Male Fire Dog
26 Feb - 2 March, Ian (Re-fixed!)
When our Nepal trip was cancelled shortly before
we were to start it our tour operator offered us some alternatives, including
Bhutan. In coming up with an itinerary here at short notice they were happily
able to take inspiration from the trip of the required length that they'd just
organised for a family with girls aged 7 and 9. We know this because we'd met
that family - Adrian, Sally, Maddy and Orla Ward - in Paro when we arrived. The
Wards set off a day ahead of us and we'd hoped to cross paths a couple of times.
Later, when it seemed that a logistical matter would prevent us, we were all
disappointed, particularly Zoe and Heidi whose chances to play with children
similar to themselves have been few and far between this year. Luckily,
persistence prevailed and we did manage to engineer a lunch together on Sunday
when we arrived back in Thimphu after our
trek.
In a rare change from our diet of Bhutan, Indian and Chinese food we ate at a pizzeria. Paradoxically, it was the first place we'd reached where we could get Bhutanese Red Panda - it's a weiss beer - instead of the more popular Black Label from India. In this most culturally intact of countries it was refreshing to spend an hour with folks like us, and especially since we could compare notes in some detail, having done essentially the very same things. Hopefully, we can stay in touch.
We also traded books: my A Short History of Progress for Sally's Saturday; it's the only Ian McEwan novel I haven't read and to get it was like water in the desert as I'd read through the little stack of books I'd brought with me unexpectedly quickly.
The drive to Thimphu from Wangdi was tortuous, since all of the roads here are narrow and twist tightly along the contours of Bhutan's many hills. The majority of people who come here, I'm told, are on cultural coach trips. I wonder that they don't all get totally sick: I'd recommend this country strongly, but only if you spend most of your time walking through it. Since leaving Thimphu, though, we have done a couple of long drives and I've fortunately been more touched by the beauty than the queasiness of slow road travel. Geographically, we've been to Ha and then back to Paro, where we are now, and have thus visited five of the country's 20 provinces. (For anyone checking on a map Wangdi seems to be given as Wangdue and Ha as Haa - I'm following the spellings given on the majority of the town signs. Like Shakespearean English, it doesn't seem to be standardised.)
The recurring pattern of the days even after our main trek has been the up-and-down walk to see the hill-top monastery. This has been quite tough on Heidi, who like most kids has explosive fitness rather than stamina and who, unlike the rest of us, hasn't had prior experience of multi-day walks. And as Paula reminds me, she's only been alive for eight years. Nonetheless, she's managed every ascent in good time and she and Zoe run, dance and sand-ski impressively on every downhill return. Helpfully, most of the walking this week has been through cool blue pine woods - Bhutan's tree line rises to about 4,000 metres.
Before leaving Thimphu we visited the dzong, which is right across from the parliament and has the scale and grandeur appropriate to a capital but not the spiritual charm of the dzong in Punakha, the nation's religious capital. It's telling that Bhutan's religious leader splits his year evenly between these two centres.
The monasteries, or goembas, are less accessible, hence the up-and-down walks. On Monday we walked up to the Cheri Goemba. After completing their training at the age of around 25 some monks are invited to retreat here for special meditation. Those doing so live for 3 years, 3 months, 3 weeks, 3 days, 3 hours and (I think) 3 minutes in isolation without seeing or hearing another human being. Food is passed through their door as in a prison. Some monks choose to do this eight or nine times in the course of their lives.
At the monasteries it is usually possible to visit the temple. Paula and Heidi have been into some of them but latterly prefer to soak up rays outside after the haul up; Zoe and I go into every one we can. At Cheri, Bhim showed us how to bow to the Buddha the Bhutan way, which is different from the Thai ritual that Nui showed us. As explained, it is also more meaningful, with the threefold prostration atoning for any harm we may have done to any living creature (for in Buddhism, what goes around comes around).
Our next monastery was near Ha, where the monks were making colourful cakes and preparing their medieval-looking pipes for a 21 day ceremony. 108 butter lamps were laid out in the upper of two temples. In the lower temple I had a unique treat. I've reconciled myself to the fact these temples will be the dominant unphotographed memory of my trip to Bhutan. I love them. Each square inch of the walls is brightly painted in intricate allegorical detail, the shrines are like something from a dream with the most peaceful Buddha's (past, present and future) and gurus between columns of religious texts stacked high in cupboards. (You wont be amazed that Gautama Buddha left precisely 108 - subsequent teachers have added maybe double that.) Many of the temples are lined with literally 1,000 painted or modelled Buddhas. Silks in chevrons of alternating bright colours hang from the ceilings. I was admiring the paintings in this particular temple when the caretaker, after a conversation with Bhim, decided that I could take a few pictures for my own use. So I did. Being inside a small, gloomy room it was hard to get great photos but I'm pleased to have what I could get as a memento. For painting that is 300 years or more old it looks terrific. In accordance with the terms, these snaps wont be on our home page or in a blog. (Some Bhutan photos should be up on the home page at about the same time that I get this posted.)
