A brush with beauty and mortality in Bhutan, the Land of the Thunder Dragon | Eye News,The Indian Express
With its druk, dzong and datshi, holidays in the landlocked Himalayan country offer a glimpse of forever
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Peace is overrated. When our life flashes before our eyes in that penultimate moment, will we remember the calm or the torrents? The quiet or the adventure? One such life-flashing memory for me arrived in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, as close as you can get to the last Shangri-la. We were driving from Phobjika to Bumthang Valley. The dells and hills were ablaze with blinding snow. The freshly snowed-in mountain road was as treacherous as Judas with his kiss, making our car skid to the edge of the great fall with the slightest break. Our hearts were sinking like the Titanic as my partner, Aditya, drove us through not one, but four mountain passes before the roads were completely snowed in. And we lived to tell the tale.
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Druk Yul — the Land of the Thunder Dragon — is a place at the edge of imagination. A song passed down centuries in a timeless rhyme. It is a land of fiercely guarded traditions, no traffic lights, pink-cheeked dzongs against brilliant blue skies and thasha — the ashes of ancestors — arranged by the hillsides and eternalised in clay. A land where every other ravine is associated with an ogress, where 70 per cent of the country is shrouded in primeval forests; where butter is not on toast but in tea and chilli is not an ingredient but the main dish!
Bhutan opened in the 1970s for the world and, today, tourists spend a mandated $250 a day to witness its wonders. A marriage was arranged between the mystic and modern with the monarchy lifting the ban on television in 1999. The mobile-toting monks, men and women clad in gho and kira, prayer wheels swirling in mountain streams, and music bands playing guitar to the tune of Lamborghini in the night clubs of Paro are proof of arranged marriages that last.
Rating: 5