Bhutan, the Dragon Kingdom — DAVID YARBOROUGH

Allie with our wonderful guide Chencho at Tachog Lhakhang Monastery

Bhutan should not exist, not in this age. A small land-locked country of high mountains that has never been colonized and that measures its performance in terms of “gross national happiness.” Imagine a country that is a third the size of my home state of North Carolina, but with fewer people than my hometown of Charlotte (roughly 800,000 vs. 900,000). Yet Bhutan does exist, and as a complete, independent country, with its own military, currency, diplomatic corps, borders to defend, foreign policy and so on.

Arriving in Bhutan is an adventure unto itself. Unless you are an intrepid trekker coming by bus from India via the southern border crossing at Phuentsholding, you will fly into the nation’s only international airport at Paro. The landing requires weaving through valleys between peaks as high as 18,000 feet with the runway not coming into sight until the last minute. This is the only airport in the world whose length (6500ft) is less than its elevation (7300 ft.). Landings are done under visual flight rules, meaning daylight and clear weather only. So challenging is this approach that fewer than 20 pilots are certified to do it. Private aircraft wishing to land at Paro must have one of these certified Bhutani pilots or navigators onboard. Here is one of many YouTube videos of this landing. By the way, the take-offs from Paro are yet another flying adventure.

The contrast between Bhutan and the place we just spent two weeks touring, India, is stark. India is chaotic, polluted, crowded, noisy and busy. Bhutan is calm, clean, green, quiet, nearly empty relatively, and all about being Bhutanese. 72% of its land mass is forest, and its king and his government have decreed that it will remain so. It’s a vertical country, both in its topography, with Himalayan peaks reaching to 25,000 feet, and in the way it uses its non-forested land. There are no high-rises here, but even simple farmhouses have three floors. That assures that each farmer can optimize the use of his land. With my creaky knees, I dubbed it the land of a million stairs.

About an hour’s drive from Paro is Thimphu, the capital. It’s a bustling town of about a quarter million—a third of the total population. It is also a boom town. There is construction everywhere. Architectural controls assure that every building is built in the Bhutanese style—colorful, with elaborate exterior moldings and metal roofs. There are only 85,000 vehicles in the entire country, but it seems as if at least half of them are in Thimphu. The movement of the population from small villages and rural areas to Thimphu is very concerning to those who rule Bhutan, and they are developing policies to combat it.

Speaking of those with the power, yes, there is a king in this kingdom. As far as I could discern, he is extremely well-liked and respected. His picture, with his beautiful wife and young son, is everywhere. For the past decade he has served within a constitutional monarchy. This system appears to be enthusiastically supported by the people. The king is a graduate of Oxford, as is his queen, a commoner from a small town in central Bhutan whom he met at the university. This king is the first to be limited to a single wife. His father had four, all of them sisters! He proposed to marry the fifth and final daughter, but she refused. The current queen’s father is the chief pilot of the Royal Bhutan Airline, known as DrukAir. Of course, Bhutan has its own language. Druk means dragon, and Bhutan is also known as the Dragon Kingdom.

Bhutan is landlocked, the nearest port being in Kolkata. It has borders with only two countries, India and China. It is a tiny Himalayan hamlet of three-quarter million folks, bordering the world’s two most populous countries with more than 3 billion people between them. The northern border is with Tibet which was annexed by China in the fifties. No surprise that a part of this border is contested by the Chinese.

The county’s largest industry is agriculture. They are self-sufficient on food. Their largest export is hydro-electricity which is transmitted to energy-hungry India. The proceeds are more than enough to import the refined transportation fuels they still require. The second largest source of hard currency is tourism. With no viable gateways through the Himalayas to their north, they have very little trade with China. India is far and away Bhutan’s most important trading partner. Bhutan claims to be the world’s first carbon-positive country. That may be, but with the exception of a few new hybrids, all the vehicles we saw were running on either gasoline or diesel. The remoteness of many parts of their country is such that relying 100% on electric vehicles is not practical. Hybrids seem to be what they are moving to.

Like seemingly everything about Bhutan, their approach to tourism is unique. They call it “high value, low impact.” International visitors from outside the countries of India, Bangladesh and the Maldives must obtain a visa by contracting with an officially licensed local tour operator. Each visitor must spend a minimum of $250 per day. This discriminates against those who can’t afford that, but it is intended to attract only serious visitors who are coming to see this country and respect its traditions. There are numerous super-luxurious eco-boutique properties here where the cost far exceeds those minimums. The government’s cut is $65 per person per day, which is committed to funding education and healthcare.

One reason for the harmony and unity found here is the homogeneity of Bhutan’s population. This is a devoutly Buddhist country. The number of non-Buddhists is minuscule. There are four major sects of Buddhism practiced here, but the distinctions were lost on me. One thing was obvious: they take their religion very seriously. There are temples and shrines and stupas (memorials to the dead) and monasteries everywhere, including in the remote nooks and crannies of their dramatic mountains. And they are full of devotees. Perhaps 10% of the total population is monks and nuns. Every residence has a shrine within it.

We visited numerous of these places of worship with our earnest guide Chen Cho. At the Thimphu Chorten, a stupa built to honor the previous king, there were throngs of elderly people who spend nearly every day there, chanting while spinning large prayer wheels, walking around the structure—they do this exactly 108 times. That is a very important number in both Buddhism and Hinduism. Perhaps I will expand on that in a later piece.

