Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [16]
From Dochu La, we descend through mossy fir trees to a forest of shiny-leaved oak and rhododendron in bloom, some trees so crowded with scarlet flowers I almost laugh. Cartoon trees! Impossible trees! I like the magnolia better, the simple white flowers stark against black branches. “I read somewhere that the magnolia is one of the oldest flowers in the world,” Sasha says when we stop to take a photograph. This is something I would like to look up. In an encyclopedia, in a library. “Do any of the school libraries have encyclopedias?” I ask Rita.
“The college in Kanglung has,” she says.
“But not our schools?”
“Where you guys are going, you’ll be lucky if there’s even a library.”
There are a thousand new things from the orientation course I want to find out about: how reincarnate lamas are discovered, the characteristics of the Tibeto-Burman language group, who Francis Younghusband was. And all the things I’ve been meaning to look up for the past several years come back to me with renewed urgency: the meaning of “phylogenetic,” the origin of the Mafia, whirling dervishes. And then there are all the things I wish I could look up: why I have exiled myself to such a faraway place, and if I will forget everything I know in the valleys of eastern Bhutan, and who I will be when I come out.
The road twists and writhes and burrows through forests. Rita says there are an average of seventeen curves per kilometer on the roads of Bhutan. Someone once counted. At an average speed of thirty kilometers per hour, it will take us three days to drive the 550-odd kilometers to Tashigang District. I eat crackers and Gravol to calm my stomach. The hi-lux grinds its way up to passes eerie with snow and silent white mist lying over the withered trees and the drip drip of water on black rocks, then descends into valleys, tangled green and warm. Monkeys scatter as we turn a corner. Grey langurs, someone says. We pass through tiny villages, hamlets of three or four houses. The country seems almost empty to me. So much unmarked, unmarred wilderness.
The two- or three-story houses have ground-floor walls made out of whitewashed stone or mud, and upper levels of mud and wood. The narrow windows with their scalloped tops have sliding wooden slats to let in light and shut out the rain or the cold. The exterior walls are decorated with elaborate paintings, in faded blues and reds, of lotus flowers, deer, birds, and giant stylized phalluses (“to ward off evil spirits,” Rita says). Ladder steps lead to heavy wooden doors with irregular latches and locks. The roofs are covered with stone slates, or wooden shingles held down by large stones. Newer houses have roofs of corrugated iron sheeting. In the crawl space under the eaves, wooden barrels and boxes are stored, leathery items I cannot identify, earthen gourds and coils of frayed rope. Women weave at looms set up in the pale winter sunlight, and children, their cheeks dark red with cold, wave at us solemnly as we pass.
The scenery changes almost every time we turn a corner. Shadowy pine, sunlit oak and beech, dry, hot groves of subtropical pine, called “chir pine” according to Rita, dense, moist jungly forests. Sometimes the mountains roar up, steep and black and haughty. Other times they are more gentle, sprawling, spreading, dissolving into haze. In these I can trace profiles, a smooth forehead, an aquiline