Living in a Memory
10 - 15 Feb, Ian
When we arranged our trip I had imagined that
Thailand would be more tourist-friendly than Laos. I was right, but not in the
way that I expected. Last Friday we had our final breakfast at the French cafe
in Luang Prabang and then flew to Bangkok. In Thailand tourists are more likely
to carry rucsacs than the SLR's that are
de rigeur
with the well-heeled travellers to Laos.
Because Laos is only recently becoming established as a travel destination the
people you run into there tend to be more experienced and older and richer than
holiday-makers in Thailand: paradoxically the Laos crowd thus look less
intrepid.
For a few days we swapped the quiet civilities of the night life in Luang Prabang for Bangkok's youthful mania. The evening we arrived we had dinner on the main backpacker drag. Oasis at max vol provided the back-drop to the busy street life lapping across our table at a cafe open to the street. Strangely, other than Oasis the most frequently played artist was Jack Johnson, whom I haven't heard in public since we left home. On this subject, I mentioned Jack J last time and I could list a spookily high number of instances of things being echoed in the world around us immediately after I've written about them in a blog. (Another example from my last blog: just after I alluded to Nebuchnadnezzar he turned up in the novel I'm reading - am I a brain in a vat?)
Dress codes are not the same in Bangkok as in Laos - or indeed most of Thailand - either. Whenever we walk out of the hotel there are always groups of doll-perfect wafer-thin girls parading around in glossy clothes emblazoned with drinks logos. I know that at least some of them must be serious and complex people but in their uniform high boots and micro skirts they look more like after dinner mints than real women.
Most of our time in Bangkok was given over to chores. We needed to buy warm coats and a couple of extra sleeping bags for Bhutan and we picked these up at the city's newest large mall - Siam Paragon. Like many grand malls this one hovers uneasily between being grandly futuristic and sadly dated. This is a quality it perhaps acquires from the source of the cultural hegemony that inspires it. If you were in any doubt that most areas of the world are striving hard to become second tier states of the US you could come here for another example. The way that they don't quite get it but stubbornly retain marks of their own identity - and I don't know if this is intentional - is very stylish. You can see this in the English-sloganed t-shirts, which don't make the sense that they reach for, instead becoming gems of irony-chic that would be far more fashionable in New York or London than the genre that they're copying.
The mall has an aquarium in the basement, which also still seems new and exciting. We all like aquariums and have been to several, but this one has a few sea creatures that were still unfamiliar, such as the beautiful nautilus. There was, though, an explanatory board that claimed that "the most easily identifiable difference between sharks and rays is that shark's gills are located on their sides [whereas rays' gill slits are] located underneath" (my italics). Such nonsense could only be the product of true expertise.
I had the last haircut that I'll need before we get home, too. It was good and cheap, though the stylist wore latex gloves to wash my hair and a face mask while cutting it, oblivious to everything Toni & Guy teach about flattering the client's self-esteem. Maybe it's the self-esteem boost that accounts for 90% of T&G's price - if so, that would bring it right into line with the cost of my haircut here.
Yesterday morning, which seems an age ago, we got up just after 3 a.m. to get to the airport for our flight to Bhutan. During the flight the pilot warned us that as we approached Paro the plane would fly much closer to the mountains and bank much more steeply and then hit the tarmac much more firmly than we were used to - and that this was all normal. He was a Swede who works for Airbus and is helping Druk Air - the Bhutan carrier - program their new planes to make automated landings so that they don't need to land by sight, which frequently leads to long delays when the airport, which is at high altitude, is in cloud. We learnt this when he invited the girls up to the flight deck - this is always nice, but it was an especial treat since he invited them up while we were in the air. I did this a few times as child but we'd thought that after 9/11 those days were gone.
The landing was spectacular. The first we saw of Bhutan was mountains pushing up through the clouds with peaks higher than our current elevation. Once under the clouds we saw wooded hills - 72% of the nation is forested - with lone white monasteries perched next to dramatic cliffs. And in the final approach the plane did indeed bank steeply and fly close to the mountains, and it was pure fun.
