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By Root 504 0

and squirm into our clothes, which are stiff and cold. There is still no water, and we brush our teeth without it, outside under a stubby pine tree. We drive up to the Swiss Guest House for breakfast, and it does include toast and honey, just as Rita promised. “This is the last time you’ll eat toast in a while,” Rita says, “unless you can bake bread.” She begins an elaborate explanation of how to bake using some ridiculous pot-in-a-pot-on-a-kerosene-stove method. Lorna and Sasha write it all down. “It’s too complicated for me,” I say. “Anyway, maybe they sell bread in Pema Gatshel.” Rita lifts her eyebrows at this but says nothing. The sun has hoisted itself over the rim of the mountains and the mist in the valley turns gold as it breaks up and floats away, but we are reluctant to leave the warm, pine-scented room, and order more toast and coffee.

On the way out of the valley, we stop at a shop to buy cheese and apple juice, produced in local factories started by the Swiss twenty years ago. The air smells of woodsmoke. Dorji returns from the petrol pump looking grim. There is no diesel in Bumthang, he reports.

“Do we have enough to get to Mongar?” Rita asks.

“Mongar also no diesel,” he says. “Maybe Tashigang.”

Even I know we don’t have enough to get all the way to Tashigang, almost two hundred kilometers away. I am about to suggest that we return to the Swiss Guest House to see if there are any rooms available, instead of getting back into the vehicle, why is everyone getting back into a vehicle that doesn’t have enough fuel to get us to the next petrol pump which is at any rate empty, do people want to be stranded on the top of some godforsaken mountain in the snow and mist where we would freeze or die of starvation before anyone would even think to look for us? It is too late. Everyone is back in the hi-lux already, and they are waiting for me. I don’t understand, I want to wail. But I climb in.

This morning we are on our way up to Trumseng La, the highest pass we will have to cross, almost four thousand meters above sea level. Patches of old snow begin to appear along the road, becoming fresher and deeper as we ascend until we are toiling through winter. Dorji slows the hi-lux down to ten, fifteen kilometers per hour, honking at every corner. We stop when we reach the top, climb out, shivering in the cold and ghostly mist under wind-blasted trees, to read the sign erected by the Public Works Department: “You have reached Trumseng La, Bhutan’s highest road pass. Check Your Brakes. Bash On Regardless. Thank you.”

On the other side of the pass, we are surprised by an enormous truck parked close to the mountain wall. The driver has lit a fire under the fuel tank. “The diesel freezes,” Rita explains. I ask her why this method of thawing the fuel doesn’t blow the entire truck off the side of the mountain, but she says she doesn’t know.

Shortly after Trumseng La, Dorji slows down again and points ahead. The whole mountainside collapsed there last year, Rita informs us, the cliff falling away suddenly, killing 247 road workers who were camped at the site. It looks as if someone has taken a very large, very sharp knife and sliced off the side of the mountain, leaving only a narrow ledge, like decorative trim, on the rock face. Surely we aren’t going to drive across that, I think. There’s no road. The whole thing will fall away under the weight of the truck and we will end up dead at the bottom of the ravine. This is just plain foolishness! This is for the birds! But no, we are to bash on regardless. We cross it very, very slowly. This gives us ample time to study the details of the catastrophe, the deep cracks in the raw, naked rock above, the slide of stone and mud and tree roots straight down a thousand, thousand meters into the ravine below.

I feel worse, somehow, when we are over it. Now there is that between me and Thimphu. Why didn’t I ask to be posted in Thimphu? At least you can’t fall off the road there, at least it has hotels, hot running water, the bakery. Why can’t I live in a hotel in Thimphu for two years?