The next day, as we are preparing to leave Thimphu in order to get back to Taktsi in time for our classes on Tuesday, I get a text message from Francoise Pommaret on my phone informing me that due to heavy, torrential rains from what we are all fearing is an early arrival of the monsoon, the road block we so easily navigated outside of Trongsa on our way to Thimphu has completely collapsed. In fact, it seems a large chunk of the mountain, loosened by heavy rain, has dropped down into the valley taking a sizeable section of the road with it. They anticipate at least a week before the road is passable. Since there is only one east-west road in Bhutan, we are now faced with a choice—either find a guest house to hole up in for a week during peak tourist season (an unlikely gambit) or commit to a three-day drive down to Gelephug on the southern border of Bhutan and back up to Taktsi. After weighing our options, we decide to make the drive. After all, we’ve never seen southern Bhutan, and I am anxious to get back to Taktsi to continue working with Lopen Tsering Chorten, who is my new research partner and a brilliant reader of Tibetan texts. We will miss an additional day of our classes, but at least we won’t miss the entire week (or more, given Bhutanese notions of time—who knows when the road will actually be cleared). I feel sorry for the tour companies, as many of the tours are calculated to get tourists from one guesthouse to another on time. Having the only road to Bumthang (the major destination) blocked, means a huge pain in the neck for most of the tours. We leave Thimphu in the mist and weave our way back up the Dochu-la pass. Although I have now crossed this pass multiple time, I never tire of how different it looks every time. Today, it is cold and dark with high thick clouds shifting to release shafts of brilliant light down into the valleys below.
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| Dochu-la in Clouds |
Arriving back at the CNR guesthouse, we get an early night’s sleep, knowing that the next days’ driving will be long and arduous.
The next morning dawns mostly sunny and warm at this lower altitude. Having discovered the night before that there was no hot water in our room, we’ve been told we can shower in a room upstairs (the same room we stayed in two days previously). The mystery, of course, is why we could not stay in that same room and have the hot water available? There’s no point in asking. We merely take our towels in hand and climb the stairs to the room with warm water. It’s an easy drive to Wangdi, the point at which the road diverges, one branch heading east and the other south. For the first time, we take the road south. Almost immediately the road degenerates into a pit of mud, bumps, streams, and pools of water so muddy that it is impossible to tell how deep they are until one is half-way through them. We have entered the beginning of the Punakhatsangchu hydro-electric project. Because most valleys in Bhutan are so narrow, the construction for the project has consumed the entire valley for a distance, we learn, of at least 25 miles. Labor camp after labor camp perches above the churning river, while enormous piles of sand, stone, rubble, and construction materials are heaped along the river banks or safely fenced behind high chained fences.
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| Beginning of Punakhatsangchu Hydro-electric Project |
The actual project is astounding. Instead of one hydro-electric site there are two—the Punakhatsangchu 1 and 2. In both cases, the water is diverted into tunnels running beneath the mountains for a distance of up to 20 kilometers after which point the tunnel plummets downward for about a kilometer, shooting the water with tremendous force into giant turbines from which the power will be generated. This project has been under way since 2006 and is projected to be completed by 2016.
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| Diverting the Water |
As we make our agonizing way along the mostly-destroyed road, we can’t help but marvel at the scope of the project as well as at what has clearly been a complete transformation of a peaceful mountain valley as enormous influxes of Indian laborers set up their camps and working places along the banks of the river. The project is one of at least four such hydro-electric projects in Bhutan. Two are finished. This one has at least four more years, and the final project along the Mangde chu river is the one nearest to us in Taktsi. During the days, we often hear the sounds of blasting as they begin the process of tunneling beneath the steep mountains. These projects represent the future of Bhutan. Without selling hydro-electric power to India, Bhutan’s only source of revenue would be tourism.
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| From a Distance |
It takes us over two hours to drive 25 miles over the worst road I have every driven in Bhutan, which is saying something! By the time we finally emerge from the shadow of the project, I feel like a ping-pong ball that has been bounced around inside a metal cage for hours. I just want to pull over and lie down, but we have hours more driving before we reach Gelephug. Happily, the road, though still potted and broken in many places, now feels like a super-highway. We enter a long section of road that swoops and dives down through a gorgeous pine forested section of mountains. The main noticeable change in our drive is the fact that the road almost continuously angles downward. Bhutan’s geography is almost entire mountainous but for a thin strip along the southernmost edge, the area we are heading for, which border on the Indian plains. We take turns driving and eventually find a spot above the river under a tree for lunch. I’m regretting wearing long pants and a long sleeve shirt, entirely necessary where we were, but clearly increasingly unnecessary the lower we descend. Some dogs come bounding over hoping to partake of our lunch of leftover pizza, apples, and peanut butter. We feed them some old bread instead.
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| Rest Spot with Dogs |
A warm wind whips up the river valley, both delightful and somewhat oppressive in its steady consistency. At a certain point, we cross over the river and again begin to climb, this time in a long steady ascent through the Himalayan foothills. The country is gorgeous—green, lush, sparkling with recent rain. Over our heads the clouds gather and at intervals we drive through sheets of monsoon rain. But gradually we catch glimpses of the plains of Assam below us.
