General: Bhutan

I suspect that a lot of people haven't even heard of this tiny Himalayan kingdom and that would be fair enough. Don't beat yourself up if you don't know Bhutan - most people can't find it on a map so you're not alone. Tucked away in the Himalaya, sandwiched between Tibet and India, and strictly controlling who comes in and who goes out, the Bhutanese adopted a tactic that reminds me of Douglas Adams' creation, the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. ...
...as a "mindboggingly stupid animal" which assumed that if you can't see it, then it can't see you. By looking inwards and ignoring the outside world, Bhutan has long been hiding in plain sight.

So where should I start to write about such a bizarre place? As Julie Andrews would say 'Let's start at the very beginning'.......(with apologies that this is a very long review)

==A is for Archery==

The ... more

I suspect that a lot of people haven't even heard of this tiny Himalayan kingdom and that would be fair enough. Don't beat yourself up if you don't know Bhutan - most people can't find it on a map so you're not alone. Tucked away in the Himalaya, sandwiched between Tibet and India, and strictly controlling who comes in and who goes out, the Bhutanese adopted a tactic that reminds me of Douglas Adams' creation, the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. This creature appears in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy as a "mindboggingly stupid animal" which assumed that if you can't see it, then it can't see you. By looking inwards and ignoring the outside world, Bhutan has long been hiding in plain sight.

So where should I start to write about such a bizarre place? As Julie Andrews would say 'Let's start at the very beginning'.......(with apologies that this is a very long review)

A is for Archery

The ancient art of "bows-and-arrows" is the National Sport of Bhutan. Bhutan likes 'National' things as you'll discover later. I did wonder if archery had grown from a history of hunting small furry critters for food but I was wrong. Archery is not about food it's about war - shooting at invading Tibetan armies or fighting with your neighbours. In a country with tricky terrain that limits many of the usual forms or warfare, archery remained an effective form of warfare.

On any Sunday afternoon when any self-respecting young man in Europe would be out playing footie with his friends or drinking down the pub, his Bhutanese counterpart can be found in his traditional dress (plus expensive trainers) with his ultra-technical bow firing arrows at a target no bigger than a football 150 meters away. Forget your normal 'big ringed target with pretty colours about 50 m away - this is hard-core archery. I struggled to even see the target, it was so far away. And the only way you can tell if the archer has hit it, is that all his pals on his team start dancing and singing and jeering at the other team. It's a bit like badly behaved crown green bowling.

B is for Buddhism

The twin pillars of Bhutanese society are Royalty and Religion and the religion is Buddism - or more strictly Buddhism mixed with quite a lot of superstition and animism. In an average day on our tour 4 or 5 different things would happen that we'd be told were auspicious or inauspicious - seeing grey langur monkeys for example is lucky but brown langurs aren't. Bizarre.

But back to Buddhism. Amongst Bhutanese attractions that pull in visitors from all over the world, it's the temples and the scenery that sit at the top table. Most towns have a 'dzong' - a castle-like building that's a combination of monastery and fortress. You'll also find lots of goempas (or gompas) and lhakhangs which are monasteries, either for teaching or meditation. There are thousands of stupas and chortens (strange little monuments that generally commemorate something or are placed to prevent some kind of inauspicious energy) and prayer wheels which all must be circumnavigated in a clockwise direction. We even saw a small stupa slap-bang in the middle of a narrow mountain road - presumably lucky but probably not for any driver who isn't paying attention.

C is for the Coronation

You may have seen on the news recently that the Bhutanese just got their 5th King. He's a good-looking 28 year old with sideburns and more than a touch of the young Elvis about him. The 4th King is still around - he abdicated in favour of his son a couple of years back.

The Bhutanese certainly seem to adore their royal family and during our visit, everyone and everywhere was getting ready for last week's coronation. Since it falls in the centenary year of the royal family, royal-fever at the moment is on a high with lots of people wearing badges with the faces of the two kings.

The coronation celebrations took place over several days and several of the dzongs we visited were decorated and full of locals practicing some really 'lame' dances for the king's visit. King Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck hopefully has a finer appreciation of such dances than we did.

