Roel Krabbendam

Approaching the Dzong at Punakha

Punakha is famed for its Dzong or castle. It is massive and beautiful, strategically located at the union of the Mother and Father rivers, accessed from a cantilevered bridge over the Mother.

Approaching the Dzong at Punakha

Wide stone steps lead steeply up to a portico sheltering 2 massive golden prayer wheels. Inside are three courtyards, the first administrative and secular and the last strictly religious, and at the end of the last courtyard is a temple accessed through two simple curtains. You are asked to remove your shoes and refrain from photography, and enter a hall filled with golden columns and light filtering down from a second story in the center. Every surface is intricately carved or embossed or painted, the walls depicting the life of the Buddha in intricate pictograms. Gleaming in the semi-darkness at the end of the room are a series of massive golden statues, thrones for king and monk, lines of bowls with water offerings, and alters lined with money left by supplicants. The floors are dark wood and the smell is of wood. Among the golden columns are low carpeted platforms for seating. Monks wander in and out, as do tourists and a cat. Two Korean monks surreptitiously snap pictures.

Cantilivered Bridge over the Mother

This temple is so strangely moving. I thought about the 10 years of work it took to restore the temple after the flooding that almost destroyed it, a glacial lake bursting through its ice dam in the 1990s. I thought about being a craftsman producing just a tiny piece of the intricate work inside. I can’t explain this awkward feeling of sadness in there, a feeling I last felt at the delicate singing of the nuns at a Catholic Center in Benin. Leaving I felt wrung out, and sure I would neither capture the experience in words nor ever forget it.

The entrance to the Dzong at Punakha

Bhutan is described as a tripod: a governance of consensus between an electorate, a king and a religious leader. I asked what the politics was actually like to witness, and our guide described it as very English, with laughing and passionate debate and nose to nose confrontation, and with an aggressive clap thrown at your opponent when a point is considered made. That description at least felt more real than a tripod.

Prayer Wheel inside the portico of the Dzong at Punakha

Later in the day we hike up to the monastery at Chimi Lhakhang, the rituals there designed to promote fertility. We walk among the rice fields below, slipping here and there on the muddy and narrow berms between them. The fields are flooded and everywhere there is mechanized tilling and hand planting. The monks are chanting inside the monastery, women are receiving blessings, and I feel like an intruder.

Looking down from the monestary

Many of the buildings on the walk back to the hotel are painted with huge pink phalluses and hairy testicles, and the prices in the trinket shops are very high.

Patrolling the market at Lobesa

Hotel Vara at Lobesa, the valley from my balcony

Arrival

Some monks in orange prison garb wander by. Wait, that’s not right. (Their robes are actually a gorgeous orange). We’ve been sitting in the airport for a while now, waiting for the plane to Bumthang, only to find out that that it’s cancelled, probably for the next few days.

Much discussion about Plan B ensues, an intricate necklace of connections and hotel reservations and festivals and plane flights suddenly laid to waste by the early monsoon and a drizzle on the runway. Already tired, we finally opt for a 4 hour bus ride to Punakha.

We had lunch near the airport luckily, and just before dusk reached the pass at Dochula for tea and cookies as the clouds moved in and the Queen Mother drove by in a low-key entourage. The 108 chortan commemorating 10 deaths in the Assam uprising of the early 2000s were her daughter-in-law the Queen’s project.

The 108 Chortans at Dochula La, commemorating the 10 dead of the Assam uprising

The road down off the pass is a treachery in the dark, all mud and construction and barely one lane, but our driver is unfazed and finally I fall asleep. Then I fall off my chair, the bus shimmying through the slop. My spine feels well-exercised by the time we get to the hotel, where dinner awaits and a fine room and finally, finally some sleep.

Kolkata

It’s a few hours to Kolkata, which I’m determined to spell that way forever in deference to the Bengali. Expecting dense smears of slum, I see only palm trees and diffuse development and puddles, a garden suburb enveloped in smog, at least from the air.

Cloud or Everest?

The airport is a grim huddle of hangers, we don’t disembark, and I’m not sure finally what we actually saw of the city. We ascend up into a white fog, catch just the briefest glimpse of a blue horizon and what may have been Everest or may have been a cloud, and then dive down a narrow valley into Bhutan. Had the windows opened I might have grabbed some leaves off the Cypress trees on the way down.

On the plane to Bangkok finally, I watch a movie and read my book and treat myself to a glass of wine until Thailand reaches out with mysterious patterns of lighting on the land: straight lines and curlicues of dots. The airport is modern, I exchange $100 for about 3,000 baht, walk up to the wrong customs desk (“visa on arrival” sounded like what I needed, but no…) and eventually find myself in the long, long line of foreign passport holders. 30 minutes later I’m wandering the hall in search of an information booth that will call the hotel for a pickup. A kind lady helps me with her personal cellphone, and after loitering at the curb for a bit longer than expected (am I in the wrong place?) the van arrives. The man at the wheel says nothing to my apology for getting him out so early, and so we ride in silence as the sky turns peaches and rose.

