Letter from Bhutan

Well, it took some time to get there.

There was, of course, the usual problem of deciding on a suitable tour – preferably one that wasn’t too demanding on a constitution weakened by years of neglect. Then it had to be acceptable to my sister if I was to have any guarantee of congenial company. I’d managed to persuade her that on a birding tour, she would see much more than just birds, which was the difficult part. And she did the rest, including bringing along her daughter, who was already developing an aptitude for birding that I’ve never managed to achieve.

Then the pandemic struck, so all plans were put on hold since Bhutan closed itself off from the rest of the world, thereby reverting to an attitude that had served it very well for most of its history. Even when the rest of the world re-opened borders, Bhutan maintained its Garbo stance. In 2022 there were rumblings to the effect that it was poised to allow limited entry, but as a means of achieving this had decided to increase its tourist tax by an exorbitant amount. Then the authorities announced that an exception would be made for visa applications that pre-dated the increase, if a drastically short deadline was met for reapplication. Luckily our tour operators were on the ball. So we were ready to go as soon as the points of entry re-opened.

Not all of them did, which required rejigging the itinerary. So instead of entering by land from India, we would have to fly into Paro, the only international airport in the country, from Delhi. And since the operators had taken care of the group visa for Bhutan, the only thing we had to fix was the Indian transit visa.

This proved to be a test of endurance and ingenuity – and a little mendacity. It was called an electronic visa, which meant of course that it had to be filled in online. It was probably the longest visa application I’ve ever completed and the gist of it was that if you had any relatives from Pakistan, if you had ever visited Pakistan, or if you had even attended a test match played by Pakistan, then you would be refused entry to India. Most bizarrely of all, when I had to testify to the religion I belonged to (or not) and I chose ‘or not’, the whole page I had filled in was erased and I had to start again. Don’t ask me why. But after three attempts to register as unaffiliated, I decided to reclaim the faith I was brought up in.

In a couple of days, I got a cheering email saying that my application had been approved. And no other instructions. So, fool that I am, I simply printed the email. It was, after all, an e-visa and the approval would surely be logged into their system when we went through Indian immigration.

I seriously underestimated their determination to exclude undesirable visitors, even those that would happily have avoided the country altogether.

Still, I set off from Sweden full of anticipation, blithely oblivious of the trap laid for me. The flight to Heathrow was uneventful, Gothenburg being one of the few remaining airports that treat passengers as human beings rather than cattle.

True, I managed to bugger up as usual on arrival. I had to switch terminals when I got to Heathrow. We’d been booked into a hotel that was close to the terminal we would leave from the next morning. It took my addled brain a while to figure out the logistics – though to be fair, Heathrow didn’t exactly go out of its way to help transiting passengers.

Finally I made it to Terminal 5, so I simply had to get the right bus to the hotel. Needless to say, this wasn’t as simple as it looked and, needless to say, I managed to bugger up this task as well. The problem was that there were two Premier Inns at the airport and both were on the same road. And the bus I took was stopping at the wrong one. Which in fact was close to the terminal I’d just left. As luck would have it, I managed at least to figure this out, so I didn’t get off and end back where I started. And my luck held when the driver took pity on me and dropped me off at the other Premier on his way back – even if this wasn’t a scheduled stop. There are advantages to looking old and feeble-minded. I probably mean, ‘being old and feeble-minded’.

Still, the first stage had been surmounted without disaster and I met up with sister and niece later in the afternoon. In future, they would be able to nurse me through the trauma of Getting There.

I hadn’t reckoned with the LFF (Lappscouse Fuck-up Factor, for the uninitiated). Which proves to be genetic, partially at least.

For, the next morning, having met up with our British guide/ courier Mike at the terminal, niece and I found that our Indian visas were not what we had assumed they would be. Both of us should have returned to the visa website to print it out. But all three of us had had different takes on what we were supposed to do, and only my sister had chosen the right one. So Mary (the Niece) and I had to throw ourselves on the mercy of the member of the BA staff we tried to check-in with. The fact that he was of Indian origin himself perhaps helped. The upshot was that Mary logged into the required pages on her phone, downloaded them and sent them to a room buried somewhere in the bowels of the airport where they could be printed out. Our clerk fetched them and we got checked in. All of which took the staff member about 30 minutes. Perhaps I should enter ‘Hindu’ on my application next time by way of thanks.

After all that, it didn’t come as a great surprise that, when we got to Indira Gandhi Airport, old Imperial habits of bureaucracy kicked in. The only thing electronic about the e-visa was the application. The immigration officer reverted to copying out details in triplicate from our visas before admitting us.

No sooner were we were out than they pulled us back in. So to speak. In fact, there was some confusion about where we should check in for the flight to Paro. But after we had run the length of the airport five times, we were finally formed into a queue that had to be constantly redesigned to satisfy the aesthetic sensibilities of the three members of staff that were supervising it.

After check-in, we breezed through security, only pausing long enough to allow the scowling guards to confiscate my cigarette lighter. I scoured the shops in the Zone for one to replace it, but in vain. Strangely enough, there was actually a smoking room there. In the full bloom of my naivety, I entered and asked for a light. I was pointed to a plate in the wall. With a hole in it. The idea was that I should insert my cigarette, then press a button to the side to light my fire. My roll-ups are so short that I ended up kissing the plate and getting my nose burned.

Still, mission accomplished. I’d poisoned my lungs and bought my duty-free whisky. I was ready to go. And about time too.

You begin to see the problem. I am already on page three and we haven’t got onto the plane to Bhutan yet. So let’s.

And we were off again. It was a short trip, enlivened by the Himalayas and a medical emergency that required my meal to be shifted so my inside neighbours could attend the patient. The patient presumably survived. My meal didn’t.

