We are Twice Adopted

The first thing to go is privacy.

The current volunteer family lives in a small guest house in the compound of the family of Dr. Gadho, an assistant Minister of Health in Bhutan and an important official at the Jigme Dorji Wangchuk National Referral Hospital, named for the current king's late father. Dr. Gadho's household is busy, with relatives coming and going, and two or three hired helpers hanging around to do the cooking and washing for the extended family. He himself is almost never here, traveling to meetings and official dinners, making a genial and impressive appearance now and then, in a well-tailored gho, on his way to somewhere else. His wife is Tashi, who drives a LandRover SUV and carries a large black leather tote bag into which she is often digging for her ringing cellphone. She is a delightful person, and was an important mentor to me the last time I was here, when Thompson was an infant and her two oldest children were adorable girls ages 6 and 4, who called me "Auntie" and hung around us much of the time. Their social position, and twelve years of American volunteers in their backyard have made the family very savvy to all things Western. Those little girls have become gracious and well-spoken young adults: Chimi is highly versed in American films, has just come back from a 6-month visit to the US, and is looking forward to attending medical school either on scholarship either in Germany or Sri Lanka. Her sister Tashi is a studious 16-year old, headed this fall for a two-year stint at an international school in Thailand. She wears Western clothes most of the time, dark blue jeans with a bleach-stripe down the center of each leg. Jamtsho is 11, the young heir-apparent to the family, being the only boy, and the undisputed leader of a passel of cousins and friends who wander in & out to play. I toured his small bedroom, which he shares with a bachelor uncle. He pointed out the posters: Beckham the British soccer star, Kurt Cobain and Enrique Eglasias. I asked him if he liked their music, and he said to me, "Yes, Auntie, but I like Eminem better." We have one of the housekeepers, Ratna, to come wash for us and tidy our beds and, as she says, "complain" to the maintenance department of the hospital when there is something in the house that needs fixing. Jamtsho's small girl cousins become pals of Halle: Sonam who is about 10, and Deki, who is 5.

Any of these folks, grown or children, will walk right into our house, with only the squeal of the screen door hinges to announce their arrival. They enter into a large living room with a Western-style dining table and chairs (unusual here), wide-plank wooden floors, lots of windows, two sofas, some chairs, a large desk, bookcases, benches, and some electric radiators for the winter. This takes up about a third of the house. The rest are smaller rooms coming off a central hallway, all with stone floors: a kitchen and a bedroom to the left, two bedrooms off to the right, each with a bathroom. The back bathroom, with a deep tub, serves as laundry, and the front bathroom has a shower in one corner, and a hot water heater that heats up during the night for morning showers. Both have regular toilets, which is a relief to Halle who is afraid of the floor squat toilets that are the norm in public bathrooms here. The kitchen is well-appointed compared to when I was here before: a cold water tap with a stainless steel sink, a very functional large water filter, a 2-burner propane cooktop sitting on the counter, and a half-sized refrigerator. A dish cupboard with screen doors and some wall shelves with pots & pans make up the rest of the room.

Our first night Liz & George, the previous HVO volunteers, have left us some food in the fridge along with a list of what has been recently purchased and can be trusted, but Tashi offers to make us supper and I am glad to accept, as we are tired and sore from hiking Taksang and the drive to Thimphu. She cooks us red rice, potatoes and stewed meat, yellow dal, and a plate of raw sliced carrots, and serves us the crunchy rice called Tsao alongside. Everything is delicious. Within a day our kids are inseparable from theirs and spend the day roaming, playing tag, and checking out the stack of board games here on the shelves in the house. We are "Uncle" and "Auntie" to the children, and we are part of their family, with anyone passing in & out of either house whenever they please. We do lock it when we're not home, but when we are home, it is free game for anyone to come in and sit with us. It is good to have a family here.

Our second adoption also takes place the first night we are here. A slender girl with a loose ponytail arrives by climbing over the wire fence behind the house, bringing two small girls with her, and introduces herself as the best friend of the girls who lived here in June. They attended a local school and this girl was, apparently, their constant companion. Her name is Thinley (silent h), she is Thompson's age, and she has come to meet the girls' "Auntie" (meaning me) and the children she has heard will be living here in July. She is an eager and winsome character, who attaches herself to our family partly out of loyalty to the previous family, and partly for reasons known only to herself. We make her feel welcome and she soon becomes a daily feature. The second day, we encounter her on the sidewalk on our way to breakfast and end up spending the entire morning in her company; she brings our boys back to her house later that day; and on the third day we spend another several hours with her in her home or ours. We become her second family and she takes over care of Halle with some authority, especially in braiding Halle's hair.

Yesterday we went to her home, what she calls a "government cottage" in the district behind the bakery near the Indian military compound. She explains that her family were squatters in the Motithang area who were relocated to these public housing units. Her family of 5 occupies half a small cottage, consisting of a front room, a kitchen the size of an American broom closet, one bedroom, and a toilet, with a small patch of land out back for the clothesline and a garden with corn, tomatoes. The front room is dominated by an elaborate corner prayer altar. Her young mother speaks no English and has a 2-month old newborn son. Our children play in the street with the kids in her neighborhood. She is an endless fount of circle games, tag variations, and street fun, and she plys us with many invitations to go with her to a monastery, to the botanical gardens, to spend the afternoon at her home, to come for cheese momos which she will make for us, etc. We are both charmed and somewhat bemused by all the attention. We bring the baby a gift and she chides us for bringing a gift on the first visit to her home, but in contrast to where we live here, to say nothing of the vast luxury in which we live at home, it seems a trifling thing. We balance between the two adopted families, a little gingerly, as we find our way here the first week.

