From previous Druk Air flights we knew that the airline owned two airplanes and alternated them (or, as Don sometimes says, flew one and used the other one for parts). Thus we were delighted to see that Druk Air had expanded its operation and now owned a brand-new Airbus A319. The flight attendant told me they had been using it for about 7 months. The flight crew have lovely British-English accents, with an audible "t" in "fastened" during the seatbelt instructions. The airplane was sparkling clean inside, and we did not, as in previous times, have to stand on a scale with our luggage to make sure we met weight requirements just prior to boarding; this had been handled at the checkin counter. Even in a new plane, however, the flight was turbulent. The pilot would come on with a pleasant, polite sentence about how the plane would be entering a spot of turbulence, and we would be roller-coasted along for a while, the flight attendants grimly clutching the meal cart and continuing to serve food, and then it would be fine again. Turbulence makes me think of too many movies about planes going down... I don't like it. The kids say "whee;" they are too young or too adventurous to pick up on my well-disguised worry. I start that very un-Mormon practice of reciting words to keep calm... first I went through the names of the parts of the women's clothing in Dzongka, as it seemed as soothing as the mantra Om Mani Padme Om (Hail to the Jewel in the Lotus - does not flow as well in English, does it?)... Kira, Teygo, Wonju, Koma, Japtha, Kabney... then I tried the Lord's Prayer... then I tried the words to the hymn we sang in Bangkok on Sunday, which used to be called "When in the Wondrous Realms Above," which ends each line with "Thy will, O Lord, be done." Because, really, if it was the will of the Lord that the brand-new Airbus A319 should go down somewhere in Bangladeshi waters, with a Mormon family, some saffron-robed Buddhist monks, some Sikhs and an unspecified number of Hindus and Buddhists aboard, then so be it. But I also knew that many people were praying us to Bhutan, and that helped literally lift the wings, I think, and bring us through without any incident.
Our route took us north-west of Bangkok, into Burma, passing north of the capital Rangoon, then over the coast of Bangladesh, and into Indian airspace after only an hour and a half. Another half hour brings us down through the clouds into the green and palmy carpet of Calcutta, where we land at a grim-looking airport and the Indian passengers stand up and start unpacking the overhead compartments long before we have reached the gate, despite the polite and timid pleas from the Bhutanese cabin crew to please remain seated. After they nearly empty the plane of passengers, leaving only those of us continuing on to Bhutan, a bright red "Indian Oil" refueling truck drives up next to the wing and a team of what I imagine to be petrol engineers climb out and proceed to refuel the plane from an underground tank, while the pilot looks on and kicks the plane tires, and the Calcutta ground crew unloads the Calcutta baggage onto the Druk Air luggage carrier: a green tractor painted with the words "Druk Air," to which is hitched three livestock trailers to hold the bags.
The second leg of the flight is much shorter, a 50-minute (!) flight from Calcutta, though the turbulence is worse in places and my dire imaginings change from distressing water landings to fog-wrapped mountain crashes. But the sky as we climb fills with the most unusual-looking clouds. American children draw clouds, as I did, as scalloped blobs, sometimes with flattened bottoms. Bhutanese religious art (which is the only kind of art there is in Bhutan, really) depicts clouds as swirly, rounded stylized flowers in the air, and the clouds outside the window, sitting on the green mountains below, had that look to them. Clouds above, striations of clouds alongside, and these living entities with beautiful spherical protrusions below--we were creatures of the clouds. The approach into Paro is thus a mythical experience, like descending out of (or into??) heaven. You can't see what's below you until you break out of the low-lying clouds to see very steep hills on all sides, into which are carved flooded green rice terraces, with no flat land in sight at all.
The Paro valley widens enough to accomodate an airstrip, but the mountains on all sides require the plane to come in low, so that it looks like the wings could touch mountain on both side, but it's just an illusion--then to make a dramatic banking turn and a stomach-dropping quick descent onto the runway. And then the sun appears out of nowhere and all is windy and bright as we come down the steps onto the tarmac in front of the stunningly beautiful traditional Bhutanese-style building that is the new and enlarged Paro airport. Our trip through the customs desk is uneventful, and we gather our luggage, declare nothing at customs, and change our leftover Thai baht into Bhutanese Ngultrum (about a 1-1 exchange from baht to ngultrum, while 43Nu is 1US dollar).
