Bhutan crowned its new king yesterday, 28-year old Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck, son of the fourth king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, 52 (AP, AFP, BBC).
The outgoing King Wangchuck IV guided his kingdom through a sustained period of change. In 1998 King Jigme Wangchuck IV voluntarily reduced his monarchical powers and began the introduction of constitutional rule.
At the time of our visit to Bhutan, eleven years ago, under the rule of the reluctant King Wangchuck IV, there was no television, save for VHS tapes of mostly Bollywood and Rambo-type thrillers, since action movies didn't need much translation. King Wangchuck IV allowed television, which began in 2002.
In 2005, at age 50, he announced plans to abdicate, which lead to the coronation in the capital, Thimpu, yesterday.
See photos from the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon in our Bhutan Gallery on EarthPhotos.com. Here's part of the story of our visit, which continues with more photos after the jump:
From the eventual book, Common Sense and Whiskey:
The river Brahmaputra wound out toward the Ganges near Dhaka. Sunlight glinted and skipped across tens of thousands of acres of flooded rice paddies, miles and miles north of the Bay of Bengal. Sometimes the clouds lifted over northern Burma and Bangladesh.
Four hundred miles north of Rangoon a bend in the river ate half a town. It was July 4th. Americans celebrated independence while South Asia grappled with the monsoon.
Only about thirty of us were flying to Bhutan, so the back of the plane held cargo: a couple of computers strapped to the seats, a boom box, a crock pot, several unmarked boxes, a quilt. And in the back seat a flight attendant drank in sleep - I mean, she snored. She, my wife Mirja and one more were the only women.
When time came to drop through the clouds into Bhutan, the pilot announced, “We will maneuver the aircraft in the valley. This is a little different from large commercial aircraft. It is standard procedure. You will see the houses and trees a little closer than you are used to. The scenery is beautiful. Please enjoy the ride.”
He just picked a hole in the clouds and dove through. He did a 180 into the Paro valley. The automatic sensors called out, “too low,” and for the record he kept repeating, “acknowledge, override,” into the cockpit recorder.
This was George, bluff, barrel-chested, a real dude with a wide gray moustache, and one of just fourteen people ever to fly for Royal Bhutan Airlines, aka Druk Air. We said we’d buy him a beer if we saw him in town and he told us he’d drink it.
The only airport in the country is in Paro, an old west one-horse town spread three hundred feet, and no more, across the valley floor, hardly movin’ in the midday sun. Uniformed Indian soldiers lolled about drinking “Thums Up” brand cola.
*****
Phruba and Jigme, our men in Bhutan, gathered us up for the trip to Thimpu. Irrigated rice grew just about before your eyes, and every river was a tumult.
We crept and powered around corners (all week) in a Toyota Yokohama van. Jigme and Phruba both wore traditional skirt-like wraps called ghos. Phruba’s legs stuck out below the knee. All week long he sat in the passenger seat, the picture of Bhuddism, calm, hands clasped, wearing a skirt.
Tall and 28, he used to play basketball with the young king.
“We would stay outside and pick teams,” Phruba told us. “When he was in a good mood the king would invite us in to play. When he was in a bad mood he would play with his bodyguards. He is very good at the three point shot.”
Being taller than the king sets up a sensitive question: Does one shoot over the king’s head?
Yes.
The king’s bodyguards are some of the biggest men in the country, Phruba said, so he reckoned the king was used to it.
*****
“Phruba, is the king married?”
“Yes, he has four queens” Phruba replied, and seeing an eyebrow cock, he tried to put that right by adding what must have seemed the obvious: “But they are all sisters.”
With only one newspaper in the country, Keunsel, a weekly that comes out on Saturdays, how does Phruba keep up with the world? His answer was simple, disarming and direct.
Phruba’s eyes twinkled. He laughed, “We don’t. We don’t read much.”
The national dish is called Ema Datse, literally chillies and cheese (It’s those long not-too-hot green chillies we call “finger-hot” in a bowl of melted cheese, eaten with a spoon). Finding our common love of chillies, Phruba’s face fairly radiated. “Whenever people travel outside of Bhutan they carry chilli powder. To Bangladesh, India, Bengal - anywhere!”
Whether they travel to India or Bengal, Bhutanese bring back a lot of India. Everything not Bhutanese is Indian: Those horrid polluting Tata buses and the big cement-truck lookalikes used for general transport, all of them spewing the same ghastly black smoke that’s already spoiled the Kathmandu valley.
There’s Mysore Rose Brand soap. Dansberg beers. Indian videos - there were posters for Suraj! and Insaaf - The Final Justice! and Border! all with exclamation marks!
Rupees.
The Ngultrum (Bhutanese money) is pegged to the Indian Rupee and you can spend either of them anywhere. Bhutanese share Indian punctiliousness and inclination to paperwork. Pads of everything are done in triplicate with carbons - even restaurant orders.