Jacob de-ticking a dog
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Dogs of Thimphu

Our first night in Thimphu I cannot sleep. Dogs are everywhere barking, discussing, arguing, and calling to each other across the weedy garden patches between the houses. The Gadho's compound has 6 dogs, who are considered pets and are fierce guardians of the compound's boundaries. Beyond this, there are dogs everywhere, and they run in packs at night through the streets and alleys. Buddhists will not kill these wild dogs; sterilizing animals is unheard of here, and so there are a generous abundance with always more on the way.

There are many body types and sizes of these dogs of Thimphu, but they tend to be either sandy-colored, or black, with curled-up tails and pointed, flopped-over ears. They nose in the trash, drink from the gutters, sleep on the sidewalk, piddle where they please. We do not approach them, and unless it is night and you are alone, you needn't worry that they will approach you. Humans and dogs occupy the same space here on different planes of existence, living in grudging acceptance of one another, if not exactly harmony. Some become pets, like the motley crew of dogs here at the Gadhos, who are fed a pot of rice in the evening and even wear collars, and who roam with gentle authority and arrive energetically barking at the gate whenever a person or vehicle approaches. They are Shadow, the black matriarch; Polo, a younger black dog; Puppy, a kind of small sandy shepherd dog with black muzzle; Licky, a brown feminine-looking Pomeranian mix; and Puppy's two puppies, perhaps 10 or 12 weeks old, one who is her exact likeness and one who is black, whose names I think are Pepee and Phoebe. The kids and the dogs roam in a kind of integrated pack, rolling in the grass and shoving one another, and staying outside the entire day.

At home I left careful instructions for our own dog to be checked for ticks. It has been a bad tick year in Massachusetts, meaning I can easily pull one tick off our dog every time she has been out for the afternoon. Jacob sometimes helps me with this task; he is fascinated with every sentient being, as a Buddhist might say, and ticks are an interesting novelty at home. So he is horrified and distressed to flip back the ear of one of the Gadho's dogs and count 14 attached ticks on the underside of a single ear. Jacob spends lots of time grooming the dogs, petting and combing through their fur and mourning the number of critters he finds there. This morning Jamtsho and our the boys have taken it upon themselves to rid just one dog, "Puppy," of her many bloated ticks, and they count upwards of 15 and smash them merrily on the concrete outside. Jamtsho does the smashing, although this is frowned-upon as Buddhist practice. His mother Tashi said to me apologetically yesterday that the flies in the house are a nuisance, but "what can we do, we can't kill them."

Tigers Nest

Coming back from a walk to the Gantey Palace in Paro, on our first day in Bhutan, the hotel proprietress hands us a phone message she has taken. It is from the June HVO ortho volunteer, Liz Regan Lowe and her family, and it tells us that they will be coming with a car in the morning to pick us up to hike Taksang, and then at the bottom there is the cryptic but important phrase: "We have permits." Both of these items are very good news. It means we will be able to meet and talk with the family that has been in Thimphu for the previous month, so Don and Liz can talk doctor and transfer the reins, and it means that we will be able to go inside one of the most unique and sacred places in all the world, if we can manage the ascent.

Taksang Lhakang marks the place where Guru Rinpoche arrived, on the back of a flying tigress, to bring Buddhism to Bhutan. He surely had to fly there, because the spot is 900m above Paro on a sheer rock face, shielded by mist most of the time. The Guru meditated before subduing the demons that ruled the land before the arrival of the Buddha's teachings, and the sacred meditation cave has been surrounded by a monastery and temple (lakhang) for centuries. Taksang partially burned in the 1950s and was rebuilt, and then in 1997 or 1998, the entire construction went up in flames, probably from a butter lamp. It has once again been painstakingly rebuilt on its old foundation. I have heard that the local people were conscripted to dedicate a certain amount of time to the temple's reconstruction and to improving the foothpaths that lead up to it. Tourists to Bhutan -- of which there are only several thousand a year, due to strict government regulation -- nearly all walk the trail that winds through the woods, snakes around the mountain, providing tantalizing glimpses of the misty cliff with its white monastery clinging to it high above. The trail brings one to a teahouse, with strings of prayer flags all around, close enough to see the monastery in beautiful detail across a steep pine-covered canyon. Anyone may, if they are not completely winded from the altitude, continue on to a small checkpoint some 45 more minutes up the mountain, where incredible pictures like this one may be taken at nearly 10,000 feet up. From this point, the trail drops off the cliff and becomes a stone staircase, leading down many flights to a footbridge over a narrow frothy waterfall, and then up again on the other side to the monastery itself. Without a permit, tourists may go no further. But Liz and her husband George have gotten a permit, and this will allow them, their two daughters ages 11 and 13, and ourselves, for the first time, to enter the lakhang and see its treasure rooms.

