Radio Shangri-La_ What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth - Lisa Napoli [85]
THE GIANT ELECTRONIC signboard announced arrivals from all kinds of exotic places: Manzanillo. Singapore. Manila. Ngawang’s plane from India by way of Frankfurt, the board said, was delayed. Just like my first visit to Bhutan, I thought, as I surveyed the waiting area. Everyone here was expecting someone who had journeyed from another land; most likely none had ventured all the way from Thimphu.
More than three hours elapsed before my friend emerged from the bowels of the airport. She looked so much less formal than she would in her Bhutanese dress, more like a typical college student: a sweatshirt, an orange backpack, faux Crocs to match, hair pulled back in a ponytail. Behind her, she dragged a small suitcase. She looked tired but not depleted. The forgiveness of youth, this representative of the modern Bhutan. Ngawang now could count herself among the elite few from her country to have actually seen a plane, been on one, much less flown halfway around the world.
“How was it, how was it?” I asked, hugging her tight, aware that I was completely incapable of imagining what it would be like to land in the United States for the first time. During college a friend from Switzerland had come home to Brooklyn with me for Thanksgiving, her first trip to the New York metropolitan area. When she caught a look at the lower Manhattan skyline, she’d gasped, loudly, at the live vision of a vista she’d seen a thousand times in the movies. From her, I learned the wonder of seeing for real a place you’d long imagined, and how perceptions rarely matched reality.
“Okay,” said Ngawang, who wasn’t nearly as demonstrative. “Long. What day is it?”
“It’s Friday evening.”
“I left on Friday evening. Wow. That’s cool.”
The elasticity of time as it relates to world travel was just the beginning of a series of events that would elicit that exclamation. The next phenomenon was the five-story parking garage, crammed with cars of all shapes and colors and sizes, far more varieties than the five types of vehicles that roam the streets of Bhutan. Despite the cool, nighttime desert air, I flipped down the top of my dusty old two-seater convertible; Ngawang had never been in, much less seen, one before. Out of the airport and onto the eight-lane freeway we went, weaving through the balletic tangle of traffic. Cruising sixty-five miles an hour on a straight open road was as much a thrill for her as riding the Cyclone at Coney Island would be. Especially when we ascended the long arc of a ramp to exit the 105 so we could spill out on the even wider 110. I could feel Ngawang gasping for breath with the speed, motion, and height.
We were surrounded, in every direction, by twinkling lights.
“There aren’t this many people in all of Bhutan.” Ngawang sighed.
She was right. If you drew a circle on a map around downtown Los Angeles, it was likely to contain the equivalent of the kingdom’s population—around 650,000 people. The Los Angeles school system had more students in it than her entire country had citizens. Ngawang’s sensory overload reached a new dimension as we neared the towering buildings of downtown, shimmering in the distance. As we got closer and closer, they commanded the sky, stern and intimidating. The modern, manufactured version of that spectacular range of mountains I’d visited with the tour guides.
We drove inside another parking garage, this one with a remote-controlled electric gate. An elevator transported us to the eighteenth floor, a height she’d never experienced from inside a building. The floor-to-ceiling glass windows in my apartment offered Ngawang a panoramic view of twinkling lights flickering in every direction. The centerpiece was the stainless-steel