*****
They’re trying to keep Bhutan pure. I think intellectually everybody knows it’s a losing long-term proposition, but good for them just the same. In a lot of ways it’s working.
Guys walk together in their ghos with an arm around their buddy’s waist. Benevolent, open stares. So few people have stuck Nikons in their faces that they still smile back.
*****
After an hour and a half our Toyota rattled up the driveway of the Indigenous Art School. Trying to keep traditional ways alive, the government brings children who show talent here from all over the country to learn to draw the traditional religious thangkas, elaborate paintings, and to learn carving and sculpting.
They all sat at wooden benches, windows wide open - no electricity in the building - working in natural light. We stopped methodically at year 1 year 2 year 3 year 4 year 5 and so on up to eight. Smiling boys in robes at dusty wood benches. A fairy tale.
*****
There was a football match that afternoon. You could hear that stadium cheer from every corner of Thimpu. Phruba boasted (or did he rue?) that it’s up to 27,000 or 28,000 now, Thimpu is. No stoplights yet, but there are two traffic cops. A sign on the road between them advises, “Dumping Strongly Prohibited.”
I treaded mud down toward the sound of the crowd, down by the river, admission fee 5 Ngultrums (14 cents), and sat with five Indian monks, each contributing to the betel-juice-stain emergency in Thimpu.
*****
A delicate, clean rain painted the crowd as the football match let out, and the streets of Thimpu (only a few streets), teemed. At the Thimpu Meat Shop a man stood under naked light bulbs on a table high above the buying public wielding an ancient scale, weighing skinned chickens and fish.
*****
In the bar at the Hotel Taksang, directly opposite Pelwang’s Mini Mart and below the billboard explaining the “Sewerage Construction Project – for better health,” they knew all about us. They already knew I lived in room 325 and my wife was asleep upstairs. I was the only one there and they made french fries to go with my beer. In this bar one beer cost 54 ngultrums and two cost 104.
Stray dogs (I think about eight billion) gave a free, full-throated concert most nights. Strays are the bane of Bhutan, just like in Kathmandu and Rangoon and Tahiti.
Being Buddhist, the Bhutanese have a little problem. They can’t kill the strays, can’t even spay them. That would be taking a life. But they can appoint Indian Hindus as dog catchers, and have them kill dogs on the pretense of rabies or rash.
*****
Neither tumultuous, chaotic nor edgy, the polite weekend market sold no disgusting pounded meats or goats’ heads or bowls full of crawling bugs. Everybody wore their traditional clothes and chewed betel.
One guy sat sorting fat chillies green from red. He’d pause and turn, spit betel juice in his right hand, shake it behind him, and dig right back into the chillies.
A short drive from the river, the only golf course in Bhutan doubled as the front yard for the Supreme Court. At the Indigenous Medicine Hospital (established in 1978 by the World Health Organization) the manager tried to integrate the traditional and the modern. If patients didn’t get well via one regimen, he tried the other.
They grew all their own herbal remedies in a garden out back. There were machines from Austria to package them. Three rooms were labelled like this: Powder Section No Admittance, Pills Section No Admittance, Tablet Section No Admittance.
A prayer wheel clanged because they always turned it, the patients sitting in the square, which doubled as the waiting room.
Twenty or thirty people mashed bark to pulp at the oxymoronic “Jungshi Handmade Paper Factory.” They wet it, dried it, rolled it, spread it, and eventually produced coarse papers, some embedded with leaves or rose petals.
Down at Plum’s Café, you could read a three day old Times of India. It was the most up-to-date news in Bhutan. You could sit on a toilet named Hindware. Ex-pats and their kids took up too much space and fretted in the corner. Probably the calmest posting in the world, and still they fretted.
*****
Up the hill, past the embassies of Bangladesh and Denmark, the Little Dragon Montessori School, the Druk Incense Unit (manufacturing and exporting) and the Motithang Fire Out Post, was a sanctuary for the mysterious cross between the sheep and yak - not the shack - the Golden Takin, preserved in this place, behind a fence, long ago when animal diseases spread across Bhutan.
Down on the valley floor, prayer flags flapped from a government telecommunications tower. Paddies ran right up to the Royal Palace.
Phruba declared that no subject has seen inside the palace. Mirja and I chewed on this for awhile. Whattaya think’s inside? Jacuzzis?
You think they live like what, kings?!
- excerpt from the eventual book, Common Sense and Whiskey. When it's published you'll learn about it here first.
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Read more stories on EarthPhotos.com:
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Crossing Lake Baikal
Blazing through Tibet with Noodle Boy
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(Photo credits: top, Gurinder Osan, AP, the others from EarthPhotos.com)
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