You know you are in for something special while flying into Bhutan. The airport in Paro is at one end of the long valley and our plane, after flying up up up into the mountains from sea level Dhaka, had to make a sharp banking turn to slot into the valley so the plane can fly in between the mountains. The forested slopes interrupted by the occasional farmhouse looks so close that you feel you should be able to wave to the farmer in his terraced fields. If you are really keen you can see a cockpit view video of the landing here.
We witnessed everything through the surreal veil of jetlag that day. What felt like the world’s quietest international airport, built in the traditional Bhutanese style with the ornately painted wooded trimmings which would come to be so familiar, meeting up with Rinchen – the lovely man formerly a post-graduate student I had taught – who arranged a guest visa for us into Bhutan, meeting Neten our guide and driver for the next twelve days. Both of them were dressed in the gho, the knee length robe of heavy fabric that is paired with knee high black socks and smart shoes.
We drove the hour to the capital Thimphu and by that afternoon we were at the Dzong (temple/fortress/monastery) for the final few hours of the annual Buddhist festival. Each major temple has a festival at some point during the year, and it is a clamour of people, noise and colour. In the middle of the courtyard there is a continuous program of sacred masked dances, which tell stories of past vanquishing of demons by Buddhist masters.
Wanchoe, the vibrant host at our homestay told us later that many of the sacred dances at the festival feature masked demons, the idea being that if you attend all the festivals throughout your life you will recognise the demons when they trouble you in the period of Bardo after death, and you won’t be scared of them.
The next day we visited the Great Buddha Dordenma, a 52m high gilded statute that looks out over Thimphu valley. Our visit coincided with a long running festival, where monks were reading out all 108 Buddhist texts, to thousands of devotees, in an event that would take months of daily readings and was intended to create peace and prosperity throughout the world.
Fingers crossed.