At the airport we paid our entry fees and breezed through passport control - until it came to my turn. Then, with Paula, Zoe and Heidi waiting over a virtual line in Bhutan, the official checking me through noticed that my passport number as shown on our visa was incorrect. A guy came and took my passport and the paperwork off into an office, leaving me with nothing to do but sit down in the arrivals hall and get my book out. After a while all the other passengers cleared the hall and most of the officials packed up and left too. Aware that the officials there simply might not have the authority to admit a foreigner without a valid visa, I had visions of having to write a Forget Bhutan blog - and I really didn't want to! Fortunately, the customs guys and our travel company found a way round the problem and eventually I got in.
Paro is fabulous - literally, like a land from a fable. The first thing you notice is that not only do the women all wear traditional long dresses and scarves, the men also wear long robes called ghos. If it weren't for the electricity cables, the modest number of cars, the tin roofs that have replaced many of the wooden ones, the concrete blocks that can sometimes be seen in construction work and the occasional pair of sneakers on the feet of a guy in a gho you would be hard pushed to identify what epoch you are in. If you are inclined to fear to an apocalyptic future for our planet - which you might well be now that its most powerful cabal seem in a rush to bring it about - Paro's simplicity seems a paradigm suited as well to the future as to the past. The human scale of the place - it's one of the Bhutan's major centres and has a population of only 3,000 - also has the peaceful ring of sustainability. More than anything, I personally worry that the very recent explosion in humankind that swept us all into existence and that continues still augurs badly for the future. Being here corroborates the intuition that smaller communities are happier ones.
Tourism is quite new here: we're currently staying at the hotel that was Bhutan's first, and it opened only in 1974. I had thought that the authorities shunned tourism and thus made it hard for people to enter the country. This isn't true. Rather, they control the tourism business directly and levy high taxes so that those people who do visit leave some of their wealth behind. As in The Galapagos Islands, this is also a method for keeping visitor numbers at manageable levels, and to me it makes perfect sense. In a completely extreme instance of angling after the rich set, there's apparently a hotel near town where bungalows (note the plural) cost $10,000 per night!!
The Bhutanese feel, probably correctly, that they are wisely led by their king and fear for the future, since the king is voluntarily handing over most of his power in 2008 to a new constitutional government. His son, the crown prince, will take over as head of state. The population looks at the actual democracies around the world and understandably worries that a two party electoral system may be a downgrade from their happy monarchy. Unlike Britain's, the Bhutanese monarchy is not ancient, having begun only in 1907 when the country was first unified; and with only a century of experience they have yet to endure a bad monarch: all four kings have been popular successes. The king is already on a tour of the country explaining how the new constitution will work to all of his subjects. According to our guide, Bihm, only 13% of Bhutanese have TV's and so this not yet a nation that can be swayed by media campaigns.
The government of Bhutan is physically very visible since the administrative head offices are housed in huge imposing forts called dzongs. The dzong in Paro rises above the open valley landscape, which stretches out for miles between the Himalayan mountains. The land from the rivers up into the lower hillsides is arranged in terraces divided prettily into separate fields. For much of the year these are used as rice paddies. At this time of the year they're used to grow potatoes and men and women are out there farming: it looks like hard work. The dzong is visible from these fields for miles and miles around. We went to the dzong this morning, first touring round a museum that has been laid out in a beautiful round building above the dzong that used to be a watchtower. In contrast to the last museum we visited - the ultramodern "interpretive" single-theme Hall of Opium in northern Thailand - this one is very Old School: lots of artefacts such as costumes, weapons, pots, bamboo work, mangy stuffed animals and most of all religious arcana are displayed behind glass. I like this type of museum when it's got plenty of good gear, as this one does.
One thing that I learned is that the Bhutan flavour of Buddhism is very different and much more complicated than the Laos/Thai flavours, with many more accompanying gods, goddesses and gurus, and even quite a collection of past, present and future Buddhas. You may be interested to know that in Tantric Buddhism men are taken to represent knowledge and women to represent wisdom and thus their union is thematically important. Another symbol that I especially like was more clearly depicted at the dzong itself: it's a wheel with six segments depicting different states of existence (gods are one, humans are another) from which it is necessary to be liberated to achieve nirvana. The whole wheel is held by the devil.
As well as being an admin centre, the dzongs are home to monks. The one here in Paro houses about 200 and they mill around decoratively in their red robes (not the saffron robes of the Thai and Lao monks). Though not in any way opulent the dzong is an impressive and beautiful building, and, to a lesser extent, so are the houses and shops in the town. By law they are all built in the Bhutan vernacular, whatever construction materials are used. Many of the houses in the centre of town acquired even tighter uniformity about thirty years ago when they were rebuilt by the insurance corporation after a big fire.