D is for Drukair

The national carrier of Bhutan is called Druk Air. The country has one airport, one airline and two planes - some reports suggest there might be another two but I'm not convinced. No other airline is allowed to schedule flights at the airport and only 8 pilots worldwide are qualified to land at Paro Airport which works on Visual Site Rules - i.e. if you can't see the runway, don't land; if you can't see the mountains, don't take off. Druk Air has the sort of monopoly that thankfully rarely exists these days and it's very well protected. It's a condition of getting your visa that all visitors (with the exception of Indian passport holders who can use the road border at Phoentsholing if they can face a horrible drive) must either enter or leave the country through Paro airport. So there's a monopoly supply and a legal obligation to use the carrier which - not surprisingly - leads to high prices and a general lack of respect for the art of timetabling. Your scheduled flight time is not so much a commitment as a suggestion. We met a woman who was two days late arriving from Khatmandu because Druk kept changing the flight times. Considering that once you arrive your tour is highly regimented and inflexible, Druk's habit of flying when they feel like it can be a major inconvenience. However, the service on-board is good, the pilots keep pointing out which big mountains (Everest, Lhotse, Makalu, Kanchenjunga) are outside your window and the crew are very nice. Don't be surprised though if your flight leaves and/or arrives at a completely different time than you expected or doesn't stop somewhere it's supposed to on the way.

E is for Ema Datse - the National Dish

This scary concoction has a name which means chillies and cheese - and that's pretty much what's in it. Most of the food served up to tourists is dull and bland in the extreme but often at the end of your hotel buffet there will be one smaller, innocuous looking dish of 'something green in white sauce'. Don't be tempted to mistake those green bits for green beans or green peppers; they are chillies and they are hot. In any other country, chillies are seen as a spice but in Bhutan, they are used as a vegetable. You have been warned!

F is for Four Wheel Drive

The roads of Bhutan are shocking. We were only in the relatively well-developed west of the country but even so we bumped and bounced, swayed and swung for hours to get any where. Take some travel sickness tablets - or buy them locally. We were told that the locals are rotten travellers and spend most journeys being sick so it's not hard to find tablets.

The country is only something like 200 miles from east to west and 100 from north to south - yet a journey from the capital Thimphu to the east of the country can take 3 days or more; it's a bit like the M25 on a Friday. From Thimphu to the border in the south, took us seven and a half hours due partly to the roads not being very good to start with and partly to the already-not-very-good roads having loads of landslips and undergoing patching-up repairs.

Ladies, consider taking a sports bra. Driving in Bhutan is like galloping on a camel!

G is for Gho

The Gho is the male national dress. It looks a lot like a dressing gown and is tied tightly around the waste to give a big kangaroo-like 'pouch' at the front in which men keep all sorts of handy things. They've no need for rucksacs, they just stuff everything in tehir gho. You aren't allowed to wear trousers with your gho until the snow is knee deep (or something like that - I might be exaggerating) so the standard combination is gho, knee-high socks and smart shoes. Ladies wear an outfit called a kira which is a long wide piece of cloth tied with some kind of origami skills to create a long straight dress-type-thing. I stared at these all week and still couldn't figure out how it was done. It looks good on anyone with a figure like an ironing board.

The gho and kira are not just for 'special occasions' - they are worn all the time. You don't HAVE to wear one but you can't enter a bank, post office, monastery, museum, government building etc. without one so it's really just easier to go with it. Such buildings often have soldiers or policemen on guard but they aren't there to look for terrorists, they are there to make sure you are properly dressed. Thankfully, tourists don't have to dress up.

H is for Happiness

The fourth king created a concept called Gross National Happiness and frequently said GNH was much more important than GDP. How nice - maybe Gordon Brown could adopt it as a key economic indicator. However, whilst this happiness is clearly evident, it's also very controlled. There seem to be rules about everything in Bhutan and it's hard to imagine a bunch of Bhutanese just letting rip in a spontaneous outpouring of joy.

Until recently there was no television and the government approach to getting people to stop smoking was to stop selling cigarettes and impose 200% import duty on tobacco - another good idea for Gordon! There's a bit of an ostrich-like head-in-the-sand approach to preservation of the purity of the culture by not exposing the people to nasty outside influences. However, throughout our trip the sun shone brightly in clear blue skies - that would be enough to keep me pretty happy most of the time.

I is for India

I was going to be for Independence or Isolationism - two key factors in the development of the culture. Bhutan has never been in someone else's empire so you won't find old European buildings or institutions and declining imperial elegance - everything is very Bhutanese. The mountains have enabled Bhutan to maintain a state of splendid isolation but the key factor in keeping this going, has been good relations with their neighbour to the south - i.e. India. A country with a population of 500-700,000 (nobody seems to agree) sandwiched between 1.1 billion Indians and 1.3 billion Chinese (with Tibet as the traditional historic enemy) needs good friends.

