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Timing and circumstance collided to ignite this love affair. It didn’t hurt that I had a lifelong fascination with anyplace in the throes of evolution. The college I’d attended had been around for only a decade when I first enrolled. The most exciting work experiences I’d had were with start-up ventures, companies where we made it all up as we went along. In many ways, Bhutan was a start-up, too—an ancient, once-secluded kingdom transitioning now at warp speed. A new king, a new democracy about to dawn, a new constitution. The twin cultural influences of technology and media were spreading rapidly, challenging and eroding Bhutan’s very foundation. It would need to quickly adjust to interruptions from the world outside its borders, the world that had been blocked out for so long.

Being in Bhutan today felt like taking a ride back in a time machine, to that transformative era that much of the rest of the developed world had experienced a hundred years prior, before trains and cars and electronic communications changed how we were connected to one another, and so, the very rhythm of life. And yet, this moment for Bhutan was entirely different. This never-colonized kingdom was geographically landlocked, but given its skill at isolation, it might have been a remote island; the changes and developments here, now that they were permitted, were accelerating at a frenzied pace.

There was another, more important reason I’d become so enamored. It had to do with the people here: the cadence of their speech, their wry sense of humor, their odd brand of innocence, and their newfound worldliness spurred by the infiltration of their borders. The fierce pride they had in their history, in their kings. The pace of their days. The superstitions and deep spirit of Buddhism that informed everything they did. Everyone here knew everyone, or at least knew how to find the person you were looking for. Each person had a unique role. Karma was the artist and Kinley the newspaperman and Pema the head of the environmental group. There was a feeling of interconnectedness, a sense of community, a camaraderie I’d experienced only on a college campus.

The non-Bhutanese I’d been meeting were a key factor in my reaction, too. I’d never met such adventurous souls, people so committed to living life outside the sphere of comfort and routine most aspire to have. I’d become friends with a handful of other outsiders: a divorced nurse from Canada who had hit the road once her daughters were grown, volunteering her skills in countries that needed it. A midwestern couple about the same age as she, committed to doing the same. They and the others I met were active participants in the world. People who went out of their way, really out of their way, to meet other humans unlike themselves, and see how they really lived. Not from a hotel or a tour bus, and most certainly not on a screen. No View-Master living for them.

As a member of the demographic majority in the United States, I also appreciated the bizarre, humbling wonder of being a minority in Bhutan. A minority most people here had trouble identifying. I liked it, even in the rare times it was uncomfortable. The better-educated citizens know about the United States, and a subset of those know it well enough to identify specific, obscure locations, often places they’d gone to study. But the majority of the people know only that you look different—that you aren’t Bhutanese. Being there put the United States in a completely different perspective, the way staring into the vastness of a natural wonder like the Grand Canyon does. The United States may be the superpower, and the center of your universe, but it isn’t the center of everyone else’s. More reminders that the world does not revolve around one way of eating, thinking, being.

Loving Bhutan is, like so many love affairs, complicated. It’s not like becoming a Francophile, or a fan of Hawaii, or using every vacation to visit all the national parks or Major League Baseball stadiums or NASCAR racetracks