The hotel is a small oasis in a rather dense and working class neighborhood near the airport. Even at this hour, the lady at the front desk is gracious, and a young man shows me upstairs. In front of the chair at the desk in my room it says “Do Not Sit”. It seems a little bossy. At the toilet paper in the bathroom it says “Do Not Place Paper in Toilet”. I’m still wondering exactly how paper and water hose are to be deployed for anything but a pee. The whole thing just makes me anxious. A shower feels pretty good, the air conditioning blows right onto the bed and feels uncomfortable, but 3 pages into my book I fall asleep. Outside, a rooster sounds reveille.

Voices outside wake me at 10:30am and again at 2:30pm before I crawl out of bed and head downstairs. The tour group is out seeing Bangkok says the note slipped under my door in the night, and I’m slightly annoyed with myself for losing the opportunity. Instead I read and write and do some research on spas in Bangkok in case my Bhutan visa and tickets don’t arrive in time. Miraculously though, over the next few hours I get email confirmation of both. What should have taken a couple of weeks my host has produced in 3 days.

Thanon Lat Krabang 730pm

The tour group wanders in, some lathered in sweat from the heat and humidity, and the others just off a tuk-tuk. I guess that’s the way to travel around here. We all walk down the street to a restaurant for dinner, the place covered but outdoors and recessed from the street so that it feels wonderfully apart. I choke on my order (chicken and basil), but the guy next to me orders an amazing fish that arrives whole and way too large for him to eat alone. Wait, I don’t literally choke on my order: it was perfectly good. I just wasn’t very adventurous. The fish was delicious.

I’m awake at 4am the next morning, and the same silent chauffeur bundles me off to the airport. I wander around looking for Bhutan Airways and find it finally, do the ticket-visa-passport shuffle, get herded onto a bus, and get bundled off to the airplane. I’m unusually aware of Americans in this environment, and there are several. I wonder if we’re all trying to ignore each other, the shared language an immediate bond, but really not enough to simply chat with a stranger, everyone here for a different kind of experience anyway, not some flock of geese travesty. In the US you wouldn’t give it a second thought, talking to any one of these people or not.

Starbucks beckoning, even here

Osaka is leaden grey and so is the Fancy airport terminal.
Mercifully, there’s free wifi and a set of plugs to recharge the laptop and the phone. Hideously, my layover is 6 hours long.

Mostly I walk laps down the terminal’s length, all the way down to Starbucks, then all the way back, past Hermes, Gucci, Chanel, Mont Blanc, Ferragamo, Bottega-Venetto, Zegna, Omega, Cartier, Rolex, Tiffany, Burberry, Coach and Duty-Free and Victoria’s Secret. Past café’s and restaurants and self-serve automats and money changers. Also very nice single occupant bathrooms with automatic sliding doors, intended I suppose for the handicapped. It’s a theme. The truth is, with no language I am handicapped.

I’m dozing off as I write this and slightly paranoid I’ll miss my flight because of it. Do I sit down at that restaurant and try some local sake? I have this niggling feeling I’ll fall asleep, the thought of missing my next flight so disturbing I just keep walking. 26 hours awake: this is death by itinerary.

Sit in a plane long enough, and this starts to look good!

The flight to Los Angeles dips down out of a liquid blue sky into that gross sepia yellow Summer fog perennially smothering the California coast, we get left in some remote terminal and shuttle to the main building, and then we endure hilariously bad signage to finally find the Bradley International terminal and the flight to Osaka. All the available seats at the gate are marked handicapped and I occupy two of them without embarrassment. Actually, I walk to the wrong gate and try to figure out why I’m not on the flight before realizing my mistake and then occupying the handicapped seats at the correct gate.

It is an hour layover, and I read my junky novel until the flight is called. A small stab of jealousy hits me as one guy in jeans simply saunters through the business class entry, no luggage or anything, as if he does this every day, this flying half-way across the world. As I step through myself however, this same guy flashes a badge and tells me to come with him. It’s the handicapped seating police! Busted!

It turns out he’s drug enforcement, along with an incredibly large black man standing there with his arms folded, and I apparently fit the profile for drug or money smuggling into Japan. It’s a fact: I attract police attention wherever I go. I’ve met some of the nicest cops though, in just about every country I wander into. I’m so surprised by the takedown that I can’t remember the answers to his questions: how much money do I have, where am I going, am I a permanent resident, what’s my name…tough questions like that. I’m sure he’s still wondering if he should have let this idiot go.

The flight is 12 hours, 3 movies, 125 pages of technical reading and 60 pages of techno-thriller long, plus two meals and a lot of green tea and water. Very nice Mocha chip ice cream, rather tasteless rice pudding topped with scallions and shrimp, and no crunch at all to the croissant. The Chicken was good, the coffee wasn’t. A mixed bag from a culinary perspective.

We get a call about a possible architectural project, I hop a flight to Tucson to, you know, “take a meeting”, and three days later after a veritable orgy of client decisiveness, I’m booked on a flight to Bhutan where I will nominally join a pre-arranged tour group. I have just enough time to buy some new T shirts and another electrical transformer and plug converter…because I can’t freaking find my old one. I drive myself crazy sometimes, people.