In the days of British rule in India, Bhutan made alliances and pacts with the British to keep them friendly. Wikipedia informs me this type of relationship is known as Suzerainty - which just goes to show there are always new words you didn't realise you didn't know. When the British left and independent India became their neighbour, the same sort of pacts and alliances were rewritten - tippex out Britain, write in India. Mostly it works fairly well. However, there are tensions especially in the South. Keeping Bhutan's crappy roads in a navigable state needs lots of cheap manual labourers and many of these are brought in from West Bengal. They get a limited time work permit, lots of work but a clear message that they aren't welcome to stay. And when some decided they didn't want to leave a few years ago, the fourth king put on his flak jacked, picked up his rifle and marched off to ask them politely but forcibly to leave.

Indian visitors get special treatment in Bhutan in as much as they are exempted from the $200 per night minimum fees that apply to all other tourists and from the requirement to enter or leave the country by air. However, since they are the only visitors who can travel independently, they can find themselves treated as second class visitors because many won't have guides and drivers and the support of a local tour company to arrange letters of permission for getting into a lot of the monasteries.

J is for Jumolhari

Mount Jumolhari is a beauty. She's the key mountain of western Bhutan and is sometimes known as "the bride of Kangchenjunga" (the third highest mountain in the world). Part of the Himalaya range, Jumohari straddles the border between Tibet and Paro and, like all Bhutanese mountains, is considered sacred. The three-day trek to Jumolhari base camp is one of Bhutan's most popular and accessible treks - the other really famous one being a 30 day monster-trek called the Snowman Trek.

Good views of Jumolhari can be found to the west of the second city of Paro - it's a pretty pointy mountain and very photogenic.

K is for knees

As a result of the men wearing the Gho, you will probably see more male knees in Bhutan than almost anywhere else. I'm told that - like a true Scotsman - a Bhutanese should wear nothing under his gho but thankfully I can't confirm that. What I did notice though is that wearing a skirt is not considered by most men as a good reason to keep their knees together. In winter you may be spared the sight of so many knees when they adopt the use of thermal long-johns.

K is also for my knees which are dodgy at the best of times (ligament and knee problems caused by too much hockey and ice hockey in my misspent youth). Bhutan is not a country for those who are unsteady on their feet. The biggest tourist attraction in the country - see T is for Tiger's Nest - requires an ascent of 915 m to visit. There are plenty of hills - well it is a Himalayan country after all - and wheelchair access to just about anywhere is poor.

L is for Land of the Thunder Dragon

This is the literal translation of the name Bhutan. Lovely isn't it?

L is also for language - despite the small population there are dozens of local dialects. A bit like Darwin's finches in the Galapagos, the mountains keep communities isolated and preserve local languages. In the interests of reducing the isolation from the outside world - and to take advantage of foreign volunteer teachers - the third king introduced the rule that all schools should teach in English. So despite the unpronounceable local language of Dzongkha, almost everyone you meet will speak some English. Until recently the exception to this was found in monasteries but now even young monks get English language training.

M is for Mountains

The further north you go in Bhutan, the higher the mountains. In the areas around the two main cities of Paro and Thimphu, you'll find you are at an altitude around the 2500-3000 m mark where you could feel the affects of mild altitude sickness. Heading north to the border with China (Tibet) you get the really big monster mountains. In those areas there is little or no road access and if anything goes wrong, you are probably stuffed. In an emergency, they can call for helicopter assistance from the army in Delhi but it takes two days to arrive and costs more than many insurance policies will deal with. Our guide also leads parties on the four week Snowman Trek which is considered one of the toughest in the world - he actually did some trekking in the north with Bruce Parry and proudly presented us with a DVD of Parry's programme which he appeared in. He told us that seven days into the snowman there's an option to drop out and be rescued but after that, from day 8 onwards you've no option but to just keep going. Scary stuff.

Surely the point of mountains is to climb them - or am I missing something? As George Mallory so famously said when asked about his repeated (and eventually fatal) attempts to conquer Everest, you do it 'because it's there'. However in Bhutan you aren't allowed to go to the summits for fear or angering the mountain gods. Maybe they have the right idea - perhaps we should show more respect to the mountains.

N is for National this, National that

With all the control-freakery of Bhutan, there are plenty of examples of National-ism by which I mean, National flower, National dress, National music, National arts, National handicrafts, National dances and most bizarrely, there's a ladies National Haircut. All the women over a certain age in Bhutan look like my mum. The national haircut is short - which is unusual - and rather 'pudding bowl' in aspect. It's the haircut I went through my early teens with thanks to my mum's determination to 'get her money's worth' out of the hairdresser. It's the sort of haircut that used to get playground taunts of 'Who cut your hair? The council?'

