If you go: Learn about Bhutan

BHUTAN: Limited-entry Shangri-La A nation with no traffic lights, where traditional garb is mandatory, with only 6,000 visitors a year: paradise
Sunday, October 10, 2004
RICHARD READ

Imagine a nation, in this full-service 21st century, with no traffic lights, no railroads, no McDonald's, no billboards and hardly any crime.

Visualize an undiscovered Asian Switzerland, a place where people still wear traditional clothes and inhabit snug timber-and-mud homes, where sports fans are crazy for archery and where television and the Internet are only five years old. Think of a country that exports hydropower and rocks to neighboring nations, and tracks Gross National Happiness as opposed to gross national product.

Add all that up and you get Bhutan, a remote Himalayan kingdom perched on the roof of the world between China and India. The landlocked nation less than one-fifth the size of Oregon remains the closest place on Earth to Shangri-La.

Getting to Bhutan is hardly easy, via Bangkok and connections to a national airline, Druk Air, with only two planes. And they don't let just anyone in.

But for a mandatory, all-inclusive fee of $200 a day -- a bargain actually, when you realize what's included -- you can join a limited crowd exploring the devoutly Buddhist nation as it opens ever so slowly to the outside.

Fewer than 6,000 outsiders a year get into Bhutan, compared to the 23,000 visitors who arrive in Hong Kong each day (not including those from mainland China).

Bhutan, which offers trekking, ancient cultural attractions and majestic mountain scenery, is becoming more popular with tourists as other Himalayan destinations lose luster. Maoist guerrillas are scaring travelers away from Nepal. Chinese settlers are changing the character of Tibet. India absorbed Sikkim and Ladakh long ago.

"Our uniqueness is the only weapon the country has," says Karma Tashi, owner of Bhutan Travellers, an adventure-tour operator. "We can't depend on military might."

I spent just three days in Bhutan last spring on my way from India to Thailand, and I aim to return.

My scouting mission featured stunning museums and fortresses, dinner with a farm family and a day hike to Tiger's Nest Monastery, an ornate structure that clings to a cliff 1,000 feet above rhododendron-studded pine forests.

I had no time for the famed Snowman Trek, billed as the world's toughest, a monthlong slog supported by yaks over 11 passes, three above 16,000 feet. I couldn't tag along with a Wilderness Travel contingent of American professionals in their 40s trekking into a valley just opened to tourism.

But I was impressed by a nation that seems to be playing the development game by its own rules, protecting its culture and environment while moving gradually toward democracy. The only downside to the place is the barking dogs, which can't be yelled at because they'll be humans in the next life. Best bring a good pair of earplugs.

Bhutan stands out from the moment a traveler books a trip. A visitor in a group of three or more pays $200 a day. That spring or fall high-season rate ($165 in the off-season) includes hotels, meals, tours, guides, in-country transport and admission fees. For trekkers, the rate also covers equipment, cooks, guides and pack animals.

Two travelers pay an additional $30 a person daily; a single traveler pays an additional $40 daily. Independent travel without a guide is not permitted.

The bigger hurdle is the hefty air fare to reach Paro, the site of Bhutan's international airport. The Portland-Bangkok round-trip is roughly $700, plus $740 for the Bangkok-Paro round-trip.

Bhutan sets its flat tourist rates as much to keep people out as to let them in. Backpack-toting "shoestring" travelers, ubiquitous in Kathmandu, are a rare sight in Thimphu, Bhutan's capital. Instead, Bhutan seeks a limited number of "value" tourists who aren't likely to corrupt the local youths.

Most visitors arrive in Paro on Druk Air, skimming over surrounding mountainsides and grinding dramatically to a halt just short of the runway's end. Instead, I arranged for my Bhutanese guide and driver to pick me up at the end of another excursion in Darjeeling, India, for the seven-hour drive to Bhutan.

The guide, Jigme, was an earnest fellow in traditional dress: A knee-length robe secured by a woven cloth belt, black leather shoes and long socks. The driver, Dorje, a shy young man in a similar outfit, piloted a light gray Toyota Corona with 134,000 kilometers on the odometer, in this life.

We drove through forest preserves inhabited by mischievous monkeys and through tea gardens in thickly populated India, passing a leopard-rehabilitation center. That night we stayed in Phuentsholing, a Bhutan border town as seedy as border settlements the world over.

The next morning, the Toyota climbed quickly out of the valleys that Bhutan and Britain once fought for, negotiating hairpin turns steep enough to put a crick in my neck. Road signs bore quaint admonitions. "Don't gossip, let him drive."

