January 3, 2010
Filled with educators and visitors, the bus climbs slowly out of Bhutan’s Thimphu Valley through terrain that looks increasingly like an Oriental watercolour — steep, heavily-wooded slopes covered with fluffy trees, farms made of up terraces stepping down the hillsides towards rushing rivers. Some terraces have rice stubble, a few have winter wheat, and a surprising number are orchards. The hillsides are dotted with white half-timbered buildings in the Bhutanese traditional style, which even new buildings are required to use.
Up, up, up, through tiny villages, past isolated farmhouses, along a one-lane road as twisted as a snake’s intestine. This narrow, winding track is Bhutan’s central highway, the only real highway in the country. Up, up, up — and as we go, Goenpo, our guide, a thoughtful and polite former Buddhist monk, tells us stories. That temple on that distant mountain top is near a particularly lovely village where the Fourth King, still living, found four congenial sisters, and married them all. Each now has her own palace.
We will soon arrive, says Goenpo, at Dochu-la, the first high pass of the journey, 3140 meters high. On this side of the pass, the forest is blue pine, oak and maple. All the land around the summit belongs to the Royal Botanical Garden. The Garden is part of the 50% of the land area of Bhutan committed to national parks, which are connected by wilderness corridors so that the wildlife can migrate undisturbed.
On the other side of the pass, the road will descend through — unbelievably — a whole forest of magnolias and rhododendrons. Of the world’s 1100-odd species of rhododendron, 46 are native to Bhutan, and the young Fifth King is trying to grow all 46 in his alpine botanical garden. Then, as the bus descends, bursts of brilliant red flowers will appear — poinsettia trees in full vivid bloom, growing as high as a bungalow. We’ll even see a grove of orange trees — a lusty variety, presumably, since trees are growing at about 8000 feet elevation.
But all of that is on the far side of the pass. At the summit itself, Goenpo says, stand 108 memorial shrines, also known as chortens, erected by the Fourth King in 2005 in memory of battle losses two years earlier. An Assamese separatist force had been raiding India from refuges in southern Bhutan, and India was pressing Bhutan to eject them — or face the possibility that Indian troops might do it themselves.
The Bhutanese made numerous fruitless attempts to persuade them to leave. Eventually the king himself went to visit the Assamese camps, bearing a gift of apples. He put his case to the Assamese directly, and personally gave an apple to every fighter. He also warned them that if they didn’t leave, his army would have to force them out. But they still wouldn’t go
So the king came home, added several hundred volunteers to his untested 9000-man army, and personally led his inexperienced forces into battle. He knew the Assamese strength and deployment, because he had seen their camps, and he had counted his apples. His army prevailed, with a loss of about 10 Bhutanese and numerous Assamese. Far from being jubilant, the king was so appalled at the loss of life that he forbade any victory celebration. Instead, he caused 108 chortens to be erected at the high pass to honour the dead on both sides, and speed them on their way to their next lives.
At Dochu-la, the air is alive with fluttering prayer flags — yellow, red, green, white, orange. And yes, there is a big shrine, a new temple — and, on a small hillock, 108 white chortens standing like ghostly sentinels.
Beyond them, the view is breathtaking. We stand on the crest of the mountain we have climbed, looking over narrow but fertile valleys, with miles of virgin forest in every direction. The land drops thousands of feet and then ripples across lower mountains to the horizon, where it sweeps upward again to a jagged rim of cruel, white-crowned mountains. That’s the Tibetan border. Those peaks include seven of the highest mountains in the world.
We’re standing, it seems, on the roof of the earth, surrounded by flags whose every motion sends a prayer upward on the wind. We may never get nearer to heaven.
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