Fortunately the weather is cool, cloudy, and some light rain. This cools us off as we hike and share snacks to encourage the kids. Liz and George have found Oreos in some shop in Thimphu and these are a welcome sight for our kids. We are accompanied here and there by stray dogs, some of them bearing grisly wounds from dogfights, watching us hopefully for dropped Oreo pieces. The hike is spectacular, and the path is well-trodden both by people and pack horses, though we see few other hikers today: only two other tourists, from Japan, and perhaps a dozen other Bhutanese people making the climb today. We are one day away from the low elevation of Bangkok and Stow, so we are struggling a bit with the altitude, which is here around 8000 feet and going up quickly. However, the group of kids meshes well and they keep a good pace, with Halle only occasionally flagging in her energy. We piggy back her part of the way, but the trail is not always conducive to this, so she takes some rests and the ten of us stretch out along the trail, meeting up again here and there to make sure we have all our hikers. Reaching the tea house feels like a major accomplishment, and we continue on to the photo checkpoint, and then it begins to rain as we start down the multiple flights of stone steps, some with railings between ourselves and the chasm, some without. I am concentrating on every step, breathing is labored, and my worry level about falling on the slippery wet rocks is high, but to look up and see the sheer rock face with the monastery perched on it is an incredible sight. The clouds are flowing in and out of the chasm like living animals, and the loudest sound is the waterfall coursing down between us and the monastery. We cross the bridge, with many dogs barking our arrival and their barks echoing out into the chasm and being carried away with the falling rain.

A Bhutanese policeman in camoflage uniform and flip-flops checks our permits. We respectfully wait, while a small novice monk sticks his head out of a nearby window above us somewhere and practices his "Hello! How are you?" We are admitted into the complex, a complicated arrangement of porches, wooden staircases, rooms, small temples, and vertical arrangement of tin roofs painted brick red, crowned by a central golden roof with a beautiful spire and golden gargoyles off its four corners. The rain is coming down at a good clip, and we shed our raincoats, sneakers, and camera bags at the doorways of the rooms we are allowed to visit. These number four, it turns out, though I don't think any of us knew ahead of time what was inside or how many rooms we would be allowed into. A small contingent of red-robed monks in their teens bring us from place to place, but none of them seems to know very much English. Each Bhutanese family is encouraged to have one boy become a monk, and they begin this training very early in life once their calling is designated; consequently they become quite expert in Dzongka and in texts and in writing, but perhaps (it depends on the monastery) do not study English as much as their counterparts in the public school system here. At any rate, we encountered the treasure rooms without commentary by the monks--esoteric Himalayan Buddhism in its richest, rawest, least interpreted state.

The treasure rooms are gorgeous... gigantic wall paintings of the life of Bhutanese saints, rich silk canopies and banners, pillows and mats on the floor with evidence of the ceremonies and prayers that take place there: giant round drums with curved drumsticks, trumpets, bundles of texts, chimes, bells. An altar wall in each one takes up the entire wall, with a central statue of Guru Rinpoche enconsed in a carved decorated house, surrounded by smaller niches for smaller statues, and an elaborate table in front with the seven bowls of water, detailed butter-sculptures, and burning butter lamps and incense. Liz and George have remembered to bring offerings of money for each room, and when they place them in the bowls, one of the monks goes and fetches a silver pitcher with a narrow curved spout, and a peacock feather on its lid. We hold out our cupped hands in front of us, and he pours a little of the perfumed water into our hands. We touch our mouths to the water, and then spread it on our already-wet heads. The rooms are quiet, there is only a kind of murmur from outside from the waterfall and the wind. By the second room, Halle begins to get sleepy. It has been a long 3-hour climb for small feet. She curls on my lap and nearly falls asleep. In one of the rooms the monks hand us silk threads to tie around our necks also. We respectfully spend some time in each room, looking at the beautiful objects and paintings, and then we gather our sodden sneakers and jackets and proceed to the next.

By the fourth room, Liz has decided to start down the path, and our two youngest are a bit weary of the rooms and decide to stay outside by the gigantic brass gong at the entrance. The rest of the group is permitted to enter the most sacred of the rooms and report to me that I have missed the most spectacular of all, with really enormous golden statues of the Guru Rinpoche and the Buddha, and a young monk with the most articulate English to explain them for us. It continues to rain as we cross the footbridge, and head up the stone steps. Across the chasm from the monastery I can hear a low buzzing chanting begin, like a deep hum from the mountain itself, prayers for every sentient being, from somewhere inside the lakhang. I know we each feel a keen sense of privilege at being permitted inside Taksang and also of accomplishment at finishing the ascent despite our lack of acclimation and the young ages of our children. This is no small thing for any of us.

It rains heavily down below the stone steps on the trail. In places the trail has become a small mountain stream, and our clothes are soaked. At the teahouse at last, we fuel on butter cookies and mango juice; Liz and George have some of the steaming hot milk tea that is served everywhere here. On the way down Halle is carried part of the way, but walks most of it herself, and the three boys are far ahead of us for most of the descent. The rain stops, or perhaps we walk down out of it; Don thinks it is still raining up at Taksang, and we cannot tell because the clouds have swirled in around it again. We started the hike around 10 am, and we are down at the bottom by 3, where the implacable Passang waits at the van for us. We have scaled the Tigers Nest, and we will carry the silken thread of that memory with us into our trip, while Liz & George will take it with them as their last taste of Bhutan on their way home to Denver. It is blessing both ways.

