My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere

by Orlean, Susan

  For centuries, Bhutan was more or less left alone, a pinpoint in the eastern Himalayas, encircled by India and Tibet but essentially untouched by them. It is a little country, no bigger than Switzerland—a fretwork of rhododendron stands and pine forests and rice fields and cattle farms. Its southern tier is flat and warm, an extension of the fertile northern Indian plains. From there, the land rises up like an escalator until it reaches the top floor of Tibet. Bananas and oranges grow in the south; in the north, yaks ramble across the snowy mountains. Bhutan’s tiny population is not surprising when you consider the ruggedness of the landscape, but it is very surprising when you consider that it is flanked by the two most populous nations on earth.

  Most of what the Bhutanese need is grown or harvested or handmade locally. Until 1974, the chief source of foreign exchange was the sale of commemorative postage stamps honoring all manner of things: the seventy-fifth anniversary of Boy Scouting, the dogs of Bhutan, the birth of the Royal British Baby, Donald Duck, World Population Year, the Mask Dance of the Judgment of Death. Until 1962, Bhutan had no paved roads, no electricity, no hospitals, no central education system, no newspaper, no television, no modern postal service, no airport, no diplomatic contact with the West, no industry. There are still no stoplights.

  When Jawaharlal Nehru visited in 1958, he had to go overland from Delhi. The trip from the Indian border to Thimphu is only a hundred and twenty-seven miles, but it required six days of travel on foot and by mule. In the early fifties, after Tibet was seized by China, King Jigme Dorje Wangchuck began modernizing Bhutan. For one of the first major development projects, the Indian government sent crews to Bhutan on two-year assignments to pave their way through the valleys and hills. When they were done, Bhutan had two thousand miles of new ribbon roads.

  THE CEREMONIES of Kagyupa Buddhism are as methodical as knitting. In addition to wearing the traditional dress, supplicants at Chime Lhakhang must bring specific offerings: a kilo of butter, a bottle of locally made wine, cookies, sticks of incense, bags of candy, and a modest amount of money in small denominations. Tovya Wager, the mother of the famous blond baby, did the shopping for the American group. This was Tovya’s third trip to Bhutan. The first, three years earlier, was a reconnaissance mission for her travel company, which specializes in adventure vacations in Asia and was considering adding Bhutan to its roster. Around the same time, Tovya and her husband, Harry, had been trying to have a baby. Tovya has blond hair and watery green eyes and dainty features and the strong back of a baggage handler. At the time of her first trip to Bhutan, she was forty-four years old and had traveled everywhere in the world. Her sentences often begin with phrases like “The first time I was in a lean-to in northern Laos” and “When I was staying with former headhunters in Borneo.” She was an old hand at infertility treatments and had grown so discouraged that she had applied to adopt a baby from China. She was not, however, thinking about babies when she went to Bhutan. It was really just happenstance—a Bhutanese friend who knew that Tovya wanted a child introduced her to Pem Dorji, then the governor of the Bumthang district, and he offered to petition the clergy at Chime Lhakhang, using the blessing of the Japanese woman as a precedent. I met the governor when Tovya went to his house to introduce Rachelle. As he was giving her his baby gifts—a roll of cloth and a prayer scarf—he recalled his work on behalf of Tovya’s fertility. Our visit took place moments after he had finished a meeting with the Indian ambassador and right before he began work on a speech celebrating Bhutan’s rare black-necked crane. I mentioned that this lineup of tasks—conception, international politics, birds—seemed interesting. “I have a lot of responsibilities,” he said in formal, British-inflected English. “Being a governor in Bhutan is an all-around job.”

  Tovya didn’t get pregnant after her first blessing, so she put it out of her mind and continued to work on a Chinese adoption. A year later, she needed to return to Bhutan on business. This time, both Governor Pem Dorji and her friend urged her to get a fertility blessing at Jampa Lhakhang Drub, an annual festival in the town of Jakar. By then, Tovya was forty-six. She was blessed at the festival in Jakar and went home without any great expectations. Four months later, she was pregnant. When she found out, she faxed her friend and Governor Pem Dorji and promised to bring the baby to Bhutan as soon as she could.