O is for Old Aged Pensioners

The life expectancy in Bhutan isn't very high - somewhere around the mid 60s. Life for many people is hard and hospitals are few and far between. So why did I make O for OAPs? It's not for the locals this time. Your average foreign tourist is of retirement age. We felt like positive youngsters and were easily 25-30 years younger than most of the tourists we met. We came across one pair of young girls in their 20s but other than that, the tourist scene is grey. In part this is due to the cost of visiting Bhutan - it's not cheap (see X is for Expensive) but it's also seen by a lot of people as the clean, safe, dependable face of Asia. It's a sort of Switzerland of the Indian sub-continent. For those who don't want to be confronted by beggars, touts, poverty and decay, Bhutan is a bit like the OAP's trip to Bourton on the Water - dependably pretty and safe. As a result of this, don't expect wild nightlife and nights of getting rip-roaringly bladdered in lively bars. You won't find that. If it existed, you probably still wouldn't find it because your trip will be so controlled.

There is no independent travel in Bhutan and this keeps out a lot of younger travellers. Backpacking over the border and slobbing around in $5 a night dives, living off rice and sleeping in railway stations like you might find people doing in Nepal or India just isn't an option. The rules say the only way you can travel around Bhutan is as part of a group on a controlled and pre-arranged tour. Admittedly the group can be as small as one person - you, your guide and your driver - but you won't get left to your own devices.

P is for Permits

Another reason you'll need to have a guide is that your local tour company is responsible for getting your permits. Almost everything worth seeing in Bhutan is barred to tourists unless they have a permit. You'll notice your guide fumbling in the pouch of his gho for the paperwork he needs to present to the caretaker monk at each old temple.

Q is for Queens

The fourth king has four queens; apparently they are all sisters. The Royal Family is large and with the fourth king abdicating but still on the scene, there are several generations of ex-queens still knocking around. One old queen stands out when you see the many photographs of the old kings - I believe she was the third queen's wife and was a woman of outstanding beauty. The new king is cute and single so likely to be - as Jane Austin would have put it - 'in want of a wife'. Apparently he caused a big stir with the ladies of Thailand during a state visit but chances are, he'll marry a Bhutanese lady.

These multiple queens bring me to a topic that just as easily could have been under P - polygamy. I'm not sure what legislation is in place but it's not only men who can have multiple spouses. In the wild lands of the north, polyandry is also practiced, usually with one woman marrying several brothers in order to prevent division of lands and farms.

R is for Regulations

Tourism in Bhutan is very very regulated but then so is everything else. There are prescribed ways to do almost everything and the whole country's like an impenetrable secret society of funny handshakes and code words. Entering some of the temples and dzongs, our guide had to rush off and find his large heavily fringed shawl that needs to be folded in a particularly complex and illogical fashion. Inside the dzongs you can identify who's who status-wise by the colour of their scarves - royal family in saffron, ministers in red and so on. Since there seem to be only about a half dozen different patterns for the fabric of the gho (although our guide insisted you could have it made in any fabric - I'm doubting there are too many denim, leather, or sequinned ghos) you can find your driver in the same outfit as the king. So it might be useful to have the high-ups distinguished from the hoi-polloi at state occasions. But surely there's something simpler than several yards of drapery.

S is for Stamps

As the old saying goes, Philately will get you everywhere - and in Bhutan, bizarrely, stamps are big business. Since almost every other souvenir is prohibitively expensive, a visit to the General Post Office is a good way to source some unusual gifts for your friends, family and people on whom you don't want to spend too much. Bhutan's post office produces zillions of different commemorative stamp sheets and has a thriving international first day cover trade. Along with tourism, flogging electricity to the Indians and something else that I can't remember at the moment but it might be selling potatoes, stamps are in the top 4 income generators for Bhutan. If your country is celebrating the 34th international tiddly winks extravaganza, the Bhutan post office will probably be doing a sheet of commemoratives. First Belgian in space? No problem, they probably did that one. 90th anniversary of the invention of Velcro, there's probably one for that as well.

We picked up some sheets for Cats of the World, Dogs of the World, Japanese paintings, History of the Royal Family and goodness knows what else. We also bought the world's first CDROM stamps because they seemed like such a novelty. It would be fascinating - well mildly interesting I suppose, to know what proportion of Bhutanese stamps actually get stuck on envelopes and posted. My guess is it's a tiny amount.

