Phobjikha Valley, Part II-- The Black Necked Cranes

Black Necked Crane at the BNC Museum

To Phobjikha Valley, Part II: The Black Necked Cranes

The morning sky was the blue of the frescoes inside St. Marks Basilica in Venice; the blue of the gentian that grows in the upper Himalayas.  Frost had painted the dry grasses silvery white and the breath of the Ferghana horses grazing at the edge of the marshes encircled their heads in clouds.  

Brick Root in the Valley

Frosty Valley

Ferghana Horses (at least I think that's what they are!)

We had been awakened by the sound of the Black Necked Cranes calling to one another from across the valley as the sun's first light crested the mountain tops and spilled like melted butter over the spruce, pine and cypress forests ringing the widely scattered village of Phobjikha.

Inside Yueli Kiis, our lodging for the night, we were warm and sleepy under several blankets and quilts abetted by hot water bottles at our feet, but the cranes' honking gave us a reason to toss off the covers and brave the cold of the room  The fire in our wood stove had burned down to embers during the night, and since we were leaving in search of cranes, we didn't bother to stoke it.

Yueli Kiis

Breakfast was impressive, especially considering that Brick, Lucy, and Matt and I were the only guests in the lodge--pancakes, cereal, milk tea and eggs--and the owner had packed Matt and Lucy onion sandwiches for their hike over the mountain to Wangdi where they were hoping to flag a taxi.  They had hired a local to guide them; the trails across Bhutan are not marked, and are often barely recognizable as trails and criss-crossed with paths made by herders, villagers and livestock, including the yaks and horses that the Laya people lead down to the valleys to forage during the harsh northern winter.  We drank too many cups of tea, keeping Matt and Lucy company as they waited for the guide to meet them, and then we all left, they for the trail and we in search of the flocks of cranes we could still hear from inside the lodge.

A dirt path that doubles as a road weaves across the valley floor, passing a cluster of tsongkhangs and houses and children washing up in the cold morning at the outdoor taps.  Brick and I followed the road past the horses and past a cluster of three unusual chortens made only out of cloth (most chortens in Bhutan are stone or mud brick) affixed to poles; we were told this style of chorten originated in this valley with Guru Rinpoche hundreds of years ago.  They cast weird shadows in the early morning sun.

The road meandered across the valley and over a rill fed by the marsh where the cranes breed, and then followed the edge of a forest, past a water-powered prayer wheel, a common sight in Bhutan due to all of the waterfalls and streams that have their source at the tops of these mountains. It emerged in the sun on a rise above a large farm that might have grown buckwheat, potatoes, or barley rather than the rice common in the lower, hotter Punakha Valley.  There, inside a fenced-in field about 500 yards across the valley, was a flock of perhaps 30 cranes, feeding on the gleanings of last year's crop.

The cranes, one of only fifteen remaining species of cranes in the world, are tremendous in size--they appear to be nearly four feet in height with pale gray bodies and black necks and heads.  Known as Thrung Thrungs, or 'heavenly birds' in Bhutan, these birds appear in dances and folklore across Bhutan and Tibet.  Globally endangered, they number only about 6000 worldwide; in the Phobjikha Valley, their population has increased from about 250 ten years ago to almost 400 today due to comprehensive protection efforts by the Royal Society for the Protection of Nature (RSPN) in concert with the willing support of the locals who benefit from the tourist trade generated by interest in these beautiful birds.  

We retraced our steps along the road and then cut through the fields over terrain that reminded us both of the Alaskan tundra--tufted hillocks of peaty grass and duff--stepping carefully to avoid cow pies and puddles.  As we drew close to the flock, we slowed our pace and veered away from the cluster of birds, hoping to take them by surprise by coming around from their flank.  Not speaking, taking steps with great care so we wouldn't break sticks or make any sudden moves, we followed the fence's perimeter, heads down, cameras ready.  When we were about fifteen feet from the nearest cranes, we very slowly rose to our full heights to take a picture, but the cranes' vigilance brought all their heads around toward us in unison, and in a great, loud honking whirlwind, they all rose into the air as though they were one creature and headed for the other end of the valley.  Fortunately, Brick caught them in flight as they rose above us:

Photos by Brick Root

We had been told by Matt and Lucy that the Black Necked Crane Museum was worth a visit and that we would be able to watch the birds through telescopes there, so we made our way to the main road and followed it through the village, past our lodge and the shuttered shops (February is the off-season) to the hexagonally shaped museum built into the side of a hill to maximize the scope of the view from the bank of windows that faces the valley.  The museum doors were locked, but Matt had told us that an old man who lived at the farm up the hill from the museum had a key and would let us in and focus the telescopes for us.  I found him chatting with a few young men on his front steps, and although he spoke not a word of English, he knew what I meant when I asked if anyone had the key to the museum?  His teeth and gums were stained red from chewing doma, and the gritty juice ran from the sides of his mouth in a gruesome trickle.  His knees were somewhat bowed and his gho was filthy, but he was very happy to help us and patiently waited while Brick and I watched several groups of cranes through the telescopes; Brick counted nearly 100, and we could see only a small part of the valley from the museum windows.  We watched a short, informative video made by an ornithologist working with the RSPN and browsed the library of books about birds and other wildlife in Bhutan.  After about 45 minutes there, we decided it was time to think about how we were going to get back to Punakha since the only bus heading west had left at 8:30 in the morning.

Black Necked Crane Museum

After a lunch of instant noodles and milk tea back at Yueli Kiis, the owner's 15 year old son conjured a ride for us with his cousin, a clever ruse to get himself a free ride to Punakha where his friends from Ugyen Secondary School, a private high school near my public high school, would be waiting to show him a good time.  He and his cousin were excellent company on the ride back--a ride that took half as long as the bus, thankfully--answering our questions about Bhutanese history and about the Phobjikha Valley and filling us in on the care and feeding of the typical teenager in Bhutan.  They knew about Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones and had playlists on the car radio (which took a thumb drive loaded with music) that represented current American and British pop music.   

Brick and I plan to return to the Phobjikha Valley in the summer when it has greened to hike up to the Gangtey Monastery, the center of the Nyingmapa Buddhist tradition in Bhutan.  It is the Buddhist belief in reincarnation that underscores the desire to protect the cranes in the first place--after all, according to Buddhism, all the cranes were once our mothers!

Next Adventure: Gasa Dzongkhag in northwestern Bhutan.

Vicissitudes of Language in Bhutan

If one looks at a topographical map of Bhutan, one can immediately see how the geography has shaped the culture: with the exception of a few broad valleys, this is a country of very steep mountains and very deep gorges, and, though the size of Switzerland, it still has fewer than a dozen paved inter-provincial (or inter-dzongkhag-al, to be more Bhutanese about it) roads.  The peoples who inhabit these gorges and valleys are extremely isolated, and thus many languages have developed over the centuries independent of one another; each is incomprehensible to the other, though these days many people are multi-lingual, speaking the national language, Dzongkha, as well as Nepali, some English, and possibly one of the other minority languages of Bhutan: Kurthep, Sharchop, Choekyi (classical Tibetan, taught in the monasteries and nunneries), Khengkha, Bumthangkha, Mangdep, or Dzala.

Dzongkha has been the national language since the 17th century but, like Somali, was not a written language until the late 20th century.  Though it uses Tibetan script, the Lonely Planet Guide to Bhutan claims that speakers of Tibetan struggle to understand spoken Dzongkha (though my monk friend who learned Tibetan in his monastery in Nepal seems to have no trouble at all).  To the ear, Dzongkha echoes the chanting of the Buddhist monks; each syllable seems to carry the same amount of emphasis as the next, unlike our own iambic, Latinate/Celtic/Germanic/Norse/French soup of a language.  Lengthier sentences in Dzongkha recapitulate the sound of rocks being tossed down a flight of stairs, each syllable a rock tumbling after the syllable before it (unlike Tamil in South India, which resembled a liquid cascade of sound with no distinguishable beginning or end to each word). To ask 'What is your name?" in Dzongkha, one says, "Chö gi ming ga chi mo?" and each syllable is a word or discrete concept, neither stressed nor unstressed except for the slight upturn in tone at the end to indicate a query.