Inside the stupa is an elaborate, colorful sculpture, almost grotesque to our Western eyes, depicting many of the gods of Buddhism. The complexity of the religion was overwhelming—so many gods with so many stories! I did learn the three most important figures to Bhutanese Buddhism are Siddartha, the prince who became the Buddha, Padma Sam Bhava, who introduced Buddhism here in the eighth century and the Great Unifier who created Bhutan the country in the sixteenth. I will spare you trying to spell out his full name, let’s just go with Unifier. By the end of our stay in the Land of Happiness, I was praying for a great Simplifier, a god who could help me make sense of it all.

Repairing earthquake damage at the Cheri Monastery

Another hugely impressive sight in Thimphu is known affectionately as the Big Buddha. It’s not just big, it’s huge! Designed by Bhutanis, manufactured in pieces in China and assembled on a hilltop overlooking the city, it stands 193 feet tall and sits on a pedestal the size of several football fields. Beneath the statue is an elaborate temple which contains 125,000 small (8-12”) Buddha statues! The story goes that two Buddhist businessmen from Singapore were persuaded to do this by a Bhutani monk they met on a flight. They bankrolled the entire project to the tune of $100 million.

While we weren’t there to climb or do serious mountain trekking, we did have two spectacular hikes in our program. The Cheri Monastery is tucked into the side of a mountain, at 9300 feet, north of Thimphu, no more than forty miles from the Chinese border. The hike up takes less than an hour, but the emphasis is definitely on the “up.” To think how this was constructed in the sixteenth century, how all the building materials were brought there, is confounding. Today there is a lot of construction there, to repair damage from the 2015 earthquake centered in Nepal. The materials are hoisted up the mountain in a crude cable car. All the workers, many of them women, must hike up to work each morning, bringing their lunch. Watching them maneuver around on scaffolds made of bamboo poles tied with rope, with no harnesses, was to imagine that the original construction done four hundred years ago must have been very similar.

The tiny Kingdom of Bhutan bills itself as a place where the pursuit of happiness is paramount. There is little hardship, save cost and accessibility, with visiting there. It is completely safe, and the happy Bhutani people welcomed us stressed-out aliens warmly. Water quality and the variety of food were excellent. The most popular national dish is ema datshi, literally translated as “chili-cheese.” This is definitely not the same variation on a hamburger I used to order at the Beacon in my youth. This is a stew composed of hot chili peppers and yak cheese with onions and cilantro that is served over the nation’s primary staple, rice. It’s delicious but incredibly spicy.

One surprise was that they eat beef here, something you would never find in India. Cows are still sacred and wander around blocking traffic, but apparently once they are dead, they’re fair game. We were told that most of the beef served here was imported. There are numerous world-class hotels to choose from. As in India we went with the Taj Tasha, with proved a worthy choice. We were greeted with the customary gift of scarves and given a ritual blessing for our stay by a Buddhist priest.

The highlight of every visitor to the Dragon Kingdom is the trek to the Taktsang Monastery, or the Tiger’s nest, as most people know it. The iconic image of this structure clinging to the side of a cliff at an elevation of 10,000 feet is the one most associated with Bhutan and the one every travel article features. Reaching the monastery requires a steep hike with more than 3000 feet of elevation change. The final approach involves more than 700 stairs. The entire hike up can take four hours. Because of the altitude and the elevation change, this can be a slow walk for many visitors, the reason that most guides, like ours, plan this trek for the final day of a visit.

Allie snapped this shot of the Tiger’s Nest from the trail

The gods were not smiling on me on the day of our ascent. I awoke with a digestive problem that would not allow me to make the trip. It was a huge disappointment for me, but I enjoyed the experience vicariously through Allie and our friends the Killians, all of whom made the hike successfully. They reported it to be one of their toughest walks ever (and Coco has climbed Kilimanjaro!), but one that was enormously rewarding. There are seven temples within the monastery complex which dates back to the seventeenth century. Unfortunately, as inside all the other Buddhist (and Hindu) temples we visited during our entire tour of India, Bhutan and Nepal, no photography is allowed.

Bhutan has long been a bucket-list destination for me. I consider myself blessed to have experienced it. Meeting our guide Chen Cho was yet another blessing. Seeing the kingdom through his eyes, I was struck by how passionate the people are about their religious traditions. Buddhism is literally their way of life. We saw it in the elderly and the young. In the monks and nuns and the common people, working the fields and shops. We saw men lying prostrate in the street, enduring their personal spiritual journeys, while traffic carefully avoided them. It was all very moving, something I will be thinking about, and writing about in the coming months.

There are a few dark clouds that hover above this Shangri-La. While there is no legal limitation on the practice of other religions, there are very few non-Buddhists here. It is a highly homogenous population and a monoculture defined by its Buddhist religion. There are lingering scars from the loss, whether through flight or expulsion, of more than 100,000 Lhotshampa people in early 1900s. The Lhotshampa are ethnically Nepalese, who chafed at the ban on the use of the language in schools and a requirement to wear traditional Bhutanese attire. Most of the Lhotshampa ended up in refugee camps in Nepal where they lingered for years. There is also the ever-present reality that Bhutan is sandwiched between two populous and powerful countries. Indo-Sino relations remain tense and show no signs of softening under the current Modi government in Delhi.

More troubling to me is the fact that the Bhutanis require government permission to travel outside their country. The rational for his is to stem the loss of younger people who are tempted to emigrate to Australia or the US or elsewhere seeking a different kind of life. Freedom of movement is a fundamental human right. It may prove difficult for Bhutan to maintain the happiness of its people when they are deprived of this right.

Bhutan is exactly what it is billed to be: a peaceful, clean and beautiful country with wonderful, contented and welcoming people. A “once in a lifetime“ visit there is something I can heartily recommend for everyone’s bucket list.

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