T is for Tiger's Nest

The Tiger's Nest is the iconic image of Bhutan that appears on all the posters and websites. It's a monastery SO beautiful that they built it 900 meters up a cliff face clinging to the bare rock-face. I believe this was probably just to ensure you really have to suffer to get there. OK, that's not actually true but it's how it felt when we visited. Bearing in mind the average age of visitors, keeping in mind that the Tiger's Nest is often visited very early in a trip when you may not have acclimatised to the lower oxygen levels, it's quite a challenge. The temple is built at a site where it's said that Guru Rinpoche - the man who brought Buddhism to Bhutan - meditated for three months in a cave after flying up the cliff on a winged tigress. It has burned down repeatedly (a common problem in temples with lots of butter-lamps) and was most recently damaged in 1998. According to my guidebook, a few years ago it still wasn't open to the public.

If your knees or lungs won't deal with the climb, there's an option to go about half way up with horses. They take you to the so-called Cafeteria building which offers fabulous views and cups of tea with biscuits. I would have felt it was cheating to have gone by horse - as well as fairly scary in places.

U is for umbrellas

We didn't get so much as a sniff of rain but we saw lots of umbrellas - all carried by ladies shielding themselves from the sun. Lest you are tempted to insist that these are parasols and should be under "P is for..." I'll defend myself by saying there was nothing particularly elegant and lacy about these. They were proper brollies.

V is for Villages

Bhutanese life is village life. The capital city has a population of around 30,000 and the second city around 10,000. In each case the figures include the villages around the city. Neither would get city status in the UK. The rest of the population is spread throughout the country in villages. Life is mostly agrarian - Bhutan is lucky in having good soil, lots of water and plenty of sunshine.

W is for Water

Two aspects to this one. Water - don't drink it! That maxim applies in Bhutan as in every other country in the region. Bottled water is probably pretty cheap - I'm not entirely sure as our guide and driver kept us plied with plenty of it as part of our tour fees.

Where water comes into its own is in the generation of electricity. Bhutan is a major exporter of hydroelectric power to India. Unlike other places I've visited in the region, they aren't short of water or power so you won't have to feel guilty about taking a long shower or leaving the immersion heater on in your hotel room. And since it's 'green' energy, you doubly don't need to feel bad. However, despite having loads of energy, you'll still experience power cuts and in one particular valley we visited, there's only solar energy. This is not because they can't put power into the valley - it's because a rare bird makes its home there for a couple of months each year and they don't want the buzz of power lines to upset the birds.

X is for eXtremely eXpensive

Here's the rub. There's no way of hiding the fact that Bhutan is bloody expensive. If you go with a group of more than three people, you will have to pay a minimum of $200 per night. For two people - as in our case - it rises to $230 per night and for a single traveller it's $250 per night. Next year all these costs will go up by an additional and eye-watering $50 per night. You might say that it doesn't sound too unreasonable - people regularly pay that sort of money to stay in swanky resorts but Bhutan doesn't work like that. For your $230 per person per night, you get hotels that probably cost about £10 per head, food that runs at about a fiver per day, plus the excellent services of a driver and guide and the use - in our case - of a very nice vehicle. It's not too bad really but when you compare it with what you can get for the money in neighbouring countries, it's a bit steep. $75 of your daily fee goes to the government.

On top of the daily fees, you have to pay for the exhorbitant Druk Air flights (I think ours were about $350 per person ONE-WAY), visa fees, and 10% on top to your tour company. Now you can understand why it's been 12 years since I first fell in love with the idea of visiting Bhutan - this is a place you have to save up to visit.

What's a holiday without shopping though? In this case, a very good idea. Souvenirs and handicrafts are stupidly expensive. Want to buy a length of hand woven fabric? That's going to set you back £1000. OK, it took months to make but sorry, it's ridiculous. Adding insult to injury, an awful lot of the over-priced tourist tat isn't local. Fortunately, having been to Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh, we recognised that a lot of the gear wasn't authentic and would be available over the border when we reached Darjeeling. So our only souvenirs were a couple of cheap T-shirts and some stamps.

Y is for Yak

Y is always for Yak. I've written at length about Yaks in my review of Ladakh and I'm not about to repeat my tales of hairy beasts.

Z is for Zeppe

This is the first holiday I've had that came with a reading list and top of the list of suggested tomes was Jamie Zeppe's book 'Beyond the Sky and the Earth'. Zeppe was one of the early western volunteer teachers, attracted in to Bhutan by the idea of doing 'something different'. Her book is a beautiful story of falling in love with an alien culture (and an alian chap along the way of course). Highly recommended for a taste of what to expect when you visit the country.

Don't forget to check the photos! 

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