Thus it was that after only a couple of hours, the plane began its descent. We learnt later that only a handful of pilots were able to manage this landing since Paro Airport lies in a basin surrounded by mountains. It was probably just as well no-one had told me that before. I was still trembling as we walked into the Arrivals Lounge. Or was it in fact a temple, I wondered? It was certainly like no airport I had seen before. The whole building was made out of wood, with the exposed beams and joist-ends painted in exotic patterns. Since ours was the only plane to arrive, the queue consisted entirely of us. The Immigration officials seemed genuinely glad to see us. And I was out in 5 minutes, pausing only to change some money into the local Ngultrum (the world’s most unpronounceable currency?) and waltz through Customs.

The last needs further explanation.

A few years ago, Bhutan introduced the most draconian anti-smoking laws in the world, no doubt partly due to the fact that the prime minister was a physician. The cultivation, manufacture, sale, distribution, and I take it, the importation of tobacco was banned outright. The government was soon forced to backtrack, but I had learnt that the amount of rolling tobacco I could bring in was limited to a couple of packs and that it would be taxed at 100%. One hundred percent of what, I’m not sure. But I’d brought an extra wad of dollars just in case it was 100% of GNP – rather than GNH, of which more in a moment.

I was quite happy to cough up, if that’s the right word. But since I had done the research myself and nowhere were there signs or information about the import of tobacco, I felt it the duty of the Customs officials to ask me whether. A smiling lady did ask to look in my duty-free bag and I smilingly obliged. But I had bought my tobacco from home (old duty-free) and the bag contained only booze.

Hence the fact that I breezed through and out with a vague feeling of guilt and a crystal-clear feeling of relief to be out of airports for the next few weeks. Graceless of me, I know. Paro will remain the top of my list of favourite (or least disliked) airports for the foreseeable future.

Once out of the airport building, I looked back at it. It was just as joyful from outside as it was inside. Our Bhutanese bird guide, Phub, and driver, Pinto, latched onto me immediately, introduced themselves with a smile and a bow, and then provided me with a box of matches and an escort to the nearest smoker’s shed.

I was back before anyone else had emerged. But when we were all gathered, we got on the bus, drove 10 minutes down the road and parked besides a river. Or the River – Paro, that is.

Frankly, after all the stress and a night without sleep, I would have preferred to hit the sack. But it was only early afternoon. And after all, it was a birding holiday. So we were shown birds, both by Mike and the Bhutanese guide, Phub. My eyes were in such a poor state that most of them looked the same. There was, however, no mistaking the big attraction. A bird that looked as if an ibis had forced its attentions upon a seagull. The bent bill of the ibis was there, but the colouration was all wrong. As it happens, the bird is related to neither, and to nothing else. It is, like Bhutan, itself a one-off.

After walking up and down like zombies for an hour or two, we were all loaded back onto the bus and driven to a hotel on the outskirts of the capital, Thimphu. I dumped my bags (or rather, had them dumped for me), popped across the road to buy a lighter, and introduced myself to the cook in the smoker’s enclosure. Then introduced myself to his cooking.

Lunch and siesta over, we headed for the hills up a winding road, past houses lavishly decorated with mystical symbols and phalluses (or is it ‘phalli’?), through pastures green lavishly spread with livestock into an enchanted woodland lavishly draped in lichen and inhabited by lots of very pretty small birds. On the way we’d also seen our first wild mammals, a group of grey langur monkeys, lounging along branches, their long tails drooping like the lichen. They were at the entrance to a Buddhist University. Read what you like into that. Maybe you need a university education these days to climb the reincarnation career ladder.

And so back to the hotel in Thimphu for dinner.

This was the one big disappointment with Bhutan. The food here, as elsewhere, was perfectly edible but pretty uninteresting. I guess they were making allowances for foreigners. Still, I ate, and I drank a bland but adequately strong local beer, then helped myself to a stronger nightcap in my room. Set my alarm for 5 am (a lie-in by later standards). And fell asleep cradled in Gross National Happiness.

And so, as it warms my sleep, to GNH.

I guess if you know anything about Bhutan, then you’ll know about GNH. But I won’t let that stop me.

Even if you know nothing about Bhutan, you will have heard of GDP or Gross Domestic Product. This is by far the most common measurement of a country’s well-being. The issue that many have with it is that it is an economic index and as such equates well-being with money, even if the money is in the wrong hands – i.e. not mine. This is a particular problem if you are a land of happy smiling people which produces next to nothing in terms of ‘finished products’.

Bhutan’s solution is both an excellent bit of marketing and a reminder of a home truth – that bags of boodle don’t necessarily make you happy. So the government (that is, the King) came up with a whole load of other parameters by which a nation’s success might be measured. Included amongst these are health, education, ecological diversity, ‘cultural diversity and resilience’, and, yes you’ve guessed it, happiness, aka psychological well-being. I’m really not sure how they go about measuring some of these. But at least the index shows that someone cares.

I’ll come back to some of these later, since the ramifications in some cases are a tad problematic.

For the moment, all you need to know is that I woke up next morning prepared to drink my cup of national happiness to the full. Which was just as well, because the coffee was instant and awful. In fact, the only time we had proper coffee was in the departure lounge of Paro airport. Clearly decent coffee was not considered essential to psychological well-being.

Nothing daunted, we headed along the road and inevitably up a mountain. Nearly all centres of population (and let’s not get carried away – the total is barely three-quarters of a million) are to be found along the side or in the bottom of valleys. True, there are some very lovely views from the tops of the mountains, but since we’re talking 5000 metres, freezing temperatures and altitude sickness, then I know where I’d choose to live. The problem is that occasionally even the most-self-contained Bhutanese will get the urge to see the world in the form of the next valley. And to do so, he will have to find a suitable pass from the one to the other.

