Bhutan | GlobalSalsa: travel writer Belinda Jackson

Jun

Fags are going to pot and booze gets the boot in the healthy kingdom of Bhutan

Punakha dzong

It’s been a while between posts, because it’s been a while since internet. Hell, it’s been a while since electricity.

But what it lacks in power (ironic considering it’s selling hydro-electricity to India) Bhutan makes up for in enlightening ideas.

Here’s a few to consider:

Politicians
must retire at 65 years, even the king. In any case, you’ve got to be able to get into the administrative offices, such as the Punakha dzong, pictured, a building
accessible only by what can be described as a rather beautiful ladder. Can’t get up it?
Can’t go to work (lordy, think of some of our Aussie fatties trying to edge their way up this one!)

The first
Sunday of the month is car free in the major towns. It used to be every Tuesday, but was overturned by public demand. Tuesday’s obviously a biggie for reform as…

…Tuesdays are ‘dry days’ which means no booze is sold in the country (except in tourist hotels). The locals just brew arrak – like whiskey – from barley at home. Wait, isn’t barley a
superfood?

Pot grows
wild on the roadside, the government encourages school children to rip it out.

Selling
tobacco is illegal and you pay 200% duty on any imported fags. This is the
place to go when you’re contemplating quitting. I haven’t been hanging around the bars, so I have seen only three guys smoking; and two of them were hunched over like they were behind the school toilets, and the others were in a snooker hall, flagrantly ignoring the ‘no smoking’ sign.

Jun

Down on the farm, Bhutan style

My farmhouse, Phobjike valley

It’s seven o’clock at night and the family has sat down for dinner. I can’t say the Jones
family, because Bhutanese don’t use surnames. But to draw you a picture,
there’s four generations in the room: granny and grandpa, mum and dad, their
daughter, her two-year-old daughter and seven-year-old niece.

They sit in a large circle that includes me, my guide Tshering and driver Tensing.

There are no tables or chairs in the Bhutanese house. Everyone sits on thin mats around the bhukhari (wood stove), and I admire the effortless half-lotus position that the 79-year-old grandfather, Tshewangla, adopts for his light dinner.

The white rice is sticky and is rolled with your hand into a tight ball and daubed with chilli cooked in
cheese sauce. Chilli is not a flavouring, chilli is a vegetable to be eaten at every meal, including breakfast.

Until 18 months ago, the women did all the cooking on a two-ring gas burner and on the wood stove. There was some light from the solar panels, but electricity has
changed all that. The warm kitchen is all very comfortable, with a fluorescent light above and a home-grown soapie on tv. A little cat sleeps by the wood
stove, and I spot a rice cooker, microwave, toaster and fridge. Butter and cheese are still often wrapped in rhododendron leaves to stop it from going hard.

Namgay Pem and her husband Phub Gaytshey.

“Electricity has changed our lives,” says Namgay Pem, the mother of the house. It’s helped them to have better sanitation and everyone loves the soap opera, which won an international award for its role in educating people about the dangers of HIV.

That night, as a special guest in a full house, I sleep in the altar room. Namgay’s husband, Phub Gaytshey, is a lay monk, and the room’s walls are covered in
elaborate paintings that pulsate with colour. One complete wall is taken up with a deep altar which Phub attends carefully each morning.

After Phub demonstrates his ritual of offering tea, incense, water and three prostrations to the altar, the two little girls show me their new three-day-old calf, safe
in a manger attached to the kitchen, and we pop a few arrows: archery is Bhutan’s national sport, and their obsession is comparable to, say, the AFL or English league.

We clamber in the 4WD to slip and slide up the muddy driveway, waving to the family. There is no word for ‘goodbye’ in Dzongkha, only ‘see you again’.

Jun

What they’re wearing in Bhutan right now: fashion show in Thimphu

My first
night in Thimphu, the capital of Bhutan, was spent at a glamorous fashion
parade. My second night was spent sitting on a farmhouse kitchen floor, eating
rice with my fingers with a family of potato farmers.

Curve ball
tourism?

Absolutely the place to be in Thimphu this week was
the fashion parade that marked the opening of the new National Textile Museum
building.

