Bangkok Airport Hotel January 20, 2013

The only guests in this "boutique hotel" on the ring road beyond Suvarnabhumi Airport are me and a short, very thin Indian man whose narrow birdlike feet shuffle up and down the hall in the over-sized terry slippers provided by the magnanimous hoteliers.  Offered to eat in the lobby are flavorless biscuits that look like a Thai version of biscotti.   There's the rumor of dinner.  My skin is gummy with the dirt and sweat of a day wandering Bangkok, and before I do much else I need to take a shower.

Since leaving India five years ago, I'd forgotten how urban Asia smells: like hot pavement and the nauseating sweet smell of decay and algae rising from the river.  The smell alone has made me nervous about this adventure--I am remembering how it felt to be unable to find a quiet refuge of trees and grass unsullied by trash and feral animals, away from honking horns and blaring Asian pop music.  At least in Thailand there is less honking.  And less trash.  And the feral animals are cats and dogs, not cows.  But the smell reminds me, too, of the strange kind of loneliness that trying to live in a completely alien culture engenders.

And yet: Bhutan is not Thailand or India.  The air and water will be clean and there will not be touts and tuk tuks; the sky will be enormous, held up by staggering mountains, and it will be bracingly cold.  Trees still dominate the lanscape, leopards still prowl at night, and there is an entire national park devoted to protecting the habitat of the Yeti.  The people are famously earnest, self-deprecating and fond of pranks and jokes (which must be why they love Drukpa Kinley, the drunken, mad Buddhist protector of Bhutan), and have little of the cynicism that defines modern life for most of us.  It will be hard, certainly, to adjust to the food, the new people, the constant demands that being the New Teacher will incur, but a new kind of hard, an easier kind of hard.

BACKGROUND IMAGE: This is Padma Sambhava, the Tantric master who introduced Buddhism to Tibet and Bhutan.  It is believed that he flew into Bhutan in the 8th century from what is now the Swat Valley in Afghanistan on the back of Yeshe Tsogyal, one of his female consorts whom he had changed into a tiger for this journey.  On arrival, he meditated in a cave which evolved into Taktsang Monastery, or "The Tiger's Nest," Bhutan's most famous landmark.  He is always depicted with his eyes wide open and the thin hairs of his moustache curling upwards in a smile.