Until the sixties, when the first asphalt roads outside the capital were built, this entailed a major expedition of several days, involving pack mules if you could afford them. Fortunately we had tarmac and a coach. But it was still a hell of a climb out of the one valley into the next over a pass called Dochu-La, where true to form, it was so freezing cold that I didn’t notice the altitude. It didn’t put the birds off. We saw our first yellow-billed blue magpies, along with an unusually sociable parrotbill, a thrush-sized bird with a face that looked as though it had been steam-pressed.

It didn’t put the wild strawberries off either. I’d left them in full bloom in Sweden and was surprised to find the reassuringly familiar sight all over the place here. Not that I needed much reassuring, of course. But Bhutan was very different from anything I’d seen before. This pass, and pretty much every other one we went over was draped in prayer flags and covered in stupas to commemorate one thing or another, whether it was fallen soldiers or uplifted and uplifting holy figures.

Here, though, they weren’t called stupas, but chortens, and they differed from the more conventional ones in India and elsewhere in being very angular on a square base rather than the usual more rounded ones. They were also often to be found in the middle of the road. Which I supposed was fair enough since they were there first. To their lasting credit they made very decorative roundabouts. And since every good Buddhist knows you should only go round a chorten in a clockwise direction, then there was no need for signs to that effect. Or traffic lights, for that matter. Anywhere, for that other matter.

From there we descended to our first al fresco meal. Luckily the weather was warmer at the lower altitude. And it turned out that we had a kitchen crew devoted entirely to our needs. They would follow us and then shoot ahead to an assigned place where they would cook and wait for us to arrive. When we did, they served us. The Raj ambience was enhanced by the very British nature of the breakfasts they served. The food in general was as good as we got in most hotels. This isn’t saying a great deal, but since it was cooked on the hoof, it wasn’t to be scoffed at – just scoffed. Add to the fact that the places they chose to set the table were unbelievably scenic and infinitely varied, and that the service was gracious to a fault, and you could have been forgiven for thinking you were on a 19^th century Imperial scientific expedition.

After brekkers, we descended further to the Royal Botanical Gardens and saw quite a few birds and some butterflies. Then we headed further down to the Punakha Valley and the confluence of two rivers that were guarded by the first dzong of the tour. These are imposing, ornate building complexes, usually built in strategically important and thus spectacular places in order to protect the area from invaders. It is hard to believe that anyone would want to invade such a poor country. But in their turn Tibetans, Mongols and, needless to say, the British have all had a go – none of them with much success. More of a threat were domestic neighbouring fiefs, since it wasn’t until the end of the 1800s that the country was totally unified.

For present purposes, we were more immediately interested in checking into the next hotel, which was in within spitting distance of the dzong, if you had cared or dared. It goes without saying that this was a traditional two-storey house with exquisitely painted protruding floor joists and beams, along with an obligatory phallus or two. It goes without saying, since this describes most of the buildings in Bhutan and most of the places we stayed in. So in future I’ll go without saying it.

There I’d signed up to share with Mike, due to a shortage of rooms. This was not a problem as it turned out. He was by far the most entertaining person on the tour. The only downside was that I ran out of whisky sooner than I’d anticipated. We had a short nap before heading out to bird the river and then returning for dinner, where we met up with our second ‘trainee’ guide, Tandin – not quite as experienced as Phub but somewhat less intense. I won’t bore you with the details of the meal. What was most striking about the hotel restaurant was the smoking room, which like the smoking area in the hotel proper had a wonderful view of the illuminated dzong. For a country where they had tried to outlaw smoking, they treated their smokers a lot better than we deserve.

Next morning we set off before daybreak. You get used to it after a while. As dawn broke we drove up through conifers, pastureland, villages and deciduous forest. Before arriving, I’d had an idea that the highland area would be fairly uniform in its ecology. It became quickly clear I was wrong. I hadn’t been wrong about the small birds, however. The variety and beauty of the flycatchers, yuhinas, sunbirds, minlas and fulvettas was one of the highlights of the tour. So even though the target bird this morning was a half-glimpsed Ward’s trogon, it was the tiny charmers that won my heart.

After lunch we were escorted round the dzong by Tandin. There was a monastery (and monks) in the forecourt, but the main three-storey buildings of the fortress surrounded an inner courtyard. Even though this had had a military function, they had decorated the exteriors in the usual fashion, though there was a noticeable absence of phalluses. I guess that might have been tempting fate with a garrison of men-only cooped up together for months on end. Nowadays, of course, there is little threat of invasion. The country is at one with itself, the Mongol and British Empires have bitten the dust, and Tibet is otherwise occupied. So the quondam fortress now serves as a tourist attraction and government offices.

Most of us elected to return to the far bank by means of a bridge hanging twenty metres over the river and draped, after the fashion, in prayer flags. We were told this was, at over 100m, the longest suspension footbridge in the country. I’d seen The Man who would be King and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom enough times to break all speed records as I crossed.

It was wobbly.

On the morrow we did a moonlight flit and went down river in search of one of the rarest birds in the world, the critically-endangered white-bellied heron. There are only about 300 individuals left, many of which are in Bhutan. The one we found didn’t seem eaten up by self-pity, which is more than I would have managed in its position. It was a fine-looking bird, the second-largest heron in existence, but otherwise pretty unremarkable except for its precarious status.

From the river we began to climb out of the valley, stopping to look at some huge wild bees’ nests, and a honeyguide that looked at us, encouraging us to knock them down so it could help itself to the honey and wax. We weren’t born yesterday so we left the poor bird crestfallen and waiting for the next birding group.

We were late for breakfast but the brekker wallahs took it in good part. I had a desperate need to relieve my bowels of their burden, but my fellow-travellers were fascinated by the prayer wheels we had parked up by. Even in my wretched writhing condition, I could understand the fascination. I’d had in my mind the image of a prayer wheel being rotated by a monk in saffron as he chanted mantras. Here they had used technology to facilitate the process, since all the wheels we saw were built on streams and prayer-wheeled by a water-wheel, so to speak. I can’t remember seeing this technology used elsewhere in the country for anything as banal as grinding corn. So it was obvious where the Bhutanese priorities lay.

