and Aum Rinzi would advise that right from the start, you rein in the driver assigned to your car, who wants to be able to boast at the other end about how fast he made the trip.

Although the hillsides around Dochhu La, an hour or so from Thimphu, display the richness of Bhutan’s forests and, in the spring, its glorious tree-high rhododendrons, it is not until well after Wangdiphrodang that the road disappears into real uninhabited wilderness. As I approached Wangdi with Vinod, who had been a model of restraint since Dochhu La, he suddenly reverted to a display of motor showmanship, which entails driving recklessly through populated areas, scattering pedestrians and animals, and careening to within inches of market stalls. This behavior, if not caused, as in Thailand, by the consumption of tonic stimulants that blunt judgment and perception, can probably be explained as a subconscious or maybe conscious effort to demonstrate who has the power of life and death, or the great distinction of knowing how to drive—and a car to go with it. In Wangdiphrodang, it seemed particularly irrational for a young man from faraway Kalimpong, clearly not a Bhutanese by dress, language, or physical appearance, to be barreling through a busy bazaar in a military garrison town, where he stood to be
mobbed if he struck a local resident. Hostility toward people from the Indian border areas runs deep among the mountain Drukpas, who see the roots of all the country’s ethnic distress planted in the lowlands, whence come also greed, corruption, violence, drugs, and disease.

Maybe Vinod just wanted to get out of Wangdiphrodang. A lot of people feel that way, though not at the outset of a visit. The approach to the town along the road from Thimphu is lovely. A river of pale blue-green flows between sloping hillsides where villages cluster on productive farmland. On the left, a ridge rises as the road nears the dzong, giving Wangdiphrodang fortress and town an imposing elevation above the surrounding fields. After a police post at the junction of the road south to Chirang, the east-west highway crosses the Puna Tshang Chhu on a newish bridge and begins a switchback climb to the Wangdi bazaar. Wangdiphrodang had a fine, centuries-old, traditional Bhutanese bridge until the 1960s, when it washed away in a flood. Some of the iron chain from that bridge is at the National Museum in Paro. The old roofed bridge had carved slate reliefs in panels along the sides of the span, similar to the exceptional slate portraits of famous holy men, carved and delicately painted, still in place in the outer wall of the seventeenth-century temple at Simtokha Dzong, all but hidden behind a row of prayer wheels.

Legends compete to tell the story of how Wangdiphrodang Dzong came to be where it is, although most agree the fortress was built in the 1630s under the direction of the busy Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyel. Either a local deity, Yeshi Gompo, or the fierce god Mahakala appeared to the Shabdrung and told him to construct a dzong on either the ridge with the shape of a sleeping elephant or the place where ravens fly off in four directions, depending on which story you are told. Alternatively, the Shabdrung may have named the spot for a little boy he saw playing in the river’s snow-white sand. Various accounts translate the name Wangdiphrodang in different ways, depending on the version of the town’s founding one believes, a reminder of the tenuousness of historical truth in a land of legend.

Wangdi always seems like the perfect place to take a break and enjoy the view over the aquamarine river and spacious (for Bhutan) fields before moving on toward the dark forested roads and passes that lead into the Black Mountains. This is when the disappointment sets in. The town has but one small guesthouse, welcoming but exceptionally
unappealing. If there is running water that day, it may flow out of control and you have to wade through it to the toilet. Electricity is scarce, as are candles. The staff is usually willing to rustle up coffee or tea, to be served in a dismal, windowless hall or (if that’s pitch-dark) on a claustrophobic enclosed porch abuzz with flies if it’s fly season. Dragging a chair out into the front garden to enjoy its commanding view seems to be regarded locally as an indicator of insanity, though this aberrant behavior is tolerated. A few steps from the garden gate is the town center, famous for its gas pump. The village is a ramshackle affair whose wooden lean- to shops resist all efforts to perceive them as quaint.

Beyond Wangdi, however, the scenery is again fine. The road east, blacktopped only in the mid-1980s, spirals out of a large valley, winding around and finally above substantial two-story farmhouses standing in terraced fields. In winter, at isolated farmhouses, the gently sloping rooftops made of loose wooden shingles anchored with rocks occasionally wear a mantle of bright red, as baskets of chilis are spread out neady to dry in the sun.

After Wangdiphrodang, there is one detour to be made before crossing the mountains that divide western Bhutan from the central and eastern parts of the country, geographically and linguistically. A few miles after the hamlet of Nobding, a side road turns off to Gantey, climbing into a forest of oak, magnolia, and giant rhododendron. In April and May, the trip to Gantey is a drive through a natural botanical garden splashed with color. In this forest, as in so many other wild places in Bhutan, nature evolves and passes through cycles of life and death in full view of passersby. Trees die, fall, and decay, to be claimed by ferns, mosses, fungi, and sometime orchids, clinging in profusion to disintegrating trunks left untouched by villagers, who are forbidden to pillage or scavenge in protected forests—and who in this area are in any case few and far between. “To cut a fresh tree we consider a sin,” an administrator told me, “because a tree also has life.” The woodland floor is deep in a damp compost of leaves and twigs, through which new trees rise, nourished, to look for light.

The side road ends on the rim of the Phobjika Valley, a serene open space of perfect natural proportions in a perfect enclosure of hills. Here one can picture the genteel tea parties or night halts of Aum Rinzi’s youthful travels. In the spring, this high valley (over nine thousand feet in altitude) is a bowl of emerald fields; in winter, a dun-colored haven for
black-necked cranes, one of the few safe places left for them in Asia. A scattering of farmhouses and flocks of prayer flags rest on the valley floor. Overseeing all this from its perch on a hill at the valley’s northern edge is the Gantey Gompa, the largest Nyingmapa monastery in Bhutan. According to Bhutanese legend, Gantey was built in the seventeenth century by a grandson of the saint Pema Lingpa. The monastery invites pilgrimage, standing as it does at the end of a narrow lane that wends through a cluster of houses and up a gentle incline to the gompa walls, where novices roughhouse in the grass and dogs snooze under trees.

A royal government permit allowing me to enter monasteries closed to foreigners, a document that wasn’t always honored by abbots, passed muster with a senior monk at Gantey. The abbot, he told us, was halfway through a three-year meditation at a retreat on a nearby hill. The monastery had a somnolent air. A few more novices were messing around in the first courtyard we entered. The monk said that boys came here to study at the age of ten; their childish restlessness seemed to be tolerated most places. Everywhere boys seemed to be racketing around monastic compounds, often in rubber flip-flops. They don’t always pay attention during prayers, and nothing in a temple moves faster than a novice at the end of worship or a ceremony.