He tours the country regularly, consulting local people and hosting big meals at which he himself serves the food.
‘He’s not a king who goes on European holidays,’ says Benji.
He is, nevertheless, an absolute ruler. Though he himself is working on a constitution that will limit his power, King Jigme is, to all intents and purposes, free to do as he likes. Benji sees no problem with this.
‘It’s very important to have an absolute monarch, a guy who cares for the country, who knows where he’s taking us. Left to ourselves …we’d be squabbling.’
His policies are all geared to the preservation of Bhutan’s cultural identity, and this has led to allegations that outsiders, particularly Nepalese immigrants in the south of the country, are not allowed the same rights as the Bhutanese. Benji sees this as justifiable.
‘Small countries like Bhutan, surrounded by larger countries with fast-growing populations looking for land…have to be on the lookout. We don’t want the Sikkim syndrome, where Sikkim was just overpopulated by Nepalese. The original people of Sikkim became a minority in their country…they got voted out of power, and then they all voted to become a state of India.’
Bhutan’s survival after the war was a triumph of diplomacy and timing. Independence from India was agreed in 1950, just before the Chinese invasion of Tibet. If it had been after the invasion, Benji thinks India might well have wanted to keep control of Bhutan. As it is, the two countries have maintained good relations. Bhutan’s biggest export is hydroelectric power, all of which goes to India, and recently the Bhutanese army flushed out insurgents who were using the country as a base for operations into north India.
Benji positively glows with pride.
‘Led by our King…we took these terrorists on and in one swift fall knocked them all out in two days. It’s amazing how we did it.’
The question is how much longer Bhutan will be able to walk this tightrope between the feudal system (officially abolished in 1953) and a forward-looking future. The King knows what he wants. In May 2004, he announced, ‘Bhutan and its people are ready to have a democratic political system.’
Day One Hundred and Five : Gantey to Thimpu
The Gantey valley has turned grey overnight. A fresh coating of snow has picked out the field boundaries and transformed the gently sloping, treeless slopes from straw brown to light silver, making this beautiful corner of Bhutan look like the Yorkshire Dales.
From my window I can see a woman from the house behind, in a blouse and long pink skirt, stepping gingerly across the ice to the public water pipe. She brushes a white cap of snow off the top of the tap and starts to wash. The flying droplets of water, back-lit by the morning sun, splash round her face like particles of gold.
Before we leave, we pay a visit to the monastery, or gompa, at the far end of the ridge above the valley.
Benji explains that Bhutan may be a Buddhist kingdom, but the sects here are different from those in Tibet. The Galupka school, the Yellow Hats, dominate in Tibet and the Drukpa Kagyu school, the Red Hats, in Bhutan. The Je Khenpo, head of the Drukpa school, is the religious authority here. The Dalai Lama has no jurisdiction in Bhutan and has never visited the country.
The monastery has been undergoing renovation for two years and outside the main door a temporary roof has been erected to shelter a timber yard and workshop. Four craftsmen are at work carving a complex decorative motif on a 50-foot-long, blue-pine beam. One man is using a dagger to carve out a dorje, a diamond thunderbolt motif that is a recurrent theme in Bhutan. It’s all done by hand, and each has a line of wood-handled tools and a portable radio laid out beside him.
An ancient gateway leads to a big courtyard, in the middle of which, in the Bhutanese style, is the impressive main temple, with the monks’ accommodation surrounding it, in single-storey cells with painted lintels, door frames and eaves. It’s a building site and looks as though it will be for some time to come.
Over the barking of a pack of dogs I can hear prayers are being chanted from somewhere. The restoration work is largely being done by gomchens, lay monks who don’t have to be celibate or live in the monastery. The monks who remain here support themselves by offering their services out for family occasions, providing blessings for births, marriages, deaths, new houses and performing any ceremonies these innately religious people require.
On our way out a dishevelled, tousle-headed young man who can barely walk, approaches us and shows us a deep and nasty gash low on his right leg. Pete, who is a saint in these matters, washes the wound and advises him to go to hospital before it turns gangrenous, but the man says it’s been like that for four years. He then starts to sing a love song to me. Benji shakes his head disapprovingly. He says the man’s obviously mad. I try not to take this personally.
We head back towards Thimpu, but conditions on the road are much worse than when we came in. Stopping to take a shot of a herd of yaks against the snow, we find ourselves victims of an admirable piece of retail opportunism. A small, doughty lady races out of her tent and sprints a couple of hundred yards through the deep snow up towards us. For a moment, we imagine she’s come to shoo us away, or demand a BBC contract, but nothing of the kind. Scrambling up onto the road, she produces a range of yak-hair tote bags and sells all three of them more or less instantly.
Once over the 11,000-foot (3350 m) pass out of the valley, we expect things to get better. Quite the opposite. The snow is deeper and the road icier and much more treacherous. Lichen-clad conifers plunge steeply down on one side of us, disappearing into a cold shroud of mist, so it’s hard to tell just how far we might fall if, as seems all too likely, the minibus slides off the road. From marvelling at the delicate beauty of the snowbound forest, thoughts turn swiftly to problems of survival. The normally nerveless Nigel, who, not long ago, was in a serious accident on the ice in Alaska, has the window open on the other side of the bus, ready for a quick exit. We negotiate a score of steep hairpin bends at a snail’s pace. The snow is falling more thickly now, and every now and then the wheels slide and we prepare for the worst. After almost an hour of hearts in mouths the snow turns to sleet and the conifers turn to rhododendrons and the dirt track to paved road and we can at last breathe normally again.
The Central Road, which is the only road connecting east and west Bhutan, is less than 20 years old, an indication of the government’s ambivalent attitude to the opening up of the country. It twists and turns dizzily around the spurs and shoulders of the mountains. They say the longest stretch of straight road in Bhutan is the runway at Paro airport.
Nevertheless, journeys that took two days now take two hours, and we are in Thimpu by afternoon, and the near white-out on the pass already seems a distant memory.
So too is the gentle timelessness of the Gantey valley.
Thimpu, the capital of Bhutan, is no rip-roaring metropolis, but it has roads and roundabouts (where policemen direct traffic with wonderfully flowing arm movements, as if they’re doing t’ai chi) and car parks and cosmopolitan restaurants and banks and hotels and, according to Benji, its very own property boom.
When Thimpu was chosen to be the capital in 1952, it was little more than a few houses clustered around the majestic Tashioedzong, and it grew slowly until 1974, when Bhutan was opened to foreigners for the first time. Since then it has mushroomed and has a current population of 50,000. To accommodate everyone, the rules on traditional house-building seem more liberally applied here and the streets of boringly respectable four- or five-storey blocks look more Mitteleuropean than Bhutanese.
At the Arts Cafe I meet Tsewang, a young actor and film maker, recently returned from showing his new film Travellers and Magicians at the Deauville Film Festival. It’s set in the Bhutanese countryside and in it he plays a man trying to get away from the restrictive world of the village.