Of Highways in Bhutan

The pale brown, wide, white-cobbled river that runs through Paro valley (the Paro Chu) becomes a churning brown river as it enters a gorge to the east. Sliced into the hillside along the river is the Paro to Thimphu stretch of the Bhutan East-West Highway, really the only thoroughfare that connects the country across its numerous north-south oriented mountain ranges. It follows the Paro Chu until that connects with the Thimphu Chu - an auspicious confluence marked by three chortens (one Bhutanese, one Nepali, and one Tibetan, just to cover the bases) and a police checkpoint that signals you are traveling from one region to another. The drive takes about an hour and a half, and there is not one single straight stretch of road on the entire journey. There is only one road visible anywhere, and it's the one we're on. Nothing else is paved or even identifiable as a vehicle road. As most roads here, it is one lane that serves both directions, with harrowing drop-offs on the river side and rocky outcrops on the other.I find it visually disorienting, for starters, because as in Thailand and elsewhere in Asia, they drive on the left side of the road. Our driver meep-meeps his horn liberally while approaching a turn, hoping for open road on the other side of the blind turn. A car - or worse, a truck - coming the other direction is a moment for negotiation, a slight slowing on both parts, and a swerve to just clear the other vehicle with only inches to spare. These are generally only mildly nerve-wracking, except in the case of the oncoming public bus, the Dawa Transport death bus, which nearly drives itself and us off the road with a screeching of tires.

I think it may be the case throughout Asia that travelers put their lives in the hands of drivers, whose car registration, experience, licensing, and capabilities may be only dimly perceived when the driver is hired. In our case, we have inherited the very able van driver who took the previous HVO family from Thimphu to Paro to meet their flight and is now taking us to Thimphu to take up residence there. His name is Passang, and he is quiet, apparently unflappable, and obviously very familiar with this mangled stretch of asphalt that serves as the road from Paro to Thimphu. We had a similarly trustworthy driver on my previous trip to Bhutan in 1993, a genial young man named Choifel, when it was a shock to ride with my 7-month old child in a car with no seatbelts or carseats on this road, but I note it has been significantly improved since then. Still no seatbelts, naturally, so the kids stretch out on the seats (even try back-seat surfing until I catch them at it) and I hold the sleeping Halle on my lap, as we swerve and rock side to side, by sheer maternal will. Cows straggle across the road, slow to respond to Passang's meep-meep. We pass the Dom Che monastery, perched high above the river on the opposite side, and Passang points out that the river here is bridged by an ancient iron-chain footbridge brought up from the eastern town of Trashigang. The iron-chain bridge is very, very old, but here is being re-installed both as a relic and as a functional river crossing. Thompson tells me you couldn't pay him enough to cross that river on such a bridge.

On the Thimphu side of the checkpoint, the road climbs again (now we are driving "upstream" the Thimphu Chu instead of downstream the Paro Chu) and then begins to descend, slowly, into the Thimphu valley. I begin to see roadside stands, ranging from a small girl under an umbrella tending a sleeping baby, with a basket of chilis at her feet, to a narrow wooden stall along the road with fruit, some water bottles, and the ubiquitous Coca-Cola. As we approach Thimphu, a large new chorten is under construction, and then Passang points out something even more interesting up ahead: a two-lane divided highway with streetlights, its brand new black asphalt pavement gleaming with the late afternoon rain on it. We are amazed. It runs right up to the concrete supports of a future bridge/overpass, and then picks up again on the other side. Although the bridge is not built, the road is being used by cars on either side of the construction, and it is the straightest road I have seen in Bhutan and the first divided highway ever. Signal of things to come, perhaps, or at least of the dramatic changes in Thimphu, which has filled its valley and is steadily creeping up both its hillsides with new construction (in somewhat traditional-looking architecture at least) of housing, offices, and shops. (Photo was taken on the outskirts looking towards Thimphu)

However, there is still no streetlight in Thimphu. Instead, there are two traffic circles ("rotaries" back home) in the downtown, each with a stone circular platform in the middle with a little wooden roofed tower built on it, in which a white-gloved traffic policeman directs the traffic at the rotary (and people obey!). Away from the circle, it is every Suzuki Maruti for himself, although the traffic looks and feels slow after the vehicular hell that is Bangkok, and we are glad to be ending our long arrival journey in a city that we have come to love as a kind of second home.

Schoolgirls

A taxi is contracted to take us up the opposite hillside of Paro, on the other side of the river, to a location above the dzong, a drive of about 20 minutes. Our destination was once the watchtower of the Paro dzong (the dzong is pictured, the Museum is above & to the left), to ward off marauding Tibetans, and is a huge 6-story circular structure with a spiral interior meant to be like a conch shell. Today it is the National Museum, and we are among its only visitors an hour before closing time on a Tuesday. It costs us about a dollar, and our children the equivalent of a penny, plus leaving our bag with the ticket taker, to go inside and wander clockwise around the round floors. The exhibits are very old tankhas (religious paintings set in silk frames, which hang like small tapestries) depicting the important religious/cultural characters of medieval Bhutan; a floor of stuffed birds and animals indigenous to the region (looking a little bit scruffy after all this time in glass cases); a floor of gigantic shallow round brass urns, one entirely of brass and copper teakettles, one of baskets, one of clothing and jewelry, etc. Our kids favorite is the philatelic exhibit on the top floor, showing the first issue of some of the country's distinctive postage stamps. Bhutan has made something of an industry out of making unusual stamps for collectors. We saw 3D and holographic stamps, stamps with gold coins set into them, beautiful stamps honoring world events, and our kids thought that the most inventive were a series from the 1970s that were tiny phonographic records about 2 or 3 inches in diameter made of flexible bright-colored vinyl, so they could actually be played on a record player.

