Radio Shangri-La_ What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth - Lisa Napoli [6]
Dear Lisa:
It was great to meet you last night. I owe you a drink for all that change you dug up for me. When can you get together?
—Sebastian
Sebastian and Harris were leaving on their journey in just a few days, and by the time they returned, I’d be back home in Los Angeles. I could find a way to see him tonight. My calendar was totally open after work. I liked it that way, and this invitation reinforced why: The most interesting experiences seemed to happen spontaneously—just the opposite of how most everything worked in New York City, where every moment had to be planned by the quarter hour, lest you felt as if you might be “wasting” a bit of your precious time.
And yet I found myself hesitating to accept this invitation. I’d witnessed many a friend as they sabotaged or just plain avoided opportunities out of some sort of unexpressed fear that success or happiness might result. They became riddled with anxiety and self-loathing before they’d even sent in that cover letter or gone on that date. Now here I was, similarly paralyzed.
The voice of this other me politely declined. It was easy to justify not seeing him. We lived on opposite sides of the country; launching into a relationship that was destined to be long-distance was preposterous, a mistake I’d made in the past that I’d vowed not to repeat. My, I was getting way, way ahead of myself.
Of course, none of this meant I just forgot him. Clicking out of the Web sites about yuppie family-friendly condos, I did what any smart, savvy person in the age of the Internet would do. I Googled him.
He appeared, from what I could deduce, to be about my age. He had been in the tea business for a decade. He had been going to Bhutan, it seemed, for twenty years. It looked like he’d started as a guide, leading people there on exotic treks.
Exhausting what I could dig up about him, I then searched for “Bhutan,” and realized his offhand comment about my tagging along was a joke. There was no just “getting a visa” to this remote Himalayan nation. Tourism to Bhutan had been permitted only since the 1970s, a time when the nation began to step out of its long-imposed isolation. An airport hadn’t been built until 1984, and even now there were many restrictions; the government-run airline owned only two planes. You couldn’t just tool around the country unescorted; you had to hire a guide to travel with you, and some areas still remained off-limits. To keep out all but the wealthiest visitors, a $200 per person, per day tourist tax was imposed.
Other colorful, curious facts unfolded: Bhutan was considered the last Buddhist kingdom, as others around it like Tibet and Sikkim had been swallowed up in political battles waged by giant neighbors China and India. Little, independent Bhutan had been known as the Land of the Thunder Dragon since the twelfth century, when an important religious man heard a clap of thunder—believed to be the voice of a dragon—as he consecrated a new monastery. The nation had long deflected colonization and outside influence. Christian missionaries had come calling in 1627, but the only lasting legacy of these Jesuit priests from Portugal is a detailed written description of their travels there and the hospitality they enjoyed from the locals, who politely resisted conversion.
Today, the majority of the people subsist by farming. There isn’t a single traffic light anywhere in the country, not even in the capital city, the only capital in the world without them; instead, a uniformed police officer directs cars at a handful of particularly tricky