Well it isn’t.
Spectacular is far too insipid and feeble a word to describe this
landscape we’re travelling through.
Hills are higher, ravines are deeper, roads are narrower and twistier,
drops are steeper and further, roads seems collapsier. It really is so impressive that at the end of
a day it seems too much to take in and we’re overdosed on dramatic views.
We’re heading out of Eastern Bhutan into Central which is as
far as most tourists get to from Western Bhutan. So far we’ve seen the same few people
regularly, about 20 or so and that’s all the tourists there are. Even they didn’t all get to Trashi
Yangtse. We’ve eaten regularly with a German couple,
Tanya and Wolfgang from Bavaria but haven’t mixed with anyone else.
I am not impressed with the food although H is very happy
with it. It’s either rice with
vegetables, vegetables with rice or sometimes as a special treat, rice and
vegetables. Cuisine is apparently
completely different in the western side of the country where I understand
there’s a chance of vegetables and rice.
Very occasionally there are noodles, bread is bread but not quite as we
would know it and I expect to be lighter when I get back than when I left. The black tea is good but I think I get most
of my calories from the odd bottle of coke.
We’re to spend three nights in Bumthang which is nicer than
it sounds and we’re visiting a festival which lasts several days while we’re
here. It’s one of the major ones in the
country but there will be far more tourists than the local festival we went to
earlier in the trip. Like so much of
what happens here, it’s basically religious.
Just before we arrived in the town we visited a burning lake, remarkable
for two things. It isn’t a lake and it
isn’t burning. It’s mythological.
There’s no secular art at all and in a way it is just like
pre-renaissance European art. Everything
is Buddhist and that is just very precisely copied with templates from age old
designs. There seems to have been no
development at all for centuries or scope for individual interpretation. There’s variety but no change which itself is
a bit ironic seeing as a large part of Buddhism relates to the impermanence of
everything.
The festival is full of tourists (like us), I can’t be too
precious about it but the activities haven’t been adapted for us
westerners. It is packed with locals in
fantastically coloured clothes with not a pastel shade to be seen on any of
them. I saw one western couple in traditional
Bhutanese dress and frankly they looked ridiculous. Inside, opaque religious ritual with gongs,
chants and the blowing of eight foot horns did have more tourists than locals. Outside were dances in even more wild
costumes. Masked men pranced around in
one, led by a red faced clown, who is really in charge, and keeps an eye of
what’s going on. The masks are wooden
and very heavy. In another, all the
dancers were in vivid yellow outfits.
The girls danced much more sedately.
However, for us the surprise was one we just saw briefly as we were
leaving. It was a girls dance with a man
carrying an erect wooden penis. At the
climax of the dance this wooden penis is placed vertically on a girls head and
there’s an emission of something whitish. Not quite your average Morris Men. Here in Bhutan and it seems particularly in
the central region, the erect penis with attached testicles is a good luck
charm, so the dance is not a fertility dance but a good luck one. There are drawings of the lucky charm in the
midst of production on houses and shopfronts; crossed wooden ones hang from the
four corners of houses or stand as crosses in gardens and they also act as the
spouts for fountains. Quite an eye
opener but not mentioned once by our guide.
This festival is also famous for the Naked Monk’s Dance and
yes, I could mention their filthy habits but I’m not going to. It takes place around midnight and is just
what it sounds like, naked monks dancing, although there seems some dispute
over whether they really are monks. That
said this is an official event, not just a load of uninhibited drunks. The dancers wear a face covering but
otherwise are as nature made them. A bit
of dancing, a bit of waving (not hands), a bit of thrusting while the girls in
the front row scream. This is how it was
reported to me because I was in bed asleep.
H went with the two Germans and the consensus seemed to be that I had
made the most sensible choice. A few
years ago the authorities banned it but then, bad harvests. Naturally this was blamed on the dance ban and
it was reinstated. I have been unable to
discover any official statistics on the standards of recent harvests. It’s no more ridiculous than the one
survivor of a plane crash claiming “it was a miracle” and avoiding any mention
of the 150 other poor buggers who’d been incinerated.
Toward the end of the previously mentioned Monk’s dance, H
told me that a fight broke out. Not
between tourists but two locals, who would have been Buddhists, generally
thought to be a very peaceful and serene influence. It’s as unlikely as the BNP having a
Caribbean Weekend.
What I wouldn’t give for a nice freshly made cheese and
tomato sandwich.
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