We are summoned - reluctantly - from the armor exhibit by the caretaker telling us the museum is closing, and he turns off the lights and locks the door after us. On our stroll back to the taxi we see three schoolgirls - 9th grade, it turns out, cramming Shakespeare for their English exam the following day. They are charmed with Halle, and ask her many questions, and teach her to ask what someone's name is in Dzongka (don't ask me to spell it, but it sounds like Chimi Gochimo?). They take our address and promise to write. We take a picture and promise to send. This will be the first of many such encounters with kindly teenage girls who are enchanted by Halle's looks and her friendliness. She takes it all in stride. The ticket taker has gone home, leaving our bag in the office, but it is unlocked, so we open the door and retrieve it and taxi back down, waving to the girls on their way home. "Goodbye, babee!" they call to Halle as our taxi grinds past, laboring down the steep curving road towards Paro.

Frog Funerals and Grocery: A Tour of Paro

Paro is an agricultural town. Its airport and the several hotels in the town make it only slightly less of a typical Bhutanese village, and I have read in the guidebook that the tin roofs here (out in the countryside they would be wood shingle, held down with round river stones) indicate the prosperity of the town. Being a wide valley blessed with a wide, shallow, milky river of pure snowmelt, it is a good location for the production of the local variety of rice, "red rice," so named because of its rusty husk that turns the rice pink when cooked. I also read that the government of Japan has sent consultants to help develop the rice agriculture here, and as a result the Paro rice paddies are very well constructed and managed. In late June the rice is about 6 or 8 inches high and bright grass green, and the paddies look like a crazy quilt of lush green velvet when seen from above. The paddies are bisected by a single one-lane (but two-way) road, almost directly below our hotel, which connects the hill (site of the penlop's palace) and the town, one main street of shops and hotels, buildings, cement alleys, and innumerable stray dogs.

In vertical Bhutan, as Don says, there is always a long way, and a short way, to wherever you want to go. The long way will be paved, more or less, and passable by vehicle, pedestrian, cow and dog. The short way will be a footpath, barely wide enough for one, used by people, cows, and dogs. Yes, it will be a shorter way, but with steep switchbacks and kept in place only by the frequency of foot traffic. We take the short way down from the palace to the paddy road, single file, carrying our umbrellas and raincoats because rain is always imminent. Crossing the paddies, avoiding the swerving boxy taxi-vans who signal their approach with a Road-Runner like "meep-meep," our kids notice a large number of flattened frogs on the road, who evidently misinterpreted the meep-meep and met their doom. This distresses Jacob, who eulogizes them with the American national anthem and a short prayer for their frog souls.

At the end of the paddy road, we reach one end of Paro's main street, marked by a small unfenced green where bony cows are wandering, grazing. It is mainly what are here called grocery shops, some with names (in Dzongka and English) and others only numbers (Shop No. 57), and all of them one small room with wooden-shuttered windows open to the street so you can see the wares piled on the shelves in the back. The wares are brightly-packaged crackers and biscuits from India, cooking oil, powdered milk, bottled juice, bags of dried banana chips, sodas, candy, shoes, candles, incense, school paper, rice, baskets of chilis, and the like. The shops seem indistinguishable to me, with almost no specialization. Here and there a different category emerges: the handicraft shop, which does not sell food, but fabric, carvings, offering bowls, ceremonial masks; and I see the occasional shop advertising an internet connection or a "B-Mobile" phone card. We stroll the street, talking to the children and the shop owners that we meet. People know a smattering of conversational English, sometimes are quite articulate and talkative. We learn Bhutanese hopscotch from a group of girls who are playing it in the street, using a piece of the orange clay dirt as a chalk. We take a digital picture of them and show it to them, to their amusement. We shop for Bhutanese clothing for Jacob and Halle in one shop, lingering for a long time to talk to the shop owner. Jacob now owns a lovely vertical-striped gho and plans to wear it often.

The sidewalks are cement, with open running sewers alongside, and they are full of buzzing flies; each shop, however, is granted a government trash barrel painted with the words "Use Me" on it. Dogs run everywhere or sleep where they please, even in the road. Children play in the alleys with whatever is handy: a partly deflated soccer ball, an empty plastic water bottle. Halle is surprised to see a toddler dragging a piece of uncoiled wire as a toy. "She won't hurt herself on that poky thing," she tells me, recognizing with the unremarkability of what would be totally unacceptable in our culture.

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.

Auspicious Days, and Otherwise

The Kuensel, the weekly 10-page national newspaper, carries a column of astrological determinations for the week ahead. It appears that if I followed them, I wouldn't travel much, and heaven help me if someone dies in my house on tuesday night. But I could conduct frequent rituals. Here's the rundown:

Saturday 6/25: The elements of earth and fire combine to make the day favorable for daily offerings. Not favorable to conduct rituals, construct statues, consecrate new structures, preach, marry, build stores, give away wealth, wear new ornaments, and roof houses.

