It happens at some point in every country. Life takes over and the time to write dwindles. Since I last updated this page I’ve walked the Druk Path, started working, been to the setchu, travelled to Bumthang again and we’ve started living like the poorer locals. This afternoon we’ll meet with friends to discuss the possibility of walking to Gasa, passing the 5000m base camp of the sacred 7000m Jomolhari in a couple of weeks time.
For tourists, the Druk Path is a 6 day walk with horse support. Straight off the plane from sea level, it makes sense to take it easy, but we couldn’t afford guides or horses and were on a deadline. Marie had to prepare her budget and request to extend her contract into 2006, so we only had 3 days. Added to that, we decided to do the walk in the opposite direction – up the steep side – so as not to put too much pressure on my knees. Two of the three days were at 4000m and I spent one of those with an altitude headache. The feeling is like wearing a bandanna too tightly. The walk was pretty, but not spectacular unless you count the views of Jomolhari shyly retreating behind clouds as soon as it came into sight. Culturally, it didn’t have much to offer except the sight of horses coming the other way, carrying 80 litre gas bottles, stoves and assorted other ‘necessities.’ The lead horse always had a brush on its forehead like those on military hats – if only I could remember which country wore them….
Work is entirely voluntary. I was missing the daily interaction with people and finding less inspiration to write so I submitted my CV to contacts at the Department of IT and told them I’d be willing to work for free for a while. This would also give me a chance to see the working life in Bhutan first hand. The Royal Institute of Management was quick to respond seeing that I was an ‘expert’ in PHP and MySQL. I thought I’d oversold myself, but it turned out that the instructors for the dynamic web design course had very little knowledge themselves, so now I’m teaching web design to Bhutanese students and getting an idea of the way Bhutanese people think. It seems that I’d chosen the right tools to study when I got here.
Big Dave, a friend from Sydney visited for a few weeks recently, in perfect time to see the biggest festival in Bhutan. The Thimphu Setchu is big only because it’s the capital and is timed for good weather so all the tourists come along as well. Articles in the paper complain that it’s grown too big for the venue – the Thimphu Dzong – and many people, both locals and tourists, missed out. The locals were upset more because it’s the chance to show off their best clothes than for any religious reason and the tourists were upset because they’d paid enormous amounts to get here and to stay each day, only to miss the highlight. Marie, Dave and I were lucky. We knew to go early and arrived at 7am. Dave and I had seats in the VIP box which we weren’t really impressed by. People there were really all about showing off and there was very little of the party atmosphere I’d been looking forward to. We’d rather have been in the crowd having a picnic and chatting with the regular people, but when someone goes to the trouble of arranging something like this, it’s rude to refuse. Marie missed out because she’d arranged to go with her taikwondo friends, but they had to sit in the sun and had a worse time of it than we did. The costumes of the dances were as dazzling as expected, but after a morning of slow dances, we decided to call it a day and get our gho / kira off.
While Marie was in Delhi submitting her proposal, Dave and I took off to the see some of the country. The trip was very close to the one that Marie and I had done in August, so I knew the good places to stay and could call up her colleagues to have a drink with us. Surprisingly, almost everyone we met remembered me, starting with the police at the border checkpoints, though that instance is hardly surprising. It had been getting dark when we arrived the first time and we didn’t see it, speeding through and up the road a hundred metres before I noticed the blue uniforms in my rear vision mirror. They’d been laughing when they told us they thought they’d have to give chase, and this time were quick to ask where Madam was. In Bhutan, everybody knows everybody.
Although it’s October and the ‘blessed rain’ festival is over, the rainy season seems only to have just arrived. We’d been warned about the flooded roads and landslides and were expecting a true monsoon experience over the last couple of months, but it only ever rained at night and then not so heavily. This had the farmers worried because their rice crops would suffer, but not as much as the heavy rain of the last few days has. Now what crops did grow might be ruined by the rain. Most rooves around the countries are covered in chilis to dry, but much of that will rot now.
In the midst of this, we have our own disaster. I came home from dropping Dave at the airport and had a shower, but the hot tap broke and refused to turn off. Marie was already at work, the landlord was travelling and the landlady was at the hospital where her aunt had just died, so I was at home alone with a shower pouring all our hot water out in the middle of the house. Bhutanese plumbers don’t advertise in the phone book (there’s no yellow pages) and I didn’t have any tools. The hot water tank is high on the outside wall and the taps were missing. Instead, I trudged up to the water tanks above the house and tied up the toilet tank mechanism to block the inflow. That meant that I just had to wait until the tank ran out and the water would stop, but then we’d have to walk to the tank further up the hill to get water for cooking and bathing. Since that’s the way many people in Bhutan live anyway, I should have been happy for the experience. I wasn’t. Luckily, when the landlady came home, she showed me that it was possible to turn off a tap from a tank on the roof which stopped the flow. Marie then found that her group at work employed a plumber so he came to fix the problem. Unluckily, the problem was more serious than I’d thought and our bathroom is now covered in concrete from the hole he’s making in the wall to pull the pipes apart so he can change the tap.
Until that’s done, we’ll be having baths in the ensuite. Again, I should be happy because it’s more traditional, but that image was spoilt when I went out this morning to find Pemba, the landlord’s son, in the shed lighting a fire. When I asked what he was doing, he told me that his grandmother wanted a bath but she didn’t trust electrically heated water, so he was heating the stones to put into the bath. If I want a really traditional bath, I’ll have to go through that whole process myself.
Ironically, I almost had the chance. I was invited to star in a Bhutanese movie but had to pass on the chance because the timing was bad. Had I not done so, I may have ended up in a traditional bath with a beautiful Bhutanese woman scrubbing my back. Well, I can still dream. More annoying at the loss is that it would have been a great launching pad to selling a book on Bhutan. When the agent asks what’s special about me, I could have answered that I was the first foreigner to star in a Bhutanese film. Now it’s not to be. Mais, c’est la vie.