Radio Shangri-La_ What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth - Lisa Napoli [71]
By 6:00 a.m., we were sprawled across the couch and chairs in the living room, fighting drunken exhaustion. I turned on the television to get one last glimpse of the morning prayers that kicked off the broadcasting day. The throaty chants of the monks had soothed me each morning, even though I never learned what they were saying. I would miss them. Now they were being drowned out by the sound of the car that had arrived in the driveway to take me to the airport. I said good-bye to Andy and left him to get some rest.
Blinking back sleep on that scary drive to the airport in Paro, I marvelled at the sky as it turned from black to gray to blue in the sunrise; I didn’t want to miss a sight or a sound in my last few hours in the kingdom. I needed to sear as much of this landscape as I could into memory. There would be plenty of time to rest on the seventeen-hour flight home from Bangkok.
There’s a tall blond woman ahead of me in the line at the ticket counter. Draped over her right shoulder is one of those tote bags you get when you give money to a public television station. Hers says KCET, which happens to be in Los Angeles. A fair-haired person alone would have caught my eye, much less one carrying a bag with a logo from back home. Friendly chitchat follows, the “where do you live” niceties that happen when you find something in common with a fellow traveler, far away from home. She points to a cluster of people across the ticketing area and tells me she’s been here on vacation with her husband’s family for the last two weeks. Seven of them, staying at the swanky Aman where I’d had lunch on the king’s birthday. I fire up my mental calculator: Four rooms at a thousand dollars each, times fourteen days … $56,000 would construct an entire village.
It wasn’t till I learned about this family that it occurred to me—really hit me—just how different the experience of being a tourist in Bhutan would be from mine. Particularly if you traveled deluxe. Just to get there you have to be moderately well off. The plane ticket from Bangkok to Paro alone isn’t cheap—around $800 round-trip. Of course, you have to get to Bangkok, too, although flying in through India might shave off a couple of hundred bucks. The $200-a-day minimum “tourist tax” on each person is the kingdom’s way of deterring an onslaught of budget tourists and backpackers on spiritual quests, like the people who swarm to neighboring Nepal and India. Bhutan doesn’t mind spiritual seekers; it just wants to attract a higher grade, and discourage them from staying too long.
The blond woman’s sister-in-law winds up sitting across the aisle from me on the plane and she’s excited to show off her pictures. She’s a good photographer and has a serious professional camera, not one of those point-and-shoot pocket-size digital things I own. For the past two weeks, she’d been squired around to splendid sights, and pulls up evidence of her travels on her state-of-the-art Mac laptop. Monasteries gleaming in the sun, portraits of stately dzongs set against spectacular mountain vistas that I’d gone nowhere near. Gorgeous portraits of smiling Bhutanese of all ages; exotic flowers captured close-up in supersaturated colors. The promised Shangri-la has been served up to this group on a beautiful, hand-carved platter. The pièce de résistance is the family portrait: all seven handsome adults, wrapped up in the finest and brightest hand-woven kira