Sunday 6/26: The elements of water and water combine making it a good day to perform rituals, draw mandalas, roof and shift houses, wear new clothes, seek medical treatment, construct canals, and sow seeds and plant trees. Not a good day to saddle horses and mules and go on long journeys.

Monday 6/27: The element of earth and fire combine to make it a good day to conduct rituals. A bad day to contruct statues, consecrate new structures, become a monk, preach, wear ornaments and new clothes, marry, roof and shift houses, and traveling.

Tuesday 6/28: The elements of fire and water clash to make it a bad day to do anything other than make daily offerings.

Wednesday 6/29: the elements of water and wind combine to make it a favourable day to conduct rituals, draw mandala, enter new house, set up stores, discuss new things, and sow seeds. A bad day to construct statues, consecrate new structures, roof house, take the dead out of the house and take infants outdoors.

Thursday 6/30: The element of earth and water combines to make it the best day of the week. A very good day to conduct rituals, draw mandalas, wear ornaments and new clothes, shift house, construct oven, seek medical treatment, adopt domestic help and sow seeds. Not a good day to take out the dead, hoist prayer flags and sell jewelry.

Friday 7/1: The elements of earth and wind combine to make it a good day to conduct rituals and circumambulate chortens. Not favourable to consecrate new structures, join monk body, preach, marry, go on long journeys and conduct funeral rites.

Cloud Kingdom

We found the Druk Air counter in the Thai airport right next to the signs for Air Madagascar and Turkmenistan Air... that's the level of carrier we are talking about. Druk Air is the only airline to service Bhutan in or out. There is one airport (in Paro), and one airline (Druk Air). The northern border with Tibet is closed, and the only other way into Bhutan is over land from the Indian border town of Puntshoeling in the south of the country. The Druk Air flight makes one refueling stop on its route, in Rangoon, Myanmar; Dhakka, Bangladesh; or Calcutta, India, depending on the day. On the day we flew the scheduled stop on the 6:50 am flight (the day's only flight) was for Calcutta (listed as Kolkata), and about 3/4 of our flight were men from India who availed themselves of this service. I spoke to the South African white woman behind us in line, headed for her first trip backpacking in India; she was wearing loose Indian clothing and had a sparkly bindi applied to her forehead, and she told me she was flying Druk Air because it was the cheapest ticket into India from Thailand. The budget-minded passengers bound for India were nearly all carrying duty-free bags, bags wrapped in strapping tape, bulging luggage, etc. Our boys wanted to change into Bhutanese robes at the gate (called gho) so they could arrive in Paro in proper style, which caused great amusement among the Western-dressed Bhutanese men waiting for the flight.

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).

Where Muzak Goes to Die a Slow Painful Death

In the comedy, What's Up Doc, there is a running gag in the fictional San Fransisco Hotel Bristol that whenever the elevator doors open, pieces of Cole Porter songs float out, piano-muzak style, which lasts only until the doors close again. At times in our Bangkok Hotel, the Royal River, I started to feel like I was part of a similar running gag. They seemed to own one Muzak tape (I'm sure it was a tape, not a CD), for the benefit of their European/American clientele, which had been retired many years ago from faithful service in the U.S., with sweeping string arrangements of popular songs from the 1970s. We would be eating, say BBQ'd prawn, to the piped in sounds of "You Light Up My Life," or "How Deep is Your Love"... ordering mango juice to the tune of "Yesterday"... or waiting for the elevator to the theme from "Love Story." What was even more amusing what that the hotel employed a violinist for dinner entertainment, and he knew all the songs too, and played them when the tape went on break, so that we would not be without our beloved favorites from the Carpenters. I hope they got a good deal on the tape, since I'm sure it was happily offloaded by some company.


Other charming things seen in Bangkok... I am sure you have seen the widely circulated email list of foreign signs slightly mis-translated into English. Here are a couple I jotted in my notebook while we took in the sights in around the city:

--A fancy building on the banks of the Chao Phraya River had it sign translated as the Moral Uplifting for Benefiction Foundation. I'd love to see their annual report.

--At the Temple of the Golden Buddha in Chinatown, on a glass money collection box: "Please Donate For Help the Elephant."

--And in the shoe removal room of the Vinanmek Teak Mansion, advising us to report rude staff: "If a reception of officials are impolited or unimpressived, please give the suggestion by contact Mr. Somboon..."

The Princess of Prawn (Now with photo updated 6/29)

Well, we can't get our laptop to "hear" the wireless hotspot network that is reputed to live in the corner of the lobby where these two internet connected computers live. So I can still post text but not any of the tons of lovely digital photos we have taken so far. Those will have to come later. We are flying out of Bangkok this morning and will be leaving the hotel while it is still dark. Halle says she will miss it. I know everyone has had a terrific time here.

Saturday 6/25 I wrote about most of the day, and then after I logged off we went to dinner at the hotel's buffet. It was a bizarre combination of Western and Asian foods, served outdoors in the wilting heat. You have to wonder about the meat sitting out there, dontcha? Some of us had "Mongolian barbecue," that famous Thai speciality, obviously, where you choose your own meats and veggies and they stir fry it for you. They also had raw seafood sitting there and they would BBQ your choice on a large grill. Halle asked for a BBQ'd prawn, a gigantic thing almost like a small lobster, with head and antenna on. Go figure, I knew she liked shrimp but it seemed a bold choice for a five-year old. After she ripped apart and peeled the first one, she liked it so much she went back for seconds and then thirds. The highlight of the evening was that the buffet also had a tin cooler with well-frozen ice cream so we all had a scoop before a sprinkling of rain drove us inside.