But gossip we did, as Jigme filled me in on his nation's royal history. He said Bhutan's third king was especially clever, getting the country into the United Nations in 1971, thereby avoiding the fate of Tibet and Sikkim. (Bhutan reportedly had to pad its population, now estimated at 700,000, to meet the 1 million required for membership.)

The current king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, is no slouch either, having been educated in Bhutan, India and England. The king, married to four sisters, is modernizing everything from education to communications. The National Assembly has resolved that at least 60 percent of the country must remain forested forever.

(I learned later that Nancy Lindborg, executive vice president of Mercy Corps, the humanitarian organization based in Portland, worked as a governess in Bhutan for the son of the king's uncle in 1983. She says her experience was like the movie "The King and I," without the romance.)

We stopped in a rustic mountain lodge for lunch, a tasty meal of roast chicken, rice, fiddlehead ferns, dal soup, cheese dumplings and tea. Later that afternoon, we arrived in Thimphu, billed as the only world capital without traffic lights.

The size of Corvallis, Thimphu sits in a wooded valley along a lazy river, with prayer flags fluttering from surrounding hills. Whitewashed buildings with elaborate cornices and colorful trim contain shops that carry everything from Indian shampoo and other necessities to Tibetan jewelry, intricate woodwork and silver-encrusted conch shells. There are no beggars and people appear healthy; all citizens get free health care.

Hearing a crowd's roar, I strolled down to watch some archery. Hundreds of enthusiastic spectators packed a reviewing stand and lined the range, a stretch of ground half again as long as a football field.

Cheerleaders in bright dresses tried to distract archers on opposing teams who took aim, egged on by teammates who stood dangerously close to a small target as bamboo arrows sailed in. Successful marksmen cheered, sang and danced.

Everyone wore traditional dress, which is mandatory nationwide, but especially formal at events such as archery, the national sport.

"These days it's very strict," said Gem Tshering, a 21-year-old student from Paro who, in the privacy of his home, wore a denim jacket and pants and a black T-shirt.

People who fail to wear local dress in town during the day can be fined 6,000 ngultrum ($143) and jailed for a night, he told me. "I think it's good," Tshering said, "because our government doesn't want our people to lose our traditions."

You can see Thimphu's main sights in a day, including the takin, Bhutan's national animal, a creature related to a musk ox with a mooselike face and horns like a wildebeest. The National Library is impressive, with ancient scriptures instead of books. The Folk Heritage Museum is a gem, a replica of a traditional farmhouse showing how many rural people still live.

If you're dying to play golf in Bhutan, Thimphu's nine-hole course is your only chance.

Paro, the airport town about 30 miles from Thimphu, has a rugged Wild West feel, its main street lined with stores that let customers in through their front windows.

The National Museum features an incredible display of Bhutanese postage stamps, which celebrate everything from the Apollo moon landing to Donald Duck and include "talking stamps," which are tiny record albums, grooves and all.

The massive Paro Dzong, a stunning temple fortress, takes visitors back centuries. Here, in a scene that transported me back to Tibet, I watched two dozen monks chant cross-legged on broad floorboards beneath a towering Buddha figure.

The highlight of my trip, though, was a morning hike up to Taktshang, the Tiger's Nest Monastery, where the Guru Rinpoche, the eighth-century founder of Nyingma Buddhism, is said to have flown on the back of a tigress.

Tourists can rent ponies for the mountainous hike, and Dorje, my driver, mounted one just for the fun of it. Evidently it was Dorje's first time on a horse, because he sat forward of the saddle, immediately tipping upside-down while hugging the animal's neck, to the delight of Jigme the guide.

We began our trek at an altitude of 8,500 feet, hiking through deep, cool woods and admiring wine-red rhododendrons in full bloom. We stopped at a teahouse and gazed across at the monastery perched on a thin ledge, then continued on a trail cut into the rock face.

Tiger's Nest, meticulously rebuilt after a 1998 fire, is a deeply spiritual place, one of the most venerated pilgrim sites on the Himalayan circuit and a symbol of Bhutan.

Here, I breathed the sharp aroma of butter lamps and watched red-robed monks blowing trumpets taller than they were. I gazed across the bucolic Paro Valley at powder-puff clouds floating in an impossibly blue sky. And I decided I'd have to return, venturing farther into this exceptional country before it, too, inevitably changes.

Richard Read: 503-294-5135; richread@aol.com.