After what Mike called a ‘comfort stop’, (I noticed he didn’t call the breakfast site an extreme ‘discomfort stop’) we moved up to the next pass, Pele-la, at 3,400m. It took a while for the penny to drop, but finally it released the Mars Bar I call my brain. Ah so! All the passes in Bhutan are suffixed in ‘-la’. By which we may deduce that the word ‘la’ in Bhutanese means ‘pass’, of course. As every fool know. (It also means quite a lot of other things but what the heck.) What’s more, what other words to we know that end in hyphen + la?

Well, cor blimey and strike me pink. If it isn’t Shangri-la itself. Before you get carried away with that ‘aha’ moment, it seems the novel was set in the northern foothills of Tibet rather than the southern foothills which was where we were. But if I had to choose where I would place it these days, there would be no competition. Bhutan wins over China by the widest conceivable margin in my book. And in case you’re interested, the language (along with the ethnicity and the culture) of Bhutan has nothing to do with India. It has everything to do with Tibet.

After a yak or two, we lunched at a monastery and stupa where some distressingly young (seven years plus) monks were learning how to make something or other out of clay. Then we dropped down to Trongsa and our next hotel, perched on the side of a mountain and ornately décor…, sorry I wasn’t going to mention that again. The meal that evening was made considerably more interesting by the introduction of our first genuine Bhutanese dish – ema datshi, or chilis stewed in yak’s cheese. Wonderful! Mike made a point of ordering everywhere possible after that. Not as difficult as it sounds, since the Bhuts eat it three times a day.

Next day, not so bright but still early, we headed for Bumthang. On the way we met lots of beautiful feathered friends, and drove through canyons lined with rhododendron and magnolia. But the most striking feature of the journey consisted of two very familiar birds, which I didn’t expect to see here. The first was the spotted nutcracker. I’ve lived in Sweden, where these are supposed to be very common, for more than thirty years and never seen one. In Bhutan we saw dozens. The other was the Eurasian magpie, which like anyone else with eyes I’d seen all over the place in Europe. For one of these to be within a thousand miles of Bhutan in the normal course of events, the bird would have to bought a cheap knock-off of a SatNav coupled with an irresistible Wanderlust, since these birds are largely sedentary (i.e. lazy sods). So what exactly was a whole colony of them doing here? Answer is, nobody knows. Interestingly enough, if you are so easily interested, there is a mirror image of this weird phenomenon to be found in Spain, where the azure-winged magpie has been around for a lot longer than anyone can remember, while the rest of the tribe are happily bouncing about and bullying cats in China. Rumour has it that the ones in Bhutan have been there long enough to have developed enough tweaks in their genes to be regarded as a separate species. By such means does genetic research into bird species taxonomy cause self-respecting guides throughout the world to tear out their hair and rip up their field manuals.

Eventually, we wound down and wound up in Bumthang itself. It was, I think, the third town we had visited that claimed to be the historic capital of the country, and it had a Wild West charm of all its own. It boasted a karaoke bar and a night club. I know this because someone had painted the words (not very elegantly) on the wooden barricade that concealed the entrance. Even more striking was the Swiss pastry shop that had squeezed into a row of shops advertising their status as grocer’s by the strings of hard dried yak’s cheese hanging outside. It turned out that sometime in the seventies a Swiss had married a local, opened a chalet-type hotel, started production of Swiss cheese and presumably opened a cake and coffee shop. As you do.

Luckily he hadn’t managed to get his hands on the hotel we checked into, since this consisted of the usual ornately decorated blah-blahs this time flanking three sides of a lovely courtyard. Here we ate in a restaurant that looked like it had been the model for the opening scenes of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and drank the local beer, which was fun but only the first time. It was also here that I realised I would have to replenish my stocks of hard booze if I didn’t want to spend the rest of the trip with nerves like a too tightly-strung violin. Much as I love my fellow man, and much as my fellow passengers were fine upstanding human beings, the thought of consorting with them for 16 hours per day without something to dull the senses filled me with fear and loathing.

On the way to the hotel I’d noticed a food shop just before we turned into the entrance. I’d already figured that wherever food was sold, drink was also likely to be available. Many outlets were upfront about it, calling themselves ‘bars’. Others were a little more decorous, labelling themselves as ‘Food’ or (my favourite) ‘Fooding and Lodging’. In fact, in the course of my researches into how I was going to continue smoking in the Mountain Kingdom, I couldn’t help but notice that drinking was considered just as much of a problem. Previous zealous attempts by the government to restrict the habit, like forbidding the sale of booze on Tuesdays (Tuesdays?) and doubling the tax had met with limited success, possibly because there are six other days in the week and alcohol was dirt cheap to begin with. In the event, you could still buy alcohol pretty much anywhere – you’d even see signs to that effect in the middle of nowhere. You could drive into a hamlet nestling in the Himalayas and consisting of five houses and be sure that three of them would be competing for the local dipsomaniac custom.

So during an intermission from the birding, I headed for the nearest outlet. This at first appeared to consist of no more than a hole in the wall of a normal house, behind which sat a husband and wife team. When I asked if they could sell me some whisky, they opened a door at the side and invited me in. Sure enough, their front room also served as a bar. It had hangings on the wall, a rug on the floor, a couple of well-worn but comfortable sofas against the sides and two or three bottle of liquor on shelves. They didn’t look as if they contained whisky but I was urged to sit down while the wife popped into the back to search for some. I wasn’t expecting Scotch. But I’d tasted Indian and found it palatable enough. The Bhutanese equivalent couldn’t be much worse, I guessed.