In our last few days in Laos I had flu symptoms and felt run down. Over the past week I've picked up and the others have taken a dip. Paula particularly has had a bad stomach, and it's useful for us to have three days in Paro to adjust to the altitude and recover before setting off on our first trek.
This afternoon Paula and Heidi stayed in while Zoe and I went to see a dramatic hill-top dzong that was never rebuilt after fire destroyed it. On the way back we stopped off to walk round the oldest temple in Bhutan. It was built originally by the first Buddhist king in the region: he had a revelation that he needed to build 108 temples in one day to subdue an evil spirit that was ranging across the land, and this was one of them. 108 is a religious number here: it is the sum of all the different types of each element (wood, water, fire, air, metal) and so represents the totality of the world. We did a circuit of the temple, which has a band of prayer wheels around it. Zoe, as you should, turned them as she went. You're supposed to be sure to turn 108 - there are actually more if you do them all - and there's a mantra that you can chant, which is six words connoting each of the six segments of the wheel of life. On the first three chants you add "ree", which indicates liberation. It's the opposite of Protestantism.
We've met another family with two girls here: it seems that we'll meet them again, and I'll write more about them next time. Out and about, though, we haven't yet run into any other tourists, though I'm sure we will. As we travel around the world I'm sometimes reminded of Bentham's panoptican: a penal institution in which the controllers sit at a hub in the centre looking out at inmates arranged around the periphery. This is described by Foucault in Discipline and Punish, his book on the birth of the prison. Like the prison staff, it might seem that we westerners are the most visible people on the planet since we can be viewed every day through the TV screen. But the poorer peoples we visit are, like the panoptican's prisoners, unable to see each other, and we (can) know more about them than they do about us. This is exactly my experience at work: as a manager many people know about you, but they've no idea what you're really up to whereas without speaking to them you know in detail all of their assignments, how their line manager appraises them and their pay history. Discipline and Punish made me think far more deeply about the workplace than all of the books that I've read that are actually about work added together.
I've given a little more thought to work this week and have spoken with my own management. It was friendly and constructive; but I'm better at travelling and I like it here too much.
For a few days we swapped the quiet civilities of the night life in Luang Prabang for Bangkok's youthful mania. The evening we arrived we had dinner on the main backpacker drag. Oasis at max vol provided the back-drop to the busy street life lapping across our table at a cafe open to the street. Strangely, other than Oasis the most frequently played artist was Jack Johnson, whom I haven't heard in public since we left home. On this subject, I mentioned Jack J last time and I could list a spookily high number of instances of things being echoed in the world around us immediately after I've written about them in a blog. (Another example from my last blog: just after I alluded to Nebuchnadnezzar he turned up in the novel I'm reading - am I a brain in a vat?)
Dress codes are not the same in Bangkok as in Laos - or indeed most of Thailand - either. Whenever we walk out of the hotel there are always groups of doll-perfect wafer-thin girls parading around in glossy clothes emblazoned with drinks logos. I know that at least some of them must be serious and complex people but in their uniform high boots and micro skirts they look more like after dinner mints than real women.
Most of our time in Bangkok was given over to chores. We needed to buy warm coats and a couple of extra sleeping bags for Bhutan and we picked these up at the city's newest large mall - Siam Paragon. Like many grand malls this one hovers uneasily between being grandly futuristic and sadly dated. This is a quality it perhaps acquires from the source of the cultural hegemony that inspires it. If you were in any doubt that most areas of the world are striving hard to become second tier states of the US you could come here for another example. The way that they don't quite get it but stubbornly retain marks of their own identity - and I don't know if this is intentional - is very stylish. You can see this in the English-sloganed t-shirts, which don't make the sense that they reach for, instead becoming gems of irony-chic that would be far more fashionable in New York or London than the genre that they're copying.
The mall has an aquarium in the basement, which also still seems new and exciting. We all like aquariums and have been to several, but this one has a few sea creatures that were still unfamiliar, such as the beautiful nautilus. There was, though, an explanatory board that claimed that "the most easily identifiable difference between sharks and rays is that shark's gills are located on their sides [whereas rays' gill slits are] located underneath" (my italics). Such nonsense could only be the product of true expertise.