  So this was originally just a presentation trip, a chance for Tovya to display the baby to the monks, the governor, the Jakar festival organizers, and everyone else who had bestowed their blessings on her. Then she began to wonder whether she could bring other Americans to Chime Lhakhang and Jakar. The governor and the festival organizers said she could, even though the idea of childless Americans flooding the holy sites of Bhutan was not perfectly in keeping with Gross National Happiness goals. Tovya advertised the trip in travel magazines as “Fertility Blessing: Spiritual Bhutan,” but the fine print noted that you were not required to be seeking fertility as a condition of travel (“Don’t worry, you can just observe—not be blessed if having a child is not what you are seeking”), and most of the people in the group—a retired schoolteacher, a couple in their sixties from Washington, an unattached lawyer, and Tovya’s mother and husband—were just observing, not trying to conceive. The wishful thinkers were two couples from California, professionals in their forties. The women had tried and failed to become pregnant by other, more conventional and technological means. One of them—I’ll call her Ellen—was a lawyer turned artist, and her husband was a lawyer turned actor. The other woman, whom I’ll call Dina, ran a business in Los Angeles; her husband managed a restaurant. Both couples were fed up with science, having had no luck with anything, from hormone treatments to gamete transfers. Ellen hadn’t even been planning to go to Bhutan; she had contacted Tovya with some questions about China, but once she mentioned her efforts to get pregnant and Tovya mentioned Rachelle, she felt that the trip was fated. Dina, who had miscarried several times, was skeptical but hopeful. “Anything that keeps me hopeful has got to help,” she explained. “You need to feel hopeful somehow.”

  We drove to Chime Lhakhang on the twisting Indian-built roads, along the edges of the high hills and the rims of the riverbanks, in the shade of bamboo stands and under the shadow of Gangkar Punsum, the tallest unconquered mountain in the world. White farmhouses bunched together in the valleys like sheep. Once in a while, we noticed a house high up on a mountainside that had no visible means of support or access—or, for that matter, method of construction. It was as if it had been launched up to its perch by a rocket. Most of the oncoming traffic was baggy-kneed cattle. Golden langur monkeys—lucky creatures, in Bhutanese custom—loafed by the side of the road. An old woman appeared around a foggy bend, herding a dozen piebald goats and walking a good-luck pig on a leash. Almost every mountain pass and every bridge and every curve in the road bristled with prayer flags that whipped and snapped in the wind. In a schoolyard near the National Mushroom Centre, kids on recess lurched around on stilts. Next to the school was the Family Planning Centre and the turnoff to Chime Lhakhang. An hour later, we were there.

  The temple is a mile and a half off the road, so we parked as close as we could, beside a handful of houses, and set out. A group of Nepalese watched us coolly as we walked by. Bhutan and Nepal are uneasy neighbors. Nepal is Hindu and has laid itself open to tourism, becoming a motley way station in the Himalayas. Almost no Bhutanese leave the country; Nepali emigration, by contrast, is constant, and so many Nepalese have settled in Bhutan that they make up almost a quarter of the country’s population. In the eighties, Bhutan became aggressively nationalistic in an effort to preserve its cultural identity: Nepali ceased to be a language of instruction, and Dzongkha was mandated in addition to English; the prohibition against television was strengthened; and, in public, citizens were obliged to wear traditional Bhutanese dress (handwoven knee-length robes, or gos, for men and ankle-length jumpers called kiras for women). During this time, many illegal Nepalese immigrants departed, and tens of thousands more
who had lived in Bhutan for decades were encouraged to leave—or forced to leave, according to human rights groups.

  We passed farmhouses decorated with penis paintings, where old men sat playing checkers and a few spotted dogs were chewing their nails, and then we crossed onto the terraced fields. It was a bright, cold day, and the puddles in the fields were milky with frost. A woman in a striped kira stood amid hairy haystacks, separating wheat from chaff. The temple was visible from a mile away. Its walls were white and bare, as if they had been scoured; against the green fields and the green hills, it looked like a cue ball on a pool table. At the gate of the temple, a young monk, perhaps ten years old, met us and led us the rest of the way—up the side of a hill and around a column containing religious offerings, which was called a “chorten.” To ensure good fortune, we circled around the chorten clockwise. Then we filed through the courtyard of the temple, where a few dozen monks in burgundy robes stood watching us. The wall behind them was covered with an enormous painting of the Divine Madman, who was portrayed as a sort of unstoppable galloping force, in rich reds and cobalt and gilt. In an alcove stood a prayer wheel as big as a cement mixer—hundreds of prayers had been handwritten on cloth and then stuffed inside a wooden cylinder; spinning the wheel sends all its wrapped prayers to heaven on your behalf.

  At last we got to the guts of the place, the dim, sweet-smelling altar room, where there was a towering statue of Drukpa Kunley draped with flower necklaces and jewelry and surrounded by urns and candles and tiny golden jars. The young monk stepped aside for the senior monk, who would perform the ceremony. He was a big, quiet man with an egg-shaped head and an egg-shaped body and a grave, steady gaze. First he blessed Tovya’s baby, then he motioned the group to draw together. Ellen placed butter, Krackjack Biscuits, Pizza Flavor Chicken Brand Chips, and candy at the foot of the statue of Drukpa Kunley; in the low light, I could make out other packages of biscuits and chips, which had been left earlier in the day. The rest of the ceremony was sort of a dream—a tap on the head with Drukpa Kunley’s fifteenth-century archery set, a drink of holy water, a tap with the ivory penis, and another with the wooden one. The monk spoke in a low, flowing voice and in a sinking sigh, something that sounded achingly sad and kind and went on for a long time. Dice were thrown to get lucky numbers for the women; then names for the predestined babies were drawn from a tiny, ancient deck of name cards; and, as soon as it was over, everyone started to cry.