But I would have to wait to put it to the test. The lady came back empty-handed. So her husband took a bottle off one of the shelves and asked me if I would be interested in buying the local hooch. The bottle was plastic and the contents were transparent. I must have looked a little sceptical since he opened it and poured a little into the cap for me to taste. It tasted like a bog-standard grappa. I nodded my enthusiasm and after answering some friendly questions about myself and our mission, I was ready to pay. Having shelled out the equivalent of $1.50 for a 750cl bottle, I made for the front door. Instead I was shown out the back. There was a set of steps up to the hotel car park.

In case you’re thinking of buying some, it’s called ara. It’s cheap and to the extent that I can still see, it’s wholesome. If you’re ever in Bhutan…

And if you’re interested in other innocent pleasures, Bhutan is also worth a visit. Cannabis grows everywhere, as we found on the next morning’s outing. This time, we’re not dealing with a vice that has caught on big time. Indeed it seems that the use of the weed is limited to the weaving of textiles and the feeding of pigs. Buddhism in action perhaps. Bhutan must be the one place in the world where pigs go the slaughter dreamily asking the time, man. For those still interested in the bird aspects of the trip, we also saw our second pheasants of the trip. The first, the kalij, was not so spectacular. The blood pheasants we encountered here, browsing amongst the hemp, were much more eye-catching. They looked like oversized chickens that have acquired the habits of a vampire, the head and breast being drenched in blood-red.

We were heading for our next lodge in Yongkola. Lunch was at a school surrounded by curious children and surrounded by lots of uplifting slogans in English, some of which seemed to be gleaned from Western pop singers. Lulled into a sense of false security, we continued to climb through outlandishly beautiful scenery to Thrumsing-la pass. There it wasn’t only the panorama of the Himalayas that was shrouded in cloud. There was road-building going. Trucks, as ornately decorated as the houses and with cheerful slogans on the side, kicked up clouds of dust as they passed. And workmen’s huts were scattered on the hillside. Despite the prayer flags, the stupas and the posters of the royal family along with suitably inspiring messages to the public, I was filled with a feeling of desolation and a remarkably prescient sense of foreboding.

Even Tandin’s reverent explanation of the religious significance of a tomb that lay next to the main stupa did little to dispel my sense of unease. It did, however, confuse my understanding of Buddhism. In my naivety I had always thought of Buddha as being enlightened enough to reject notions of a know-it-all god with all of the power and none of the responsibility, along with all the usual trappings of saints and sinners, heaven and hell and so on. Not here. There are saints all over the place in Bhutan, usually buried at or near the ubiquitous stupas. And Buddha is a god, by the way. Unlike in Thailand where he is simply a very large statue. Oh well.

The foreboding I’d sensed was explained shortly after we resumed the journey, as we descended towards Yongkola. The fact that the road was under construction entailed its correlative – in most places there wasn’t a road there, to speak of. We spent the journey teetering on the edge of a precipice as we manoeuvred round oncoming trucks, army convoys and multiple road works. Not to mention huge boulders that had fallen and bits of the road that had disappeared down the mountainside. I was soon reduced to a nervous wreck and assumed a foetal position as far from the window as possible for the duration. Weirdly enough, those passengers that had previously complained of vertigo now happily pointed out what I was missing by closing my eyes.

The only times I remember stopping we caught sight of a beautiful emerald cuckoo and a strange creature that was perched half way up a sheer cliff looking down at us. It was difficult to decide whether there was fear or curiosity in the look. Or perhaps contempt for our earth-bound status. It looked like a cross between a goat and a deer and was called a goral.

Eventually we hit the valley floor. It seemed to take ages. As was quite often the case, we could see what we were aiming at a couple of hours before we got there, since the mountains were so steep that you had to traverse for miles then back in the opposite direction in order to make the descent. We even found ourselves having to ride across the side of a valley and back across the other side before we could get down. It put it all into perspective. Here, there were no roads at all until about 20 years ago. And much as I’ve complained about the tribulations of the journey, I knew I was lucky to have got to a place that would have taken me a week of hard mule-back labour to reach in my youth.

The lodge in question was called Trogon Villa and was, I think, the first building we had seen in Bhutan with a neon sign. Since this was supposed to be illegal, we had to assume that either the owner knew someone important, or Yongkola was so far away from the capital that no-one cared.

Not only was neon outlawed, but it turned out that there were strict laws concerning the format and size of advertising signs in general. Apart from the uplifting messages from the royal family, there was little or nothing in the way of roadside hoardings, so we were able to enjoy unimpeded views of the magnificent scenery. But the austerity was extended to retail and catering establishments. Their signs, with the exception of Trogon Villa, consisted almost exclusively of rectangular blue wooden boards of the same size with lettering of the same size and shape. They reminded me of the licensee notices outside pubs in Britain.

In their way they were charming. And as with the landscape they did not deflect the attention from the beauty of the buildings themselves. But if we return for a moment to one of the key indicators of Gross National Happiness, that of ‘cultural diversity and resilience’, it was beginning to look as though the resilience trumped the diversity every time. True, there was some regional difference in housing styles. And the phalluses/ phalli came in all shapes, sizes and styles, ranging from the hyper-realistic to the expressionist/ abstract. On some houses I even noticed symbols that might be taken for the female vulva reduced to the basic iconography of a traffic sign. But the genitalia seemed to provide the only outlet for individual self-expression. Otherwise, the prevailing impression was one of imposed cultural uniformity. All very picturesque but ultimately a little stifling, I would have thought.

So perhaps Trogon Villa was making a political statement? Who knows? It was a pleasant if basic lodge. And the birding highlights of our time round here were the hornbills, notably the spectacular rufous-necked.