Needful of basic Dzongkha to manoeuver in the marketplace and villages, I purchased a Dzongkha primer published by the Dzongkha Development Commission.  Though it provides a far greater amount of detail than I can currently manage without a lopen (teacher), it includes the numbers, introductory sentences ("How much does that cost?" chief among them) and sentence stems that will be useful down the road.  Best of all, it is clear that the Dzongkha Development Commission could not afford or could not find an English speaking editor to ensure the accuracy and comprehensibility of the text.  This affords endless fun as one studies one's Dzongkha.  This Dzongkha Rabsel Lamzang (the title itself is untranslated) opens with the following sentence:

"The Dzongkha Development Commission experienced a lot of difficulties in pronouncing Dzongkha words written in Roman English due to the lack of a standard procedure for writing Dzongkha pronunciation in Roman English."

This tautology is proved by the following example: given seven different ways of writing the sound "'Nya" in Dzongkha, though all written the same way in English, and thus seven different pronunciations, we are informed that one of them is "used for honorific ear that is 'Nyen" while another is "used for word honorific happy that is 'Nye".  The last of the seven is "used for hell that is 'Nyewa."  Good to know.

In her amusing memoir about her life in Bhutan, Married to Bhutan, Linda Leaming relates her own struggle to learn Dzongkha from a lopen at the school where she volunteered.  After committing the 30 characters of the Dzongkha alphabet to memory, her lopen informed her that she would now need to learn the 100 consonants that, in combination with the 30 basic letters, make the building blocks of Dzongkha.  As she notes, "This may not sound like a lot, but consider the possible permutations of 100 little attachments on 30 letters.  I'm not now, nor was I then, a mathematician; but I knew I was headed down not only a difficult, bumpy road, but also a very long one."  Lopen Palden taught her the following mnemonic "ditty" to help her remember the first four consonants in combination with some of the letters:

Ka-gee-goo-key

Ka-shab-jew-koo

Ka-dim-bow-kay

Ka-narrow-ko

Here is her explanation of what this Dzongkha nursery rhyme means: "The first syllable is the actual alphabet letter, and the ending syllable is what it becomes when you attach one of four consonants.  "Key" is a little hook that goes on top of the letter [when it is written].  "Koo" is a hook attached to the bottom right.  "Kay" is a kite tail that hangs in the air; "ko" is a little bird that sits on top of the letter." 

She does not venture an explanation for the middle syllables; perhaps that's all for the best.  

As I am beginning to understand, a lot of what is said in Dzongkha in tsongkhangs (shops) and other informal circumstances is ribald or is concerned with drinking.  The Bhutanese are famously lewd, perhaps because of their national hero Drukpa Kinley, the "divine madman" of Bhutan, a likeness of whose penis adorns so many homes and businesses.   Drukpa Kinley used his "thunderbolt" to rid Bhutan of demons and to expose people's hypocrisies; he did so while intoxicated, and not surprisingly drinking is a large part of Bhutanese culture--every family makes their own ara (distilled rice liquor) and bam-chang (an unfiltered drink made from fermented grain). I was more than a little surprised when I was offered a glass of K5, a Bhutanese whiskey made from a malt base imported from Scotland (K5 = the fifth king of Bhutan; it was created in honor of his coronation).  There is also a Bhutan Highland whiskey and a number of Bhutanese ales and lagers, many served in recycled Kingfisher bottles.

Though I do not think I will need to learn to converse with my Bhutanese friends and colleagues about sex, I do want to be able to understand them when they are discussing it, if for no other reason than I want to be in on the jokes.  Drinking vocabulary is indeed useful no matter where one travels, so rather than spend my time with the Dzongkha Rabsel Lamzang trying to unravel the subtleties of 'Nya, I think I'd be better off spending my time in one of the tiny "Restaurant cum Bar"  tsongkhangs that act as the center of village social life.  There, I can get a shot of K5 and some Koka noodles (like ramen) for less than the cost of a pack of gum in the United States, and simultaneously learn the Dzongkha words to describe the drunken and bawdy shenanigans of my village neighbors.  This, and "How much does that cost?" may be all the Dzongkha I need.

Riding the Public Bus in Bhutan: From Punakha to the Phobjikha Valley, Part I

Phobjikha Valley, at 3000 meters (10,000 feet) was muscled out of the slate Black Mountains in Western Bhutan by glaciers, leaving a wide, flat, somewhat marshy landscape unusual for this country of deep and alarming gorges.  The valley is known for two things: Gangtey Monastery, the oldest Nyingma Monastery in Bhutan, and the black-necked cranes who fly thousands of miles over the Himalayas from Tibet, to summer here to avoid the harsh winters of the Tibetan plateau (it is winter in Bhutan now, too, but the winters here are so much milder than in Tibet that this is where the cranes fly to holiday).  They have chosen only three valleys in Bhutan as their winter home, and are found in greatest number in the Phobjikha Valley.  This is why I went, and why my fellow BCF teacher Brick Root joined me.