I had the last haircut that I'll need before we get home, too. It was good and cheap, though the stylist wore latex gloves to wash my hair and a face mask while cutting it, oblivious to everything Toni & Guy teach about flattering the client's self-esteem. Maybe it's the self-esteem boost that accounts for 90% of T&G's price - if so, that would bring it right into line with the cost of my haircut here.
Yesterday morning, which seems an age ago, we got up just after 3 a.m. to get to the airport for our flight to Bhutan. During the flight the pilot warned us that as we approached Paro the plane would fly much closer to the mountains and bank much more steeply and then hit the tarmac much more firmly than we were used to - and that this was all normal. He was a Swede who works for Airbus and is helping Druk Air - the Bhutan carrier - program their new planes to make automated landings so that they don't need to land by sight, which frequently leads to long delays when the airport, which is at high altitude, is in cloud. We learnt this when he invited the girls up to the flight deck - this is always nice, but it was an especial treat since he invited them up while we were in the air. I did this a few times as child but we'd thought that after 9/11 those days were gone.
The landing was spectacular. The first we saw of Bhutan was mountains pushing up through the clouds with peaks higher than our current elevation. Once under the clouds we saw wooded hills - 72% of the nation is forested - with lone white monasteries perched next to dramatic cliffs. And in the final approach the plane did indeed bank steeply and fly close to the mountains, and it was pure fun.
At the airport we paid our entry fees and breezed through passport control - until it came to my turn. Then, with Paula, Zoe and Heidi waiting over a virtual line in Bhutan, the official checking me through noticed that my passport number as shown on our visa was incorrect. A guy came and took my passport and the paperwork off into an office, leaving me with nothing to do but sit down in the arrivals hall and get my book out. After a while all the other passengers cleared the hall and most of the officials packed up and left too. Aware that the officials there simply might not have the authority to admit a foreigner without a valid visa, I had visions of having to write a Forget Bhutan blog - and I really didn't want to! Fortunately, the customs guys and our travel company found a way round the problem and eventually I got in.
Paro is fabulous - literally, like a land from a fable. The first thing you notice is that not only do the women all wear traditional long dresses and scarves, the men also wear long robes called ghos. If it weren't for the electricity cables, the modest number of cars, the tin roofs that have replaced many of the wooden ones, the concrete blocks that can sometimes be seen in construction work and the occasional pair of sneakers on the feet of a guy in a gho you would be hard pushed to identify what epoch you are in. If you are inclined to fear to an apocalyptic future for our planet - which you might well be now that its most powerful cabal seem in a rush to bring it about - Paro's simplicity seems a paradigm suited as well to the future as to the past. The human scale of the place - it's one of the Bhutan's major centres and has a population of only 3,000 - also has the peaceful ring of sustainability. More than anything, I personally worry that the very recent explosion in humankind that swept us all into existence and that continues still augurs badly for the future. Being here corroborates the intuition that smaller communities are happier ones.
Tourism is quite new here: we're currently staying at the hotel that was Bhutan's first, and it opened only in 1974. I had thought that the authorities shunned tourism and thus made it hard for people to enter the country. This isn't true. Rather, they control the tourism business directly and levy high taxes so that those people who do visit leave some of their wealth behind. As in The Galapagos Islands, this is also a method for keeping visitor numbers at manageable levels, and to me it makes perfect sense. In a completely extreme instance of angling after the rich set, there's apparently a hotel near town where bungalows (note the plural) cost $10,000 per night!!
The Bhutanese feel, probably correctly, that they are wisely led by their king and fear for the future, since the king is voluntarily handing over most of his power in 2008 to a new constitutional government. His son, the crown prince, will take over as head of state. The population looks at the actual democracies around the world and understandably worries that a two party electoral system may be a downgrade from their happy monarchy. Unlike Britain's, the Bhutanese monarchy is not ancient, having begun only in 1907 when the country was first unified; and with only a century of experience they have yet to endure a bad monarch: all four kings have been popular successes. The king is already on a tour of the country explaining how the new constitution will work to all of his subjects. According to our guide, Bihm, only 13% of Bhutanese have TV's and so this not yet a nation that can be swayed by media campaigns.