From here we were obliged to retrace our steps before heading off in a different direction. The aim was to get to Tharpaling (pronounced ‘tarpaulin’) Monastery before hitting our lodge. The monastery itself was all we had come to expect in terms of picturesqueness and location. But the main reason for our visit was not immediately obvious. We had to wait until the monks put out food for the birds. There was one bird in particular I wanted to see. And see it we did. In spades. It is called the Himalayan monal, is a kind of pheasant again, and is, as you can see, one of the most outrageously painted birds you could imagine.

Yee-ha!!

On the way back to the main road and our lodge for the night, Phub persisted in trying to attract the one spectacular pheasant we had yet to see – the satyr tragopan. I have no idea who gave it this name. It sounds like a word invented to maximise the anagrams you can get out of it. We didn’t manage to see it, so our guide only succeeded in annoying some of the more tired members of the group with his refusal to give up.

Who cares? We saw a monal.

Yee-double-ha.

So we had another night in wacky Bumthang before heading for another night in transit at Trongsa. A few of us got up even earlier to make another try for the tragopan and managed to see the top left of one through a scope half a kilometre away before returning for a cup of the worst coffee in the world. Then we headed down south, that is, down and south, stopping to look for and find loads of new birds, amongst which was the oddly named beautiful nuthatch, as if the other nuthatches were downright ugly. Along the way we also passed through one of the most attractive towns we had seen, a hill station called Zhemgang, which would not have shamed the Raj. As it turned out, the Bhutanese royal family thought so too, choosing to stay there when the weight of office became all too great.

Finally we hit Tingtibi – most definitely a one-yak town, with the only hotel for miles around. It was called, bewilderingly, T-Wang, was described by Mike as ‘rustic’ and by the rest of the group as a dump. Despite the fact that my room had only a squat toilet, which unfortunately coincided with an attack of the runs, I loved the place. The staff were lovely and genuine and the food as good as anywhere else on the tour.

They even had craft beers, though I’d warn anyone with anything less than a cast-iron stomach and a dead palate to avoid the rice beer (bouquet barbecue sauce). I had just got up to try another (and replenish my person cocktail cabinet with a bottle of Bhutanese whisky – highly recommended), when someone complimented me on my red underpants. Turned out I had split my ridiculously expensive Arctic Fox hiking trousers. Well, they had seen some service over the years. I had, however, noticed a tailor’s behind the hotel. So next day before we headed out birding, I dropped in and asked if they could mend my pants. There was one of the party of youngish ladies that spoke English and said it wouldn’t be a problem. I had no great confidence. The fabric was so worn it would be difficult to know where to start.

We headed out for the usual and browsed through some old, some new, some borrowed and some blue (whistling thrush, since you ask). Highlight for me was a number of the most spectacular cuckoos I’d ever seen – the rufous-winged. Unlike most of their kind they were very obliging and kept flying across us to make sure we hadn’t missed them the first time. Show-offs, I guess. But if I looked as good as that, then I’d strut my stuff most flauntily.

When we got back, I popped into the tailor’s again. They’d stayed open late, I guess to oblige me. One of the two ladies left handed over my pants and then, with a look of apology, the bill. The repair was invisible. The bill was almost invisible – the equivalent of fifty cents. It was my turn to look apologetic.

After Tingtibi we descended further into more tropical weather and landscapes. On the way we stopped to check out a couple of endearingly clownish long-tailed broadbills, and incidentally a very horny hornbill that, despite all his efforts, had zero success with imposing his desires on his mate. As it happened, it was local election-day throughout the country, which meant there was more traffic than usual on the winding mountain roads, along with a great number of pedestrians. Open democratic elections were first introduced in 2008, so I suppose they still haven’t lost their novelty. That sounds patronising. I don’t mean it to be. It was impressive, almost moving, to see how seriously the Bhutanese took their democracy. For the family it was a day out. But whether singly or in groups, everyone was headed towards the polling booths dressed in their Sunday best, chatting, smiling and waving to us as we passed.

Our final descent took us past border guards, who checked our credentials with an air of disbelief. Then over a river and into the town of Gelephu, which was hot and sticky, and right next to the border with India. It seemed to exist in some kind of no-man’s land, since we had already passed the immigration point. Our rooms here were flats with hot and cold and sitdown loos. I disliked it on sight, but was grateful – even if the food was awful and the staff seemed to have been (poorly) trained in an American charm school. For some reason, the manager filmed us why we ate. I don’t know if this was part of marketing exercise or whether he was an anthropologist.

So we were in the tropics. There was a lovely park outside the hotel with lots of birds. It was earmarked for the construction of a new international airport. So it goes. The birds were different here and so were the people. They looked more Indian, even if the food didn’t. I wondered if they were Nepalese. Bhutan is separated from Nepal by a thin strip of land consisting of West Bengal and a state that for a short while was the independent country of Sikkim.

Before 1990 the Lhotshampa, ethnic Nepalese, made up about a quarter of the population of Bhutan, with most living in the tropical south. Then they made the mistake of agitating for democracy in a country that at the time was an absolute monarchy. Not that they had been the victims of absolute discrimination. There were, apparently, Lhotshampa high up in the military and government service. But the Bhutan Citizenship Act of 1985 had demanded that to be eligible for citizenship, both parents should be born in Bhutan. This was clearly targeted at the Lhotshampa population and the resulting demands for minority rights soon turned violent. As did the response of the government. Brutally so.

The upshot was that thousands of the minority group fled the country for India and Nepal. Thousands more were interned in refugee camps within Bhutan, prior to ‘resettlement’ outside the country. Those that made it to Nepal met with a similar fate, with many, as far as I’ve been able to determine, still remaining in the Nepalese camps.

Well, I suppose the idealised image of Shangri-la had to have its downside. For sure, it is easier to maintain the Happiness Index of ‘cultural resilience’ if you minimise the amount of ‘cultural diversity’ you have to contend with. As for Buddhism, well, you can only wonder. How do you reconcile the message of peace and love and the image of tranquillity with the atrocities perpetrated in the name of the Enlightened One? You don’t have to look too far, Burma, Sri Lanka and now Bhutan, to see how little the creed matches the practice. Well, we ‘Christians’ have no room to talk, I suppose. And at least I suppose the Bhutanese treat their animals nicely.