  “I don’t know why I’m crying,” Ellen said. She and Dina embraced. “I’m going to have a girl,” Ellen went on.

  “I know it.” Dina nodded and dried her eyes on her sleeve.

  “A little Bhutanese girl,” Ellen said. “A little divine madwoman.” We walked back through the farm fields by moonlight. Some children from the village, singing a warped, Bhutanese version of “Happy Birthday,” serenaded us all the way.

  THERE WAS AN ADVERTISEMENT for a vasectomy clinic (“No Incision, No Stitch, Walk Home in Ten Minutes!”) behind the front desk of our hotel in Punakha and a desolate family-planning booth in Jakar—the government is trying to reduce Bhutan’s overly vigorous birth rate to two percent within the next five years—but otherwise we kept seeing fertility symbols everywhere we went. Plus we couldn’t stop talking about babies: the marvel of Tovya’s conception; complaints from those who had received hormone injections; the delivery sagas of the three women on the trip who had had children decades ago. Perhaps because we were so far from home, in a place as unusual as Bhutan, we didn’t notice how odd it was to discuss episiotomies and sperm motility with a group of relative strangers.

  The festival in Jakar, our stop after Chime Lhakhang, is notoriously phallocentric, and Tovya wanted to have the group blessed there, because she believed that it had made the difference between her first, disappointing trip to Bhutan and her second, fruitful one. Jakar is a dot of a town in the Bumthang district of central Bhutan, a gold green valley of rice terraces bordered by the Black Mountains and the wall of the Himalayan foothills. The festival was held on a flat, dusty lawn beside an old stone temple. A small stage had been erected for dignitaries at one end and a shade tent set up on the other. When we arrived, the current governor of Bumthang, Jigme Zangpo, and several of his assistants were already seated on the stage, snacking on cracked corn and cookies, watching the huge crowd that had formed on the perimeters of the lawn. Everyone was dressed in Bhutanese clothing made of bright woven material of claret red and deep blue and piney green and yellow, in a scramble of patterns—glen plaids, rep stripes, geometric rickrack—and in the full, sharp mountain light they looked lucent, jeweled. Now and again, you might see a pair of Nikes or a Yankees baseball cap, or a Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt peeking out of a robe, but otherwise it was a vision without reference to time or place or to any world outside this one.

  The governor’s assistant noticed Tovya and the baby across the lawn and motioned for us to join the group onstage. He reached for the baby and said, “I knew it. The spiritual leader of our festival is very auspicious. We are very happy to see our successful outcome.”

  The governor leaned over to tickle the baby. He was a portly, handsome man with a walrus mustache and a Caesar haircut. I asked him whether he was prepared for Bumthang to become a mecca for reproduction if word of Tovya’s success circulated. He tilted his head and thought for a few moments. On the lawn, the festival dancing had begun. The jester, the atsara, was sashaying around, swinging a wooden phallus. He wore a red wooden clown mask and a long robe that looked as old as time. Behind him, four dwarfs in puffy skirts and two dancers dressed as cows feinted and boxed. A pregnant dog with swollen ankles wandered onto the lawn, made a few tight circles, and then lay down and took a nap.

  “It would be nice if many Americans came for the festival,” the governor said. “I’m proud to say we can host two hundred and fifty-six tourists at a time in Bumthang. We don’t have any limits, but we would want only as many as we are capable of accommodating. The festival has always been a neat family event. If there are too many outsiders, the family feeling isn’t there.”

  Does the ritual work?

  “You have to have inner respect for it, but it will work if you have any type of devotion,” he said. On the lawn, two clowns had captured the atsara; a monk dressed as a tree stole the wooden penis from him and then raced around waving it at the crowd. The children in the audience clapped and screamed.

  The governor turned to Tovya and asked, “Did you have an easy delivery? It’s often risky to have a baby at your age.”

  She dandled the baby on her knee. “Very easy,” she said. “And I felt great throughout the pregnancy.”

  “Maybe it was your faith,” the governor said. “Some things are simply beyond science.” He leaned over and cooed to the baby, “Taa-shi! Taa-shi!” The baby squeezed his nose and then began chewing on one of Tovya’s credit cards. “Does she take up most of your time? Or do you have a nanny?” the governor asked. He adjusted his prayer shawl on his shoulder and shifted his ceremonial sword around his waist. An