Yesterday's monastery was on an even higher hill and required an even harder walk to get there. It has recently been taken over by the central religious authorities, who also bought out the surrounding houses (moving the residents down into the Ha valley) to make a grand complex. As of now, the houses are deserted but nothing has been done with them so the site is eerily desolate. Again, Zoe and I went with Bhim into the temple. There we were encouraged by Bhim and the young monks to prognosticate on a matter of personal importance using dice. I wouldn't do it. There are several things I could bring to mind that matter to me but I don't want the shadow of fate falling across my attempt to shape any one of them. For the same reason I never read my horoscope - once in a while when I see a horoscope column I'll read one of them but I always choose another star sign for fear that my thoughts would be railroaded if I read my own. I accept that this is as superstitious as reading the thing normally, but at least it's my superstition.
Having chosen her own private topic, Zoe touched a low denomination note to her head, thinking of the topic, put the note in a dish, then picked up three dice and touched them to her head, topic in focus, and then shook them into the same dish. They came up nine. 13 would have been a golden assurance of shining success and 3 would have indicated a certain flop. On purgatorial even numbers you get a second go, but two evens in a row spells failure. Nine, we were told, gives a pretty rosy outlook.
In my Living in a Memory entry I described visiting Bhutan's oldest temple, which was one of 108 built in a single day in the seventh century. Of the 108 only five were in Bhutan, the rest being in Tibet. Of these five, four are still standing and after coming down from the dice temple we went to see two of these - a black and a white monastery that stand close to each other. The sites were determined by two pigeons (respectively a white and a black one) who each were released and landed on the propitious spot. It being a holiday, the caretakers were absent so we couldn't look inside.
The holiday being marked was the first day of the new year. This is the year of the Dog, which is one of the twelve animals in the Chinese cycle, and it's qualified by gender (Male this year), which alternates from one year to the next, and by element (and this year we have Fire). So it's Male Fire Dog year.
The celebrations are very colourful, and more interesting than people falling over and being sick in the early hours. Rather, on new year's day groups of guys gather and have archery contests in which they aim at small targets planted in the ground 150 metres apart, and shoot from alternate ends. Hitting a target this far away is no mean feat, especially with a bamboo bow in a strong wind. When they make it the little crowd at the other end does a hop-step dance bowing to the arrow and singing merrily and then throw up their arms with loud "Wa Ha!"s.
Apart from the archery there are other throngs of people out having a good time, and all those that we saw were mixed. On the way back to our van after seeing the dice monastery we were intercepted by three woman, each bearing an empty basket on her back, who told us, through Bhim, that they had a new year's day custom to block travellers unless they received a donation. I agreed to give them their money so long as they posed for a photo.
Male Fire Dog sounds all too predictive of the year I may have ahead of me. After twelve months in which every single person whom we've met has been friendly and polite we're returning to normal life, where acts of kindness and even heroism from some will be balanced by instances of discourtesy, malice, pettiness, spite, self-obsession and disloyalty from others. What is it that makes us better people when we travel or greet travellers? Maybe I should have cast the dice in the temple and wished for a year of the dolphin or the impala or the owl or the hedgehog.
But flaws in our human behaviour are nothing new. Before I started reading Saturday I dashed through Psmith in the City from a P.G. Wodehouse Psmith Omnibus that I picked up in Thimphu just after we met Sally and Adrian. Written in 1910, it's clearly based upon the couple of years that the author spent working for the bank now known as HSBC. Unusually for Wodehouse, it has its mordent moments. Even though he writes about a time when the bank could place itself at the frontier of technology by installing a telephone, the human aspect could have been written an hour ago. It's admirable and inspiring to see how much humour Wodehouse wraps it in.
