He himself was the son of farmers and recognizes that, by many international standards, Bhutan remains backward. Literacy is a little over 50 per cent and television only came here five years ago. But though life is hard, he doesn’t think this is a bad thing. Unemployment is quite high here and this worries him more than lack of money.
‘The Buddhist version of poverty is a situation where you have nothing to contribute.’
He feels that in Bhutan there is still a strong sense of, as he puts it, ‘unison with the earth’.
‘In San Francisco I felt lost. Everywhere you go you have billboards telling you that you need to buy this or that, or the latest Cherokee four-wheel drive, but here we have different kind of billboards.’
A coach pulls up and a line of docile tourists file past us into the cafe.
‘We have the prayer flags, we have the temples. These are our markers, you know, reminding you, in the Buddhist way, that you are not here for ever.’
Bearing this in mind, I end the day sampling one of the night-spots of Thimpu, a decorous, well-behaved snooker bar called Rumours. Pretty girls smash balls around the table like old pros and a television set is tuned to live coverage of England’s cricket match with the West Indies in Barbados.
Benji, who doesn’t like to miss a get-together, is sitting at the bar with me and his attractive and urbane cousin Khendum. The talk meanders round to reincarnation. Khendum admits she has ‘a little problem with reincarnation’.
She doesn’t believe in it.
‘I can’t reconcile my practising of Buddhism with that aspect of it,’ she says with an admirable directness.
Benji has definite preferences.
‘I’d like to be reborn as a black 7 foot 6 basketball player who earns a lot of money.’
Khendum gives me a wry smile.
‘He’ll be a cockroach.’
‘Thank you. Thank you very much,’ says Benji courteously.
She and Benji are both part of Bhutan’s privileged, wealthy, cosmopolitan elite. Like Tsewang, they’re outward-looking and internationalist, and though they are fiercely proud of their country’s cultural protectionism, all of them accept that change is accelerating and inevitable. As Khendum says, ‘We’re not romantic or idealistic enough to think that things will always be the way they are now, but we’d like to slow the development process up to a degree that we can handle change when it comes.’
Realistic, sensible and a trifle wistful at the same time.
Day One Hundred and Six : Thimpu to Takstang
The slopes of the Himalaya are rich in plants that have medicinal properties. Used for thousands of years by rural, mountain people, they are now increasingly attractive to an international market seeking an alternative to chemical drugs. The canny Bhutanese government, together with the World Health Organization, recognized this demand and in 1979 set up an Institute of Traditional Medicine, which researches, catalogues and produces herbal remedies. Recent newspaper reports suggest that they might have hit pay dirt, with a product already being tipped as the first ‘herbal Viagra’.
The word ‘Institute’ fills me with ominous images of two-headed dogs and white-coated men with small spectacles, so, as we approach the heart of Bhutan’s traditional medicine establishment on a hill above Thimpu, I’m much relieved to find that it’s a colourfully decorated, half-timbered building that looks like a well-preserved Elizabethan manor house.
We’re welcomed by three serious men, two of whom are called Dorje. They show us around an immaculately laid out display of traditional medicines in a long, library-like room with beamed ceiling and glass cabinets. The debt to Tibetan medicine is acknowledged in the old anatomical charts showing the five wheels or chakras, the centres of spiritual power that control all our bodily systems. Traditional Bhutanese medicine also borrowed from the Indian idea that the balance of the Three Humours, bile, wind and phlegm, dictates the state of our physical and spiritual health.
Of their prize discovery they are as bashful and cautious as you would expect government scientists to be. They admit that they are working hard to produce products that will have a commercial application, as it brings in the money to keep the Institute going, and that they have recently concocted a mix of five herbs that ‘could possess spermogenetic powers’.
‘Increase virility,’ adds one of the Dorjes, helpfully.
Their mixture is currently on a two-year test, after which conclusions will be examined. When I enquire about its constituents, glances are exchanged and there are mutterings about bio-piracy and international property rights, but it seems the key ingredient is none other than our old friend Cordyceps sinensis, or caterpillar fungus, five pieces of which I bought off the street in Yushu for PS4, and which are currently stuck in dust and fluff at the bottom of my bag. They confirm that the tiny little shoots are very difficult to find and though it grows up in the Bhutanese mountains, there is often a fight with Tibetans from across the border to get to it first.
Our hosts line up to bid us goodbye. The idea that these grave and courteous men in matching khos might be onto a world-beating sex aid seems as unlikely as it would be desirable.
Early lunch with Khendum at a trendy new restaurant called the Bhutan Kitchen, opened two days ago and alarmingly empty. I meet two of her international friends. Linda, a buxom American, is married to a Bhutanese thangka painter and has lived here for seven years.
‘I love Bhutan. Bhutan is so relaxed and peaceful.’
‘Everyone says that.’
She nods and shrugs.
‘But there’s nothing else to say about Bhutan.’
Francoise, a lively, funny French lady, who I feel I know already, as she’s written the guide book that’s become my Bhutanese bible, is a touch more analytical.
‘I won’t call it Shangri-la but there is a certain magic here, which isn’t about wealth,’ she says. ‘Once you’re trapped in, you can’t get out. It’s a magic trap.’
Khendum has lined up some local gastronomic specialities. As a sharpener, I take rice wine with an egg in it and, noticing the ubiquitous betel nut on the table, I decide that the moment has come for me to sample the Himalayan lorry-driver’s staple diet. Khendum prepares it carefully, wrapping the hard nut in its own leaf with a smear of lime paste. The sharp bitterness of the leaf is an ugly taste, but it wears off and after a few minutes of chewing my head begins to heat up as if from deep inside. I feel my eyes water and my cheeks redden as the betel rushes my body onto full alert and soon, like everyone else who chews it, my teeth are stained red and I’m looking for somewhere to spit it out.
The main dishes are challenging. A long, stringy vegetable of some kind seems determined to strangle me from within, smashed chicken and red rice is dotted with small bone fragments and the cow-hide is, well, an acquired taste. One which, I fear, would take armed men with rifles at my head to acquire.
Our time among the flesh-pots of Thimpu is distressingly brief. Tomorrow we head north to Jomolhari mountain to begin a vale-dictory trek, a farewell to the high Himalaya.
By way of preparation, I plan a short training climb with my guide who, almost unbelievably, is not called Dorje. He’s called Doje.
In the foothills near Paro is a complex of holy buildings that draws pilgrims from all over the Himalaya. Takstang, meaning ‘Tiger’s Lair’, is built on precipitous rock ledges and, though it remains almost impossibly difficult to get to, there is now a well-trodden tourist trail up to the crags opposite.