Indoors there were two Thai weddings taking place in the hotel's two ballrooms. Each bride and groom seemed to have purchased the hotel's standard package: a huge 7-foot high heart made of roses, an ice sculpture, ballroom chairs swathed in white slipcovers, the cakes looked amazingly similar. We stood around watching photos be taken for a while. Halle said she wants to live here when she grows up.

Sunday 6/26 we got up a little earlier - Don's luggage had arrived in the night safely from its baggage snafu (not to China, in fact --of course!!-- it had sat in New York), so we dressed for church and assumed it started at nine. We got the doorman to write out the address in Thai so we could show it to a taxi driver, and we took a cab to the newer downtown part of the city and found the chapel on a quiet side street - luckily there was a sign at the corner, because the street was not labeled. Turns out that the reason we couldn't get hold of the branch president by phone was that he and the entire branch presidency were out of town, gone back to the states to visit family like many of the ex-pat families that make up the Bangkok English branch (so the poor High Priest Group Leader was conducting and in charge, and made it clear he wasn't going to accept tithing checks!) What was interesting about that branch was that it wasn't all Americans/Europeans working in Bangkok, but about half made up of Cambodian, Laotian and Vietnamese refugees who don't speak enough Thai to integrate into the Thai branches and so choose to attend the English-speaking branch. They hold a second sacrament meeting in Cambodian for the benefit of that group and then have combined third-hour meetings.

It was a fascinating setting in which to discuss the week's lesson, on signs of the second coming... the one that was on most people's mind there, not surprisingly, was that the gospel will be preached in all the world, and there was firsthand perspective there from people in diplomatic corps who have seen branches of the church begin to meet in countries where our missionaries are not currently permitted to preach or even travel, including Pakistan, Burma, communist Laos, and China. The overall feeling there was one of tremendous hope and optimism in establishing Zion as a place of refuge in every nation even though the folks who live here certainly are sensitized to the realities of the difficult and violent world we live in. Our kids were made very welcome in the Primary and the Primary president expressed regret we weren't moving there.

After church we took a taxi to the hotel where Don had stayed with Thompson and Forrest in 2002, a European hotel called the Swiss Lodge and we ate in their mostly-Western menu restaurant (specializing in fondue), then took the modern and swift Skytrain to the end of its line, the famed Mo Chit weekend market. Eight thousand venders, cheek by jowl, under rough corrugated roofs, and I don't know how many thousand people there - we held hands and plunged into the sea of humanity, peddlers, and wares. We bought some fabric and sarongs and flip flops and saw many amazing things for sale. Most of the family thought that the exotic pet section was the most interesting, with teeny street puppies and tree shrews... Don muttering as we passed the avian sellers "Keep away from the chickens, keep away from the chickens" (Asian bird flu, yikes)... but Thompson was apalled at the condition of the animals and wished he had money to free them all, especially the little chained-up squirrels. We waited out a fierce thunderstorm under the shelters and then grabbed a cab for the hotel.

Naps, more swimming, and then we found a dinner theater that had a Thai "traditional" (term used very loosely here) dance performance. Cheesy and touristy, no doubt, but the kids enjoyed it and the opportunity to see even a little of Thai folk performance - the tale with the Monkey King in full mask chasing the mermaid around the room was a favorite.

Monday 6/27 dawned very hot. We slept in, then took the public water shuttle down to the temple area and visited the Grand Palace complex with its two important Wats, Temple of the Emerald Buddha and Temple of the Reclining Buddha. These are just jaw-dropping in their immensity, complexity, beauty, and calm, while outside the gates touts try to convince you to go with them for "tours," inside the gates it is serenity and grandeur. It was tremendously hot, but inside the temples and eaved courtyards it was cool and relaxing. Jacob did some sketching, he wanted to figure out how to draw the stacked roofs with their upturned corners that are so distinctive here. We spent the afternoon at the Vinanmek teak mansion, a palace built by the king in the 1910s, an exquisite "Western-style" house executed without a single nail. Naps and swimming at the hotel, and then we went to a nearby cafe for Thai food and conversation.

Our read-aloud book here has been a simplified version of the memoirs of Anna Leonowens, the governess to the king in the 1860s whose life was made into the musical the King and I. Her original text was a favorite of mine as a kid, and although the simplified one isn't as detailed it is still fun to read about the very place where we are and to imagine it as she might have seen it.

Ok - that's enough for now, we will try to post once getting an internet account in Bhutan.