Getting to PV from the Punakha Valley used to take days, as did travel to any valley beyond one's own. Today, one can follow the loosely defined road from Wangdi in two to three hours by taxi, travelling just south of Punakha and east towards Trongsa, the Dzongkhag that marks the beginning of Central Bhutan.  However, if one chooses to take the public bus, as we did, the adventure lasts five hours, and telescopes several insights into Bhutanese culture into one, long butt-numbing experience.

Bajothang, where one catches the bus to PV, is a planned town built in the past twenty years on the Tsang Chuu. Unlike most Bhutanese towns, it is laid out in a grid like a western city, and accommodates the businesses and services needed by the surrounding communities. It has a somewhat Wild West feel to it, maybe because of all the dust kicked up by the construction vehicles that gut its dirt roads, hauling sand and rock to the hydropower project on the river below or the new hotel being built on the mountainside above in Rinchingang.  The roads are paved, but only in theory, and the uncurtained windows of several buildings on the uphill side of Bajo reveal empty flats and storefronts.  It is peopled largely by Indian immigrants, brought to Bhutan on five-year contracts to do construction work or to teach in the schools.  Brick, who will be teaching in Gaselo, a small village across the river from Bajo and 11 km up the mountain, took a ride with his Vice Principal to Bajo early on Friday to explore the town that will provide him with most of his "modern" needs--hardware, an internet connection, chocolate eclairs, and beer (brewed in Bhutan).  He bought our bus tickets at 9 am for a 2:30 departure, and nabbed the 16th and 17th seats out of 20 available for 65 ngultrums each, or $1.25.  He was told we should arrive at the station at 2:00 in order to load the bus to ensure a prompt 2:30 departure.

I took a taxi from Kuruthang, the planned town that serves Punakha, to the Bajo Bus Station and met Brick a little before 2:00.  I had ridden the public bus in India: there, the famous Indian bureaucracy and the thousands of travel options make purchasing a ticket virtually impossible without a translator or guide. The impressive Victorian-era bus stations are crammed with families and their belongings and touts and old, leprosic beggars, creating a veritable carpet of humanity, punctuated by cows and the occasional official in his greasy uniform charging purposefully through the crowd but accomplishing nothing.  The buses are built for people of small stature so that when a taller person sits down, she must tilt her knees to the side in order to fit into the narrow metal seat which invariably abuts the only corpulent Indian man who chews paan and leans across to spit out the window.  Sudden stops along the route accompanied by unceasing honking, of which there are many, threaten the integrity of one's kneecaps and face.  Crushingly loud Indian pop music assaults (or entertains) riders from cheap, buzzing speakers.  A seat for two is filled with four, all redolent of sweat and curry or the rank oniony smell of meat-eaters; the aisle is crammed with luggage and people, and more hang off the sides.  Worst of all, no one is able to tell you when to get off for your stop--or rather, everyone seems to know when you ought to disembark, but none agrees.  Everyone is in a foul humor, yelling at one another in Tamil or Hindi as though they are furious, which they may be, but it is impossible to tell.  

At the bus station in Bajo, the bus sits in a vortex of dust in a huge, otherwise empty lot. A few languid dogs press their eyes closed against the wind.  The 'bus station' is a window in a small storefront in one corner of the lot.  Brick had no problem reading the schedule (though only departure times were listed, not return times), speaking to the attendant or purchasing the tickets.  Eight or ten people, with their luggage, sat patiently on rocks next to the empty bus, waiting for the signal to board.  