The government of Bhutan is physically very visible since the administrative head offices are housed in huge imposing forts called dzongs. The dzong in Paro rises above the open valley landscape, which stretches out for miles between the Himalayan mountains. The land from the rivers up into the lower hillsides is arranged in terraces divided prettily into separate fields. For much of the year these are used as rice paddies. At this time of the year they're used to grow potatoes and men and women are out there farming: it looks like hard work. The dzong is visible from these fields for miles and miles around. We went to the dzong this morning, first touring round a museum that has been laid out in a beautiful round building above the dzong that used to be a watchtower. In contrast to the last museum we visited - the ultramodern "interpretive" single-theme Hall of Opium in northern Thailand - this one is very Old School: lots of artefacts such as costumes, weapons, pots, bamboo work, mangy stuffed animals and most of all religious arcana are displayed behind glass. I like this type of museum when it's got plenty of good gear, as this one does.
One thing that I learned is that the Bhutan flavour of Buddhism is very different and much more complicated than the Laos/Thai flavours, with many more accompanying gods, goddesses and gurus, and even quite a collection of past, present and future Buddhas. You may be interested to know that in Tantric Buddhism men are taken to represent knowledge and women to represent wisdom and thus their union is thematically important. Another symbol that I especially like was more clearly depicted at the dzong itself: it's a wheel with six segments depicting different states of existence (gods are one, humans are another) from which it is necessary to be liberated to achieve nirvana. The whole wheel is held by the devil.
As well as being an admin centre, the dzongs are home to monks. The one here in Paro houses about 200 and they mill around decoratively in their red robes (not the saffron robes of the Thai and Lao monks). Though not in any way opulent the dzong is an impressive and beautiful building, and, to a lesser extent, so are the houses and shops in the town. By law they are all built in the Bhutan vernacular, whatever construction materials are used. Many of the houses in the centre of town acquired even tighter uniformity about thirty years ago when they were rebuilt by the insurance corporation after a big fire.
In our last few days in Laos I had flu symptoms and felt run down. Over the past week I've picked up and the others have taken a dip. Paula particularly has had a bad stomach, and it's useful for us to have three days in Paro to adjust to the altitude and recover before setting off on our first trek.
This afternoon Paula and Heidi stayed in while Zoe and I went to see a dramatic hill-top dzong that was never rebuilt after fire destroyed it. On the way back we stopped off to walk round the oldest temple in Bhutan. It was built originally by the first Buddhist king in the region: he had a revelation that he needed to build 108 temples in one day to subdue an evil spirit that was ranging across the land, and this was one of them. 108 is a religious number here: it is the sum of all the different types of each element (wood, water, fire, air, metal) and so represents the totality of the world. We did a circuit of the temple, which has a band of prayer wheels around it. Zoe, as you should, turned them as she went. You're supposed to be sure to turn 108 - there are actually more if you do them all - and there's a mantra that you can chant, which is six words connoting each of the six segments of the wheel of life. On the first three chants you add "ree", which indicates liberation. It's the opposite of Protestantism.
We've met another family with two girls here: it seems that we'll meet them again, and I'll write more about them next time. Out and about, though, we haven't yet run into any other tourists, though I'm sure we will. As we travel around the world I'm sometimes reminded of Bentham's panoptican: a penal institution in which the controllers sit at a hub in the centre looking out at inmates arranged around the periphery. This is described by Foucault in Discipline and Punish, his book on the birth of the prison. Like the prison staff, it might seem that we westerners are the most visible people on the planet since we can be viewed every day through the TV screen. But the poorer peoples we visit are, like the panoptican's prisoners, unable to see each other, and we (can) know more about them than they do about us. This is exactly my experience at work: as a manager many people know about you, but they've no idea what you're really up to whereas without speaking to them you know in detail all of their assignments, how their line manager appraises them and their pay history. Discipline and Punish made me think far more deeply about the workplace than all of the books that I've read that are actually about work added together.
I've given a little more thought to work this week and have spoken with my own management. It was friendly and constructive; but I'm better at travelling and I like it here too much.
Posted: Wed - February 15, 2006 at 05:29 PM
Quick Links
Links
Archives
XML/RSS Feed
Calendar
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
Categories
Comments powered by
Statistics
Total entries in this blog:
Total entries in this category:
Published On: Feb 16, 2006 05:25 PM
Total entries in this category:
Published On: Feb 16, 2006 05:25 PM