As for us, we blithely drove along the border waving at the guards, who seemed happy to have something to wave at. We stopped for birds and breakfast along the way. Our guide’s sudden reassignment of the breakfast site brought on a massive sulk from our lovely chef and he retired like Achilles into his tents. The other staff meekly packed everything up and drove it over to us.

The other highlights of the day consisted of a visit to a sewage farm, which proved to be excellent for birding once you’d got used to the pond pong, and a dusk trip to the main high school in the area, which turned out to be a favourite hangout for a pair of owlets. It proved to be less accommodating to those of a weak and ageing bladder, so I spent most of my time there trying to track down a caretaker so that he’d open the staff loos. Our guide was wonderful and I seriously considered a marriage of convenience with him, but he had little understanding of the anatomical needs of senior citizens.

Next day we sped back along the border through forked lightning and torrential rain, breakfasting under an elegant roadside gazebo and greeted by the chef who had recovered his misplaced beamer of a smile. Eventually we arrived in our next port-of-call, Damphu. The town had no railway, but it clearly had two sides of the tracks. We drove in past down-at-heel shacks before emerging onto a slope covered with mansions and gardens. Perhaps this was another royal hill station. The hotel certainly strove to give that impression. Outside it was a palatially grand oriental version of the Grand Budapest. Inside it was a little the worse for wear, and the information booklets promised services more than were delivered.

Having settled in, we took a short hike up the road to a school (what is it with the wildlife of Bhutan – the critters seem to be perpetually looking to upgrade their qualifications). The aim here was to check out a flock of green magpies. It was comforting that even our guides had problems picking them out amongst the foliage. Again our visit prompted friendly attention from teachers and pupils and some of our group accepted an invitation to join the school in a rousing Scouting sing-song. Baden-Powell had a lot to answer for. I opted out in favour of a pre-prandial drinkie-winkie.

This was easier said than done. When we non-abstainers got back, there was heightened security at the hotel. It turned out that the regional bigwig was entertaining the Indian ambassador with the result that we were shuffled off and out of sight. The promised consolation of a beer never materialised. Instead we found ourselves reshuffled back to where we started. All by the most discourteous member of staff we had met in Bhutan.

It was relief that we spent only the one night there. We headed back north to Punakha, stopping on the way at the White-Bellied Heron Captive Breeding Centre, which might attract more attention if it came up with a catchier title. There we given a lecture by an earnest member of staff. We nodded politely all the way through the talk without understanding more than thirty percent of what he said. He had a nice smile and presumably seniority, since when we were shown round, I fell in with a large jovial man with almost equally large spectacles who spoke perfect English. I was fascinated by the bulge under his lip and the redness of his teeth. When I enquired if he was chewing paan, he kindly took me through the whole process. First you chop your betel nut and marinate it in slaked lime and the paste of an acacia tree, then you wrap it in a betel leaf. Insert into mouth and allow to decompose slowly. I’d been hoping he would give me some to try, especially after he said it was a euphoric stimulant and highly addictive. But apparently it was heavily taxed. So he put his reserve supply back in his pocket with a look of apology.

The rest of the journey is best forgotten. The lower part of the Punakha valley was in the process of being dammed, and apparently had been like this for the last 30 years. The project was being undertaken by Indian companies with a view to their importing the hydro-energy produced. The result was an appalling eyesore and an environmental catastrophe. And they wonder why the poor heron is critically endangered. Over a twenty kilometre stretch, the road was littered with quarries, component factories, supply dumps and barracks that provided housing for the masses of Indian workers.

I mean, I get it. Bhutan has little from the material realm to offer the rest of the world. Hydro-power constitutes around fifty per cent of exports. But where exactly does such an industrial wasteland and rape of nature figure in the measurement of Gross National Happiness and its supposed prioritisation of ‘ecological diversity’ and ‘responsibility towards to the environment’?

Well, as Osgood said to Jerry, ‘Nobody’s perfect’. And as JC said to the general public, ‘Think about it before you heft that rock.’ Maybe even Bhutan has to sacrifice a few of its principles in a few of its places to be able to apply the rest of them in the rest of the country.

Makes you think, dunnit? But frankly, I’d rather have spent two hours blindfolded than have seen this heartrending rape of the earth.

We were nearly back to where we started now. After Punakha we headed for Paro and the airport. But there was still time for a couple of unexpected highs and lows. The next morning we breakfasted in a restaurant with a gift shop where I spotted a glorious embroidered bed-cover in gold and blue. We desperately needed a glorious embroidered bed-cover in gold and blue, so I seriously miscalculated the exchange rate and seriously overpaid for it. Caveat fucking emptor, I guess. But at least we can claim one of the most beautiful and expensive counterpanes in Sweden and with a bit of luck start charging visitors to see it.

I’d been dreading the high, since I didn’t know it was going to achieve Himalayan altitudes. Dropping in on a Rhododendron Festival was about as enticing as a visit to the local village fete, no doubt with the local abbot presenting a prize to the largest bloom and oriental dowagers offering their homemade jams for sale. When we were told that the highlight was to be a dance exhibition, my heart sank farther. I find dance as an art form about as thrilling as Turkish soap operas. Make that oriental dance of the kind where the danseuses are fully clad, then my interest is zero but my despair is compound.

So strike me repeatedly over the head with a rhododendron branch and poke me in the eye with a yak prod. It turned out to be one of the highlights of the trip.