Brick and I stood away from the lot to avoid the sandstorm, finding ourselves, serendipitously, in front of the Shangri-La Bakery where we bought a huge piece of chocolate cake.  Precisely at 2:00, people began to board, so we dutifully joined them and took our seats which were nearly all the way in the back.  The process was somewhat orderly and everyone was pleasant.  Seated across the aisle from us was a family of three, their young daughter asleep in their arms.  As 2:30 approached, the aisle began to fill with extra passengers sitting on their luggage, but there was no angry pushing and shoving or unkind words spoken.  In fact, there seemed to be an unspoken etiquette applicable to how to accommodate and maneuver around people sitting in a bus aisle.  Several times, the six or seven aisle-sitters rearranged themselves, clapping one another on the back, laughing, helping the elderly, stepping on the armrests to walk up and down the aisle so as not to force anyone to get up and move.  Several fifty pound bags of rice were loaded into the aisle, forcing almost everyone to get off and then back on again.  Finally, at precisely 2:30, the bus driver climbed aboard, having tied down the preposterously large load on the roof, and drove out of the lot.

Sanguine Aisle-Sitters and Strap-Hangers

Within minutes, we had pulled into a petrol station.  Several people got out and then others got in.  Neither Brick nor myself could see if the driver had actually put gas in the bus, but soon we began moving again, accompanied by crushingly loud music of all kinds including old hip hop (the driver seemed to have his finger on the scan button--we heard no more than a minute of every song) up the crazy, winding, pitted, road so characteristic of Bhutan, along a sheer drop of hundreds of meters, at the hair-raising speed of...perhaps 25 kph (15 mph).  The seats were wide enough and deep enough to get moderately comfortable, though the stuffing had long been reduced to a thin layer of compressed foam so that one could feel the metal through it.  We settled in for the allegedly two and a half hour ride to Phobjikha.

Perhaps the ride is in fact two and a half hours if one drives all the way without stopping, and if one maintains a speed greater than 25 kph, but the public bus in Bhutan stops for anyone who flags it down for a lift.  It stops for lunch, unannounced: suddenly, the bus pulled off the road at a tsongkhang (the small, locally owned shops that populate all of Bhutan), only about 20 minutes after leaving Bajo, and everyone got out to buy chips and mango Frooti and play an outdoor table game that looks like a combination of air hockey and snooker.  A very elderly man with a grey beard and a filthy gho spent the lunch break scavenging for wood and cardboard so he could fashion a proper seat for himself in the aisle. Then after about thirty minutes, again suddenly, everyone filed back onto the bus and the trip resumes.  

We were told that this road had timed road blocks to allow for trucks to be loaded by track hoe with rock that had been drilled from the side of the mountains to widen the road, and then to drive down to the hydro-project where it is used for fill.  We assumed we'd had the unscheduled lunch stop because of the road block, but in fact, not thirty minutes later we came to a long line of stopped taxis, tourist vans and the tiny boxy Suzuki Marutis with Tinker Toys for wheels that many Bhutanese drive.  This was the road block--it seemed to us if we had not stopped for lunch we could have easily missed it and saved over an hour of travel time, but no one seem bothered by this. Everyone sat on the bus, chatting, laughing, singing, yelling out the windows to people they knew.  We shared an orange with the girl next to us who had woken up for the lunch break.  At least forty-five minutes passed.  And then the line began to move.  No one cheered; there was no expression of relief or impatience or surprise.  As Brick noted, it was a perfect demonstration of Bhutanese compassion and patience and an opportunity for me and him to learn the same.  What a contrast with India.

We crested a 10,000 foot pass marked by a chorten and a lone yak and headed down into Phobjikha at about 6:00 that evening in the dark, so we could not see any signs for our hotel, or, in fact, anything at all since Phobjikha is not a populous place--there are no lights in windows or stores to indicate where the sides of the road or the buildings are.  Overhead, infinite stars peppered a black velvet sky, clearer than ever in the thin mountain air.  We asked our seat neighbor if he'd heard of our hotel, but he had not--clearly, he felt not need to prevaricate to save face.  We asked others nearby us but no one had heard of it, which made sense since it is a newer hotel and it is the off-season for tourists to the Phobjikha Valley since it is still winter (the Black-Necked Crane Festival is in November and celebrates the cranes' return from Tibet; we were told they arrive "on October 25."  Who knew birds had such a predictable schedule?).  I called the hotel, the Yueli Kiis, and asked how we would find it in the dark. "Just walk up the road five minutes.  Look for the sign for the Dewachen Hotel. We are below it."  This seemed easy enough, but when we finally got off the bus, covered with dust, our butts sore, our teeth loose from the rough ride, we felt we had been dropped into empty space: we could see nothing except a few lights dotting the mountains.  Our fellow passengers dissolved into the night like Macbeth's witches.  Brick turned on his headlamp and we started heading up the road, hoping we would see the sign for the Dewachen, but since walking on Bhutanese roads requires diligent attention to what is directly underfoot, we walked right past it.  Fortunately, the owner's 16 year old son had been sent to intercept us at the gate to the hotel.  We heard his shy voice in the night tentatively calling, "Hello!"  He must have heard our loud American voices.

