Palace of the Paro Penlop

Bhutan has never been colonized by a Western power, nor has it ever changed hands much among its nearby Asian neighbors, because of the general inaccessibility of the land. There were some battles with Tibetan invaders and part of western Bhutan was federated under the control of Tibetan lamas by the 16th century. It was not united into a single nation until the turn of the twentieth century when the current ruling dynasty, the Wangchuks, came to power and managed to bring the various feudal regions under a single Buddhist monarchy. The current king is the 4th of this dynasty; King Jigme Signye Wangchuk ascended the throne in 1972 at the age of 16 when his 44-year old father, Jigme Dorji Wangchuk, passed away. In medieval times, gigantic fortresses were built across the country, many by a revered Buddhist saint named Sabdrug Rinpoche. These dzongs still serve as the major cultural, religious, and administrative centers in modern Bhutan. Local leaders were penlops, literally "lord-teacher," and some of them became quite powerful, among them the penlop of Paro, whose gracious three-story home overlooks the Paro valley, almost at the same elevation as the imposing dzong which is on the opposite slope. Penlops are still an important title in Bhutan; the king's son, the Crown Prince Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuk, was recently installed as the penlop of a region in the center of Bhutan.

In the 1980s, the Paro penlop's house was turned into a hotel (renovated 1997) called the Gantey Palace, and this was our first destination, to drop off our bags. We walk through a gate and down a flight of stone steps into a garden. A large chorten (a sealed room-sized sanctuary for sacred texts, about 25 feet high with an elaborate roof) dominates the garden. One then passes through a long building, one room deep, housing a wooden reception counter, and from there into a stone courtyard made up of two-story buildings on three sides and the palace itself, a looming large rectangular building, wider at the base than at the top, with narrow high windows. Our rooms are reached by an extremely steep hewn wooden staircase to the second floor of the reception building, where we have two twin-bed rooms with lovely views over the rice paddies, the town of Paro and the Paro River (Chu) beyond.

There is not a single unadorned surface at Gantey Palace, and this is somewhat typical of older buildings. The paneled walls are painted, with an image in the center of each panel, and the trim is painted several colors, as is the beams and the ends of the beams are adorned with designs, and the furniture is elaborately painted, and the ceiling is a dark red with dark blue beams. The proprietress permits us to go in and see the rooms in the palace, which are higher-ceilinged than ours and have the feel of a much older building. There is a prayer room/ treasure room with a large altar and statue of the Guru Rinpoche, the man who brought Buddhism to Bhutan, with the original murals on the walls showing the life and heroic exploits of the Guru.

The Western-style bathrooms are quite new, although we have arranged for a "stone bath" and are not sure what to expect. In the evening after we return from our Paro sightseeing, the proprietress shows us through a gate at the back of the courtyard, into a stone-strewn yard where a simple wooden shed has been built, with a corrugated tin roof. In the shed are four tubs that look a bit like canoes with the ends cut off, made of thick cedar planks, and beyond the shed is a fire heaped high with large round river cobbles. In each tub, a cedar plank drilled with holes divides the interior into a large section, big enough for an adult to sit (or two children!), and a smaller section, big enough to hold a dozen hot stones which heat the water mighty quick to a good steaming temperature. The man tending the fire lifts a stone, rinses it, with dramatic steam and hissing, in a small tub, and then drops it into the small section, prior to our clambering in and soaking. He had filled all four tubs and we, in our swimsuits, sat and enjoyed our *really* hot soaks. The stone baths made us so tired and relaxed we could hardly stay awake during dinner. There is no menu, we are just brought serving dishes of what has been cooked for the evening, and everything was delicious: cream vegetable soup, teeny thin fresh asparagus (grown here in abundance), spinach with cream sauce, white rice, stir fried cabbage and carrots, and some kind of cooked chicken (a bone in every bite). We sleep very soundly, the sound of the barking packs of wild dogs is very faint across the rice paddies.