Today on our way back to Paro we drove over the highest road pass in Bhutan, which if you get out the car and walk up a small hill, exceeds 4,000 metres. From there we could see Jhomolhari, which at 7,314 m is the highest peak we've ever set eyes on; it's 50% higher than the Matterhorn, for example. At our viewpoint we stood amongst prayer flags, from which prayers stream all over the country. I also learned this week that the prayer wheels that we spin at every monastery contain tightly wound scrolls of prayers so that when you spin them, if you do it the right way, they also spray prayers out into the aether. The mystery of these prayers, locked inside the canisters of the wheel, is a perfect image of Bhutan.
In a rare change from our diet of Bhutan, Indian and Chinese food we ate at a pizzeria. Paradoxically, it was the first place we'd reached where we could get Bhutanese Red Panda - it's a weiss beer - instead of the more popular Black Label from India. In this most culturally intact of countries it was refreshing to spend an hour with folks like us, and especially since we could compare notes in some detail, having done essentially the very same things. Hopefully, we can stay in touch.
We also traded books: my A Short History of Progress for Sally's Saturday; it's the only Ian McEwan novel I haven't read and to get it was like water in the desert as I'd read through the little stack of books I'd brought with me unexpectedly quickly.
The drive to Thimphu from Wangdi was tortuous, since all of the roads here are narrow and twist tightly along the contours of Bhutan's many hills. The majority of people who come here, I'm told, are on cultural coach trips. I wonder that they don't all get totally sick: I'd recommend this country strongly, but only if you spend most of your time walking through it. Since leaving Thimphu, though, we have done a couple of long drives and I've fortunately been more touched by the beauty than the queasiness of slow road travel. Geographically, we've been to Ha and then back to Paro, where we are now, and have thus visited five of the country's 20 provinces. (For anyone checking on a map Wangdi seems to be given as Wangdue and Ha as Haa - I'm following the spellings given on the majority of the town signs. Like Shakespearean English, it doesn't seem to be standardised.)
The recurring pattern of the days even after our main trek has been the up-and-down walk to see the hill-top monastery. This has been quite tough on Heidi, who like most kids has explosive fitness rather than stamina and who, unlike the rest of us, hasn't had prior experience of multi-day walks. And as Paula reminds me, she's only been alive for eight years. Nonetheless, she's managed every ascent in good time and she and Zoe run, dance and sand-ski impressively on every downhill return. Helpfully, most of the walking this week has been through cool blue pine woods - Bhutan's tree line rises to about 4,000 metres.
Before leaving Thimphu we visited the dzong, which is right across from the parliament and has the scale and grandeur appropriate to a capital but not the spiritual charm of the dzong in Punakha, the nation's religious capital. It's telling that Bhutan's religious leader splits his year evenly between these two centres.
The monasteries, or goembas, are less accessible, hence the up-and-down walks. On Monday we walked up to the Cheri Goemba. After completing their training at the age of around 25 some monks are invited to retreat here for special meditation. Those doing so live for 3 years, 3 months, 3 weeks, 3 days, 3 hours and (I think) 3 minutes in isolation without seeing or hearing another human being. Food is passed through their door as in a prison. Some monks choose to do this eight or nine times in the course of their lives.
At the monasteries it is usually possible to visit the temple. Paula and Heidi have been into some of them but latterly prefer to soak up rays outside after the haul up; Zoe and I go into every one we can. At Cheri, Bhim showed us how to bow to the Buddha the Bhutan way, which is different from the Thai ritual that Nui showed us. As explained, it is also more meaningful, with the threefold prostration atoning for any harm we may have done to any living creature (for in Buddhism, what goes around comes around).
Our next monastery was near Ha, where the monks were making colourful cakes and preparing their medieval-looking pipes for a 21 day ceremony. 108 butter lamps were laid out in the upper of two temples. In the lower temple I had a unique treat. I've reconciled myself to the fact these temples will be the dominant unphotographed memory of my trip to Bhutan. I love them. Each square inch of the walls is brightly painted in intricate allegorical detail, the shrines are like something from a dream with the most peaceful Buddha's (past, present and future) and gurus between columns of religious texts stacked high in cupboards. (You wont be amazed that Gautama Buddha left precisely 108 - subsequent teachers have added maybe double that.) Many of the temples are lined with literally 1,000 painted or modelled Buddhas. Silks in chevrons of alternating bright colours hang from the ceilings. I was admiring the paintings in this particular temple when the caretaker, after a conversation with Bhim, decided that I could take a few pictures for my own use. So I did. Being inside a small, gloomy room it was hard to get great photos but I'm pleased to have what I could get as a memento. For painting that is 300 years or more old it looks terrific. In accordance with the terms, these snaps wont be on our home page or in a blog. (Some Bhutan photos should be up on the home page at about the same time that I get this posted.)
