That story about the radish wasn’t my odd sense of humour,
it’s supposed to be true.
We’ve travelled to the far north east of the country and as
we enter the town see more litter than anywhere so far, presumably it is some
sort of ironic jest of the gods that the place is called Trashi Yangtse. Generally the country is pretty good on litter.
Quite often when we were asked where we were next going on
hols. and said Bhutan the response was
“where ?” Even fewer people know
anything about it. Well, it’s a Buddhist
Kingdom with China to the north and India to the south and has only its fifth king in place, who took over
from his father who stepped down aged 54. He
was known as a wise king and ascended the throne at 17 while the current one
appears to be highly educated in the west and India. They do seem to be a farsighted and enlightened
bunch though. It was the previous king
who decreed that Gross Domestic Product was less important than Gross Domestic
Happiness. Schooling and medicine are
good and they have a proper waste collection system in place. It became a democratic country in 2008
because the king decreed that a bad king could one day be on the throne and the
best way to counter that was democracy, although he still has a lot of
power. Everyone 16 and up has a vote. In the last few years it was decreed that
every village would have electricity and from what we’ve seen all but the very
remotest places do have it. The country
claims to be the only carbon negative country in the world because they export
so much hydro-electric power to India.
It’s their biggest export by value. I mentioned China to the north. The Bhutanese army patrols the border without
guns on the basis that as they’re unarmed the Chinese won’t shoot at them.
This Trashi Yangtse has a population of only 3000 but has a
hospital, two schools, an academy of traditional crafts, the National Seed Bank
and marijuana growing wild along the streets.
Apparently it is illegal to do anything with it and every year there’s a
one day campaign where everyone is encouraged to pull it up. They don’t have a slogan but I thought ‘Trash
the Hash’ had a nice ring to it. As a
place though, it is so remote that there are no reasonable hotels so we stayed
in a local house. Fantastically brightly
and ornately decorated it was where, despite the export of all that electricity,
we enjoyed the first of our regular power cuts. Probably has more dogs than cars and is very
peaceful. As westerners we are genuinely
odd and young children stare in an astonished way. I can’t imagine it happening anywhere else.
School runs from 8.00 to 3.30 weekdays and a half day on
Saturdays. The day starts with the
pupils cleaning the classroom, then a prayer and the national anthem. Imagine that, you teachers reading this.
The radish styled stupa is ringed with prayer wheels and
people circumambulate (clockwise and odd
number of times, remember) regularly daily or several times a day. Old people go round and round for hours and
Heather realised it did provide good exercise for them, but they did have to
keep little piles of stones to remember how many times they had been round! It is difficult to judge ages of people and
even more so ones from a different ethnic group so I asked our guide how old
these were. Oh, he said, 60’s, 50’s,
perhaps 55. He seemed genuinely taken
aback where I mentioned that H and I were 65.
I’ll mention the beer although there aren’t many to choose
from. The one we see most of is called
Druk 11000 and is an example of life imitating art. A previous beer, imported from India was called 10000 and to show that this one was
better they called it 11000, just like the amplifier in the film, Spinal
Tap. For anyone who doesn’t know it, it was a film
about a fictional rock band who claimed their amplifier was better than
everyone else’s because the volume went up to 11 instead of only 10, ignoring
the fact that maximum was maximum whatever it was numbered.
As we leave Trashi Yangtse we head westwards and we’re on
the only road crossing the country east to west. In many places it’s another ‘massage’ road
and there are sometimes stretches of more than a hundred yards without a
hairpin bend. Travelling is
tortuous. Dorje, our guide tells us that
there are three driving speeds in Bhutan: Bhutanese: Tourist: Slow and that
time is measured in BST, which is Bhutanese Stretchable Time.
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