After hiking up a short hill, we were brought to an enormous, beautiful room heated by wood stove, and were met by Lucy and Matt, two other BCF teachers who had come the previous day (also by public bus--notably, they chose to hike to Wangdue and take a taxi back to Punakha rather than get back on that bus). We had a delicious five course meal washed down with Druk 11000s, were given hot water bottles to stave off the cold in the night, and slept like babies.

We woke to the sound of cranes calling over the wide lap of the frosty valley.

Frost in the Phobjikha Valley (photo by Brick Root)

PUNAKHA Puja

Punakha: 2 February 2013

Four of us took a day trip to Punakha (where I will be teaching) at the invitation of Andrea Giesbrecht, a BCF teacher who has lived and taught in Punakha for four years (well, technically three: she suffered an accident at the beginning of last year that forced her to leave Bhutan early in the school year, but she is back).  Andrea had been invited to a puja (worship) ceremony at the home of a local farmer who is the father of a friend of hers.  The puja, as important in the Bhutanese calendar as Christmas is in ours, is an annual event in which monks spend the day at the home, performing rituals to bless the home and keep its residents safe and prosperous.  Rather than make the trip by herself, Andrea invited those of us who have our work permits and who will be teaching in or near the Punakha Valley: me; Val, who will be teaching in Rinchingang; and Matt, who is headed to Rukubji.  The four of us intended to begin the trip at 6:30 am., but ice at Dochu-la, the highest pass over which we were to travel, forced us to leave at 9 instead.

The trip is only 70 kilometers, but because there is just one narrow, irregularly paved road that travels east to west in Bhutan and that road has no choice but to climb the mountains between Thimphu and Punakha, the trip is long, slow, dusty and a bit treacherous as it consists of countless hairpin turns.  One can take the bus for a mere $2, but it leaves only twice a day and often causes horrible motion sickness, especially if one sits in the back.  We chose instead to take a taxi for all of $25 divided by four--we are not in Kansas anymore, indeed.  Taxis in Bhutan are about the size of a Chicklet, and Matt is nearly 6'5", so he got the front seat.  We three women were crammed into the tiny backseat so that at each turn, the g-force flattened us to one side or other of the cab.  

The road out of Thimphu leads through Semtokha, the ugly urban result of Thimphu sprawl, but soon  is winding up the mountainside where cypress, pine and rhododendron (not blooming just now as it is winter) dominate the landscape.  Huge trucks with fanciful hand-painted designs, tourist buses, and more of the tiny Suzukis and Kias that proliferate here competed with us as we ascended.  Andrea was generous with her Ginger Gravol, a concentrated ginger pill from Canada said to stave off motion sickness.  For that, I was grateful.  

After nearly an hour of climbing, the car crested the mountain at Dochu-la ('la' in this case means "mountain pass") where 108 chortens and a temple were built in 2005 to atone for the loss of life on both sides caused during a (successful) military engagement with Assamese rebels on the southern border (more on this battle in a later post).  The view from Dochu-la is indescribable (and can't effectively be photographed, I'm afraid): before us, scarfed with clouds, was the entire Bhutanese Himalayan range at the Tibetan border, snow-capped and inconceivably huge.  Matt, one of the most seasoned Himalayan travelers in the group, confessed that he had never seen such a breathtaking panorama of these mountains.  We were all stunned into silence.

108 Chortens to Atone for the Battle Against the Assamese

Himalayas from Dochu-la

After ten chilly minutes, mindful of the puja , we wedged ourselves back into the taxi and began the descent into the Punakha Valley.  After only a short while, the types of trees and other plants were beginning to change--the rhododendrons persisted, but the leaves were four times the size of those on the other side of the mountain; banana and palm trees appeared among the ferns; most remarkable for a New Englander were the ten-foot tall poinsettias with their bright red bracts (what most think of as the flowers) punctuating the landscape.  Andrea claimed she'd seen monkeys here.