Yesterday's monastery was on an even higher hill and required an even harder walk to get there. It has recently been taken over by the central religious authorities, who also bought out the surrounding houses (moving the residents down into the Ha valley) to make a grand complex. As of now, the houses are deserted but nothing has been done with them so the site is eerily desolate. Again, Zoe and I went with Bhim into the temple. There we were encouraged by Bhim and the young monks to prognosticate on a matter of personal importance using dice. I wouldn't do it. There are several things I could bring to mind that matter to me but I don't want the shadow of fate falling across my attempt to shape any one of them. For the same reason I never read my horoscope - once in a while when I see a horoscope column I'll read one of them but I always choose another star sign for fear that my thoughts would be railroaded if I read my own. I accept that this is as superstitious as reading the thing normally, but at least it's my superstition.
Having chosen her own private topic, Zoe touched a low denomination note to her head, thinking of the topic, put the note in a dish, then picked up three dice and touched them to her head, topic in focus, and then shook them into the same dish. They came up nine. 13 would have been a golden assurance of shining success and 3 would have indicated a certain flop. On purgatorial even numbers you get a second go, but two evens in a row spells failure. Nine, we were told, gives a pretty rosy outlook.
In my Living in a Memory entry I described visiting Bhutan's oldest temple, which was one of 108 built in a single day in the seventh century. Of the 108 only five were in Bhutan, the rest being in Tibet. Of these five, four are still standing and after coming down from the dice temple we went to see two of these - a black and a white monastery that stand close to each other. The sites were determined by two pigeons (respectively a white and a black one) who each were released and landed on the propitious spot. It being a holiday, the caretakers were absent so we couldn't look inside.
The holiday being marked was the first day of the new year. This is the year of the Dog, which is one of the twelve animals in the Chinese cycle, and it's qualified by gender (Male this year), which alternates from one year to the next, and by element (and this year we have Fire). So it's Male Fire Dog year.
The celebrations are very colourful, and more interesting than people falling over and being sick in the early hours. Rather, on new year's day groups of guys gather and have archery contests in which they aim at small targets planted in the ground 150 metres apart, and shoot from alternate ends. Hitting a target this far away is no mean feat, especially with a bamboo bow in a strong wind. When they make it the little crowd at the other end does a hop-step dance bowing to the arrow and singing merrily and then throw up their arms with loud "Wa Ha!"s.
Apart from the archery there are other throngs of people out having a good time, and all those that we saw were mixed. On the way back to our van after seeing the dice monastery we were intercepted by three woman, each bearing an empty basket on her back, who told us, through Bhim, that they had a new year's day custom to block travellers unless they received a donation. I agreed to give them their money so long as they posed for a photo.
Male Fire Dog sounds all too predictive of the year I may have ahead of me. After twelve months in which every single person whom we've met has been friendly and polite we're returning to normal life, where acts of kindness and even heroism from some will be balanced by instances of discourtesy, malice, pettiness, spite, self-obsession and disloyalty from others. What is it that makes us better people when we travel or greet travellers? Maybe I should have cast the dice in the temple and wished for a year of the dolphin or the impala or the owl or the hedgehog.
But flaws in our human behaviour are nothing new. Before I started reading Saturday I dashed through Psmith in the City from a P.G. Wodehouse Psmith Omnibus that I picked up in Thimphu just after we met Sally and Adrian. Written in 1910, it's clearly based upon the couple of years that the author spent working for the bank now known as HSBC. Unusually for Wodehouse, it has its mordent moments. Even though he writes about a time when the bank could place itself at the frontier of technology by installing a telephone, the human aspect could have been written an hour ago. It's admirable and inspiring to see how much humour Wodehouse wraps it in.
Today on our way back to Paro we drove over the highest road pass in Bhutan, which if you get out the car and walk up a small hill, exceeds 4,000 metres. From there we could see Jhomolhari, which at 7,314 m is the highest peak we've ever set eyes on; it's 50% higher than the Matterhorn, for example. At our viewpoint we stood amongst prayer flags, from which prayers stream all over the country. I also learned this week that the prayer wheels that we spin at every monastery contain tightly wound scrolls of prayers so that when you spin them, if you do it the right way, they also spray prayers out into the aether. The mystery of these prayers, locked inside the canisters of the wheel, is a perfect image of Bhutan.
Posted: Sat - March 4, 2006 at 08:44 AM
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: Mar 04, 2006 08:44 AM
Total entries in this category:
Published On: Mar 04, 2006 08:44 AM