One Night in Bangkok

Okay, what I have to say first is that a 15 hour flight is a really, really, really long flight. We took a puddle-jumper to JFK airport, and then boarded a big Korean Air 747 and settled in to 6 cramped seats for a long, long time. They fed us two meals - delightful artistic constructions of somewhat mysterious food, served with a tube of hot pepper paste - and lots of drinks, showed two films and a couple of Korean soap operas which I found hard to follow even with subtitles, and we all slept in weird positions while the sun never set. We landed in Seoul and it was STILL day. There we discovered the transit lounge, and I started to feel like Tom Hanks in the Terminal as we moved in, slept on sofas, took showers, Halle got a tall chilled glass of milk, the boys played video games, and we spent a lovely layover. Korea is so organized. Well, I admit all we saw of it was the terminal, but you get an impression. It was so foggy outside I had no sense of our whereabouts at all. We ate supper at a place called Welly&, where among our dishes we ordered a ginseng soup bowl with chicken and it came with a small chicken IN IT, bones and all. If you want to experience a taste of our brief Korean stopover, check out Little Pusan in Maynard, I love their BiBimBop and so do the kids, so that was a familiar sight at Welly&.

Then back on the next plane for a 6-hour flight to Bangkok. We slept some more, watched another movie, ate another meal (breakfast? lunch? dinner? who's keeping track any more?), and landed at 11:30 pm Friday night local time. One of our checked bags didn't make it (Hey, one out of two ain't bad) - I could have sworn that the woman at the baggage counter said the words, "We've located it somewhere in China," but that could have been my jet-lagged interpretation of her accent, and it is supposed to arrive tonight via the same flight we took. Unfortunately, it was the one with Don's clothes in it, so he was limited to the single change of clothes he had packed in his carry-on, and he did buy a bathing suit so we could splash in the hotel pool today. Anyway, we were met at the airport by a very voluble driver from a tourist organization to drive us to the hotel, which had been arranged by our travel agent, and that was helpful. We left the airport and were slapped with a wall of humid heat. Halle threw out her arms and said, "Aah, Fresh warm air! It feels like warm water!" We are at the Royal River, a quiet and elegant hotel on the West Bank of the Chao Praya, very far from the traffic jams and the noise of the Center and the Old Quarter. I like the hotel, it suits our needs fine. The kids were delighted by the little geckos in the lobby which search the walls for mosquitoes. None in our rooms, thank goodness. Geckos, that is, or mosquitoes either for that matter. And our needs last night, anyway, were limited to darkness, sleep and quiet. We were in bed by 2 and dead to the world for many hours.

This morning I woke to find Jacob sitting on the balcony watching the water traffic flow by. We ate breakfast here - you can get anything from French toast to fried rice for breakfast - and took the hotel's free water shuttle down to River City... a mall, hmm. That water trip gave us an overview of the major sites and a gorgeous view of Wat Arun, the Temple of the Dawn. We walked from River City towards Chinatown, taking the smallest alleys we could find and seeing not a single other European or American for hours. We passed through tin & metal shop neighborhood, old car part neighborhood, and then motorcycle-part neighborhood, each of these distinctly set off from one another with stalls of bizarre spiky fruit and roasted goose hanging by their still-attached necks. Goose must be big here, we saw lots of this. Then we entered Chinatown, which was clock neighborhood, gold chain shop neighborhood, and finally tailoring neighborhood before our kids got tired of walking. We went to a temple of the golden Buddha - of which there are surely many - and at the entrance roving guys with digital cameras take your picture as you walk in ("Please, lovely lady! Hello, little boy!), and by the time you stroll out they have made them into buttons for your purchase at 200baht a piece. We didn't buy them. We had a nice conversation with some university girls practicing their English, and after the golden Buddha we hired a tuk-tuk (a manaical 3-wheeled vehicle with a seat for the driver, a bench for the passengers, and a chainsaw for an engine) and careened madly around the city to a site called the Jim Thompson House.

Now, that was a real treat. It is the estate of an American textile merchant who built a historic-feeling Thai home and exquisite gardens, then disappeared in Malaysia in the late 1960s, leaving the house to become a really wonderful museum. I loved the house, it was spare and teak and high-ceilinged, and felt a million years away from button-hawkers and gold-chain shops. We really enjoyed an interlude there and the gardens were gorgeous. We also found nearby the Thai Boy Scout council office with a Scout shop and bought some patches and a neckerchief, then took our wilting children to a food court in a mall, where Halle fell asleep on me while we were ordering. We patched together a meal from Italian, Indian and Thai menus. Then we hired a taxi which sat in a considerable amount of traffic back to the hotel. Swam in the hotel's lovely but completely impractical pool (no shallow end, too deep even for Don to stand, but it did have an unheated whirpool next to it so Halle could at least get wet). Naps, and now it's evening. I guess because we are so far south, it gets dark so early! We will hunt up some dinner and try calling the local English-branch bishop again. We have not got an answer yet so do not know what time church starts although we have the address for the building. I can't find a number for the missionaries either. Where are those clean-cut young men when you want them? We might not have Don's clothes by morning anyway, we will have to see. Love the internet connection right here in the lobby, a card gets you an hour for about $3.

Punakha Dzong, taken February 2002
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Time Travel

What's up with the time? Well, I set the time to Bangkok time, which is also approximately Bhutanese time. It's half a day ahead. So when you view this blog, you can see what time it is for us.

T Minus 1 Day of Departure

We're getting ready to leave... the kids have rolling backpacks; I am packed in a Kelty backpack; Don has a rolling backpack and between us we have 2 large soft-sided duffels to check. Plus the oboe, which of course will be carried on somehow, and a laptop case. Just the last-minute items await - those will go in tonight, and we head out early in the morning for a flight to NY, then a second flight to Seoul, Korea.