Everyone was there. Even one of

Bhutan’s five queens – who is the
museum’s patron – was there, with plenty of princes and princesses into tow, mobbed by Bhutan’s paparazzi and observed eagerly and reverentially by
the rest of the population.

The dress that brought the house
down and the crowd to its feet.

The fashion
show was a collaboration of designers from Bhutan’s fledgling fashion industry
and two Indian designers, the Bollywood designer Rita Kumar and the fabulously
suave Rajesh Pratap Singh.

Models were a mix of locals and Mumbai imports: the
super-Indians had the strut and polish, while a few Bhutanese girls radiated
shyness. The boys were all doing their best
‘OMG-my-girlfriend-talked-me-into-this’ look and, in a country that created
Gross National Happiness, they all had perfected the p*** off stare.

The show
ran through the latest kiras (women’s
traditional dress) and ghos (men’s wrap), which must be worn at work and for
official functions.

Having said that, I have seen farmers happily striding the
paddocks in the gho, usually tartan, which looks like a shave coat worn with a
pair of long socks. It is more attractive than it sounds, while the kiras, shimmering
with gold threat, were beautiful.

Then INXS
kicked up and the designers let their heads go. True to form, the paparazzi’s
cameras went into overdrive whenever a mini-skirt came on the catwalk (rare)
but the biggest applause was for a fairytale gown that swept the floor.

A traditional kira.

It really
showed another face of Bhutan: there wasn’t a hiking boot in sight, and it was
touching to see the Bhutanese absolutely bursting with pride for their
beautiful new building and the fashions by their own.

They were
also extremely lucky, as the monsoon season seems to have come early this year
– it generally doesn’t kick off till late June, early July – there was not one
drop of rain on the elaborate outdoor production. I assume it was the work of
the lamas, who dictated when the building should be opened.

“But then,
the lamas were consulted as to when the elections should take place, and they
were rained out,” commented one (foreign) cynic.

For a
country that got TV in 1999, they’ve come a long way, baby.

Jun

Searching for the face of Bhutan

I wish lived in a different, less politically-correct age, so I could write like
Norman Lewis, who wrote that “The mulatta girls of Havana were seen to flaunt
the biggest posteriors and the narrowest waists in the world”.

I’d write
that in this queue, waiting to check in to the flight to Paro, there are
Indians – plump, handsome little men doing business in the perfume trade. And
there are Asians: Louis Vuitton-toting Japanese, Chinese from Shenzen. And then there are those whose faces are
blurred by geography: a group of people who look like they’ve been mashed
between the two super-countries of India and China.

Dark skin and
full lips of an Asian face, but straight narrow noses and small eyes, the eyes
of a mountain race who were born closer to the sun than the rest of us.

The check-in counter
is down the back of Bangkok airport, along with Uzbekistan and Israeli
air, but the airport is eerily deserted. Amongst the luggage, I count 15
flat-screen tvs and six clear plastic carry bags stuffed with duvets and a
large dog, yelping his distress from his cage.

I can hear
other Australians behind me, some serious cameras slung nonchalantly over
shoulders, but at 5.10am, they’re already talking gear.

Bhutan, I’m ready.

Jun

En route to Bangkok

Bangkok airport.

The
soundtrack: Terry Oldfield on the chimes and meditation bowl, churning out a
Healing Sounds journey – to get that pre-Bhutan Buddhist feelin’.

The book:
Norman Lewis’s ‘The World, The World’ – going old school, back to my early
love, where travel writing all began.

The scene: it’s like a cheerful cocktail party around me, with Campari and
Singha beer going down with handfuls of salty nuts.

The
airline: Thai Airways – thank goodness, the attendants don’t look like overplayed
drag queens and neither are they so beautiful that it turns me into
Insta-Frump.

The
destination: Bangkok and the Novotel Bangkok
Suvarnabhumi Airport – “try the breakfast buffet, try
the pool, try the beds!” urges the hotel’s PR, Cyn Dammerer. With less 10 hours
on the ground (thanks to a 6.50am onward flight to Paro), I’ll see what I can
do, Cyn.

Follow

Fags are going to pot and booze gets the boot in the healthy kingdom of Bhutan

Down on the farm, Bhutan style

What they’re wearing in Bhutan right now: fashion show in Thimphu

Searching for the face of Bhutan

En route to Bangkok