Because we were paying a visit, we had to stop somewhere to buy oranges or sweets or something to give to our hosts.  We passed a number of stands set up by the side of the road at which local farmers sold greens, spring onions, and mandarin oranges.  We stopped at one such stand to check the prices and the quality of the produce.  I have rarely seen such plump, inviting spring onions--purple toward the roots, dark green at the top.  The greens were mustard greens--the leaves broad and flat with no sign of damage from pests or lack of water or poor soil.  Though Andrea was confident that our hosts, who are subsistence farmers, would have plenty of greens, we couldn't resist them, and bought two bunches of mustard: Nu. 25 each (about $.50).  When we came into Lobesa, a small market town where the road splits and one can turn north or south, we bought oranges--$2.50 for a bag, no doubt picked just before market time.

We took the turn north into the Punakha Valley, stopping at the planned town of Kuruthang, a grey, town built in a grid (rare in Bhutan) and known for its "brutish concrete architecture" according to the Lonely Planet Guide to Bhutan; here, the long taxi ride ends, and the short taxi ride to Punakha begins.  The blessedly flat, paved road follows the Mo Chu ('Female River'), past Punakha Higher Secondary School where I will live and teach.  Though we could not stop for lack of time, the driver slowed so I could get a look at the school: built on a rise on the western side of the river, the school directly faces the Punakha Dzong, the second Dzong built in Bhutan by the Zhabdrung, in 1637, and the site of an important military victory over the Tibetans. The materiel captured in that battle is still housed in the Dzong.  

The Dzong is an enormous five story, packed-mud building at the confluence of the Mo and Po rivers that serves as the winter home for the  monk officials that comprise the second half of the dual system of government, one secular, one monastic (their summer home is in Thimphu).  It is said that Bhutanese men can wear long johns under their ghos, the national dress mandated for men, until the monks move to Thimphu, after which time they must wear knee socks only (men prefer Gold Toes).  The Punakha Dzong is said to be the most beautiful in Bhutan--surrounded by jacaranda trees, bordered by the Mo Chu, and detailed in red, gold and black.  It houses an ornate lakhang (temple) whose murals depict the life of the Buddha; three huge gold statues there represent the Buddha, the Zhabdrung and Guru Rinpoche.  Also kept there is the body of the Zhabdrung, sealed in a box, never to be opened.  All Je Khenpos, the monastic counterpart to the king, must visit the room where the box is kept in order to receive its blessing before taking up their office.   This improbably beautiful structure seemed--like so much we saw this day--to be from the set of Capra's Lost Horizon or Coleridge's Kublai Khan.  We all questioned whether what we apprehended there could really exist?

Punakha Dzong

The taxi stand is nearly at the doorstep of the Dzong, and in order to get to the home where the puja was taking place, we had to walk over the bridge, past the Dzong, to the longest suspension bridge in the world that crosses the Po Chu.  As long as we were passing it anyway, we thought we'd take five minutes to see the inside of the Dzong; we could not have known that, in preparation for the annual Punakha Tsechu, a festival held every February to honor Guru Rinpoche (each Dzongkhag, or district) has its own tsechu), the monks would be practicing their masked dances for the Je Khenpo and other local dignitaries.  As we entered the first courtyard, we could hear the eerie sound of the ritual instruments used in Bon and Buddhism--cymbals, zangs dung (telescoping brass horns),  rkang dung (horns made from the bone of a femur), and the dhyangro (drum on a pole, beaten with an arced stick).  Three at a time, the young monks spun and hopped, their maroon wool robes blooming around them.  

Three other monks, dressed in motley clothes, wearing burlesque wooden masks and carrying small hand drums and a long, freakishly pink wooden phallus taunted the audience and made rude gestures.  These clowns, or atsaras, are the only beings permitted to poke fun at the rituals of Bhutan.  