We were back in the Royal Botanical Gardens, but there wasn’t much chance of seeing any birds with all the people milling round. A girl in national dress showed us to our seats under a marquee overlooking a small playing field. Some soft drinks were passed round as we waited for the performers to emerge from behind a curtain on the other side, next to another tent where important-looking Bhutanese were sitting, also in national dress. Everyone except for us was wearing the uniform. I sat brooding over my lack of foresight. If only I’d brought my hip flask. That might have helped me get into the spirit of things. Or at least the spirits of the contents.

My gloom was further deepened when an important-looking Bhutanese in national dress, sidled up to us and explained he was the headmaster of the local high school and the festival was a money-raising benefit for the same. At least I had someone else to feel sorry for now. My heart went out to the local pupils as I recalled the humiliations inflicted on yours sincerely by a sponsored disco-dance when I was of the same age.

Then the first dancers burst onto the scene and the music started up.

Wow! This was an up-tempo number, and if the sweeping arm movements and shuffles of the feet had any esoteric meaning it didn’t matter. The significance was lost in the rhythm. The dancing was pretty well-rehearsed and the movements synchronised. But what was amazing was that the girls seemed to be really enjoying it. There was one that really caught my eye. She wasn’t particularly good-looking. But she had a knowing look and an arch smile on her mouth that could have landed her a part as the femme fatale in a Howard Hawks noir. And all of them really rocked. True, the number that followed, performed by a smaller group of middle-aged women was more what I’d been expecting. Lots of slow arms and static feet accompanied by expressions of pain – or boredom, perhaps. Maybe these were the teachers. But they were followed by a groups of teenage boys bopping like nobody’s business. And again, omigod, they were really into it.

I was just thinking how a group of English or Swedish teenage high-schoolers might have reacted in the circumstances, when one of our party complained loudly that this wasn’t what a birding trip was supposed to be about, before she headed off to engage in some retail therapy in the sales tents.

Next up were the older men, who indulged in another, slower number. Even if the tempo was downbeat, they were totally out of whack with each other. Still they seemed to be having a good time too. I wondered if they’d brought their hip flasks. The dance was enlivened by the headmaster’s toddler son walking into the middle of the pitch and through the dancers’ legs. One of them nearly fell over and the others struggle to contain their glee.

The whole shebang was topped by a traditional masked dance – re-enacting, I think, a fight between a wolf and a bear. The day was warm, the exotic costumes heavy and the performing pair, as far as could be judged, past their prime. One of them was equipped with a small finger bell. This presumably had some occult significance but it was used as if it were a signal for ending boxing rounds. When the dancer was too exhausted to continue, he would ring, and they both would stop, stoop and take some very rapid breaths, before he rang again for the dance to continue. The members of our group glanced nervously at each other and wondered if any of us had skill in CPR. No need. They dancers survived the battle, though I have no idea who won.

It was at that point that the rest of us wandered off to check out the rest of the festival. More predictably, this consisted of stalls and tents selling local produce and products, though I was enchanted to find a counter where they were offering glasses of interesting hooch at knockdown prices. I paid up my 5 cents and downed a delicious schnapps glass of what tasted like a cereal wine laced with chili.

There were also stalls selling cordyceps. I’d read about these but not seen them before. Basically, they looked like dried mushrooms. Which they were in a way. But the fungus in question was a parasite that infested the larvae of bugs and gradually took over the whole body. The result was a kind of mummified corpse that was half larva and half mushroom. Big in China and America as alternative medicine. If you must.

After that, it was downhill all the way as we descended from the mountains into Paro. But after booking into our last palatial hotel, we still had one day left. My sister and niece headed off boldly to Tiger’s Nest monastery under the guidance of Tandin. They even made it, for which they earned the respect of the rest of us. The monastery was located above a steep gorge and involved a lot of treacherous uphill. The remainder of the group spent the time with Phub, surprise surprise, looking for more birds. The highlight, I suppose, was the materialisation, at long last, of the satyr tragopan, the spectacular pheasant that had proved so coy for the rest of the trip. I charged off the bus ahead of anyone else, lined it up perfectly in my binoculars and was treated to the sight of the back of the head of one of my travelling companions, who had chosen to take the perfect photo by standing right in front of me. By the time she had finished, the bird had chosen to fly away and so had my good humour.

And so indeed, did all of us the next day. I would happily have stayed. True, I’d left my wife in Sweden. But I was sure I could lure her over with declarations of undying affection and promises of Nirvana. However glib and patronising what I have written might appear, I loved the place and I loved the people. After all, they can hardly be held any more responsible for their rulers than we can. Most importantly, the beauty of the land was so overwhelming that, at times, it was hard not to break down and weep.

So it was with a sense that I was about to lose something precious, which had been difficult to find and which I would probably never attain again, that I waited to board the plane the next day. The sensation was very similar to the kind you experience when you are roused from a broken dream, unbearably touched by something the sleeping state offered that you know is unattainable in what we call the real world. On the other hand, this feeling was allayed somewhat by the fact that there was real coffee to be had in the departure lounge, and, despite all the restrictions on the filthy habit, there was even a smoking room. But the feeling came back in force when we took off at a seemingly impossible angle to the vertical and began to fly along the Himalayas. Though no-one had mentioned the fact, this flight was due to drop passengers in Kathmandu.

Mike asked later if we’d noticed Everest amongst the ranges of icy peaks. I shrugged. All mountains look the same to me. And I’d never understood the urge to risk life and limb ‘conquering’ the damned things. But who cares? They were a magnificent and inspiring sight and simply served to carve the sense of loss deeper into my entrails.

So did India. Our overnight stay at the airport Radisson served only to underline the attractions of an underdeveloped country. The staff at the airport were offhand at best. The traffic was horrendous, the fumes noxious and the hotel bar outrageously overpriced.

Mind you. The food was brilliant.

Well, you can’t have everything. Not even if your name is Shangri-la.

Many thanks to my sister and wikicommons for the photos.