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| Rain in the Foothills |
Chris is hopeful that we might see a wild elephant, since this is the part of Bhutan in which wild elephants have been rampaging, trampling farmers crops and generally making nuisances of themselves. I am more anxious just to get out of the car. Finally, we reach the checkpoint that marks our entrance into Gelephug dzongkag (district). The young Bhutanese man at the point is beside himself when Chris comes up to present our documents. He regales us with stories about how difficult this assignment, his first since he graduated from high school, is. So many Indian nationals whose visas must be processed and work permits issued. He offers to feed us dinner, but we decline hoping to reach Gelephug town by dark.
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| Plains of Southern Bhutan |
For the first time in Bhutan, I find myself driving along a long, straight, paved stretch of road. I actually am able to get the car into fourth gear—a small miracle, but must often downshift in the fading light to avoid the ubiquitous crowds of school children who walk along the main road after being let out from school at (hmm) 6:30pm! These children have an uncanny ability to sense that our car carries an unusual load—foreigners—and they literally stop dead in their tracks to stare and call out after us. I wonder how many foreigners they’ve actually seen in their lives. Gelephug is not a popular tourist destination in Bhutan. But when we finally reach the town itself, even though darkness is nearly complete, we can still see the forests of banana trees and palms that line the brightly lit streets. The town is small, but orderly and bustling. We find our hotel and lug our bags inside, gratefully collapsing into the VIP room for a dinner of chicken, rice, the usual veggies cooked in butter and mushroom soup. This seems to be the classic tourist buffet menu. It has little flavor and, for me, little interest. I still cannot understand why tourist buffets all over the world have this tendency to whitewash the food, as if tourists have no interest in eating anything that falls outside their blandest expectations. Since I will be co-leading a tour here in Bhutan in about two weeks, I know I will get more than my share of this kind of food, and I’m not remotely excited.
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| A Different Environment--Gelephug |
After dinner, we turn on the air-conditioning in our room and collapse in bed. Even at night, the air is sultry, humid, and hot. Coming from the higher altitudes, it’s a bit of a shock to the system, though I do think that given a bit of time, I’d adjust happily. Early the next morning, we are on the road. Almost immediately, we begin the long day’s climb back up into the mountains. Chris is sad to leave the plains without seeing an elephant, but we both note the wide culverts and broad riverbeds filled with stones. In this dry season, almost no water is running through them, but it’s easy to imagine how much water must come surging through this area during the monsoon.
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| Dry River Valley |
It’s stunningly beautiful and I really wish we could linger and explore some of these remote villages perched on the ridges of the foothills, glimmering in the sun. We pick up a woman and her two children who flag us down. She climbs in the back of our van with a large bundle of banana leaves. Since we encountered her half-way up the side of what appears to be a mountainside devoid of human habitations, we can’t figure out how she and her children happen to be there. But as usual in Bhutan, one cannot assume that people are not living in even what appears to be most remote area.
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| Prayers of the Dead |
At the same time, one of the things I love most about this country is just how under-populated it is. It makes me happy to know that there are places left in the world where one can be entirely surrounded by wilderness, where there are no sounds of airplane or cars or peoples’ voices or industry of any sort. Some basic part of me is deeply at home in such silences and this is certainly one of the most attractive and compelling elements of Bhutan for me. My soul can actually relax here. Even in the middle of downtown Thimphu, which can seem especially busy and noisy, if one awakes in the middle of the night, there is silence—that deep, thick, heavy silence of mountains in the darkness, where only the trees lift up their dark branches to the high, Himalayan stars.
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| Foothills Stupa |
As the day wears on, we again find ourselves driving through torrential rains. People are complaining that the monsoon has come far too early this year, another sign, it seems to me, of the ever-more-obvious signs of global climate change. These heavy rains are especially dangerous in Bhutan, since the mountains are so steep. When the soil is moistened to such a degree, landslides become a daily event. With human habitations and basic infra-structures perched so precariously on these same mountain slopes, it’s not hard to see how transportation and communication can be so easily disrupted.
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| Precarious Road |
We eat lunch at a perch high over the Mandge chu river. Not a single car passes us. In fact, we’ve seen only about three vehicles since we left Gelephug. This must be one of the least traveled roads in Bhutan, which is somewhat too bad, since it is so amazingly beautiful. The lower hills gradually merge into the higher peaks and the landscape changes from tropical to semi-tropical to pine-forested and back to Himalayan high-altitude jungle. Everywhere flowers are blooming in glorious abandon—white, yellow, pink, red, purple. I wish I had a book of flowers to find all their names.
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| Canopy of Flowers |
We are somewhat apprehensive as the afternoon wears on since a friend has warned us that the last 40 kilometers of the road to Taktsi from the south is absolutely terrible and often impassable, especially if its been raining, which it very obviously has been doing a lot of. And, true to her words, we encounter a long section of road that is nothing but mud and ruts, but compared to the 25-mile stretch we did the day before, this seems fairly mild. Nevertheless, it is dark by the time the driveway to Taktsi and ILCS campus comes into view. We’ve been driving steadily for nearly 10 hours! Classes are first thing tomorrow morning and sleep is essential.
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| Trumpet Flowers |
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