Andrea noticed the Punakha Dzongda, or governor of Punakha, sitting up in the balcony,  and soon all of us were sipping sweet tea and watching the rehearsal with the Dzongkhag officials.  By this time, it was after one in the afternoon--and Sonam and Karma, our hosts for the puja, had expected us much earlier.  Here, though, people rely on BST--Bhutanese Stretchable Time--so arriving a few hours late is not necessarily considered rude.  We made our apologies to the Dzongda and left the Dzong, walking along a dusty path toward the suspension bridge; Karma had been waiting on the other side to drive us to his father's home where the puja was taking place.  The bridge is a dramatic piece of engineering running 200 meters across the Po Chu ('Male River'); built into the mountain on the other side we could see Andrea's home, a traditional-style Bhutanese house just below the school where she works.  Because a number of us will not have anywhere to stay until the new semester begins at our schools, those of us in Western and Central Bhutan will be staying with Andrea for a few days, so, since I am one of those people, I was eager to pay a visit to Andrea's home.

Me with the Suspension Bridge in Background

It's long!

Karma, a warm, funny military man whose English is exceptional, was more than happy to drive us up to Andrea's even though by now we were several hours behind schedule.  Her house has four sizable rooms, and her bedroom looks out across the valley. Her kitchen, a concrete slab with a two-burner gas stove, and bathroom with an Indian style squat toilet, are separated from the main house.  A garden with peach, banana and guava trees is fenced in on one side of the house.  It is a lovely restful spot.

View from Andrea's

Andrea's Kitchen

From there, we drove the rutted, iron-red road to Karma's father's farmhouse in a village a few kilometers from Andrea's.  The house is not on a road, so Karma parked the car and we walked through dry rice paddies marked off in irregular shapes to preserve the natural contours of the landscape; some of these paddies were planted with winter wheat and some with mustard.  Young monks, taking a break from their puja duties at others' homes, could be seen sitting out in the fields.  Cows and chickens meandered nearby.  A path lead from the road across these paddies to a squat hill on which the village stood.

Monks in the Paddies

The village consisted of only a few mud houses built close together, a large outdoor fireplace one of its central features apparently shared by all for cooking.  Tiny red-cheeked children, noses running, barefoot, filthy, laughed and ran between the buildings, some waving at us or shouting "Hi!".  Adults, their teeth and gums stained red with doma (betel nut) smiled at us, pausing from making sure the rice crop was drying properly or from cooking the afternoon meal to acknowledge us as we called "Kuzuzampo la!" Again, this could not be real, we all thought: places like this no longer exist.  But they do.

At the end of the path, a large paddy led to Karma's father's house, a large structure with a sizable outdoor kitchen from which smoke snaked as several women and young men tended the fire and the large pots of food for the midday meal.  We were greeted with shouts and cheers by the family, many of whom knew Andrea: Sonam, Karma's wife, was especially happy to see her; her daughters and some of the other young women hid, shy in front of these foreigners, behind their mothers' backs.  Karma and Sonam introduced us to everyone--his mother and father who spoke no English and were thus nervous about hosting us; his grandmother who had all of two protruding teeth in her mouth; and countless grandchildren, nieces, nephews, cousins and others, too numerous to keep straight.  The first floor being the indoor kitchen, we climbed the ladder stairs to the second floor where we removed our shoes and entered the home.  There were several small rooms all stuffed with bedding that had been leaned against the walls to make room for all the guests.  We were led to the front room off the shrine room where we were given tea and four different snacks: sip, or beaten rice, fried corn flakes, and  three kinds of zhao, rice fried in butter with sugar and what looked like ajwain seeds.  Karma sat with us while the women disappeared, no doubt to tend to the cooking.  

Our conversation was accompanied by the chanting of the monks in the next room.  Soon, large containers of red Bhutanese rice, mushrooms with hot chilies and cheese sauce, and a meat dish were brought into the room and each of us was given a generous helping.  Small servings were poured from a  pitcher of chhang, an unfiltered, semi-fermented rice beer was offered all around.  For dessert, we were given saffron rice mixed with sugar, cashews (a rarity in Bhutan) and raisins followed by ara, the Bhutanese moonshine, distilled from rice.  As we ate and laughed and talked, sunlight shone through the glassless windows, illuminating the otherwise unlighted room and reminding us that soon it would be dark, making the impending perilous drive to Thimphu seem especially hazardous.  It was clear that it was time to offer our thanks to our hosts and head back to the city.

Karma walked us back through the rice paddies to the path leading to the bridge; there we said our good byes, all four of us reluctant to leave this place, blessed by the puja and by the kindness of this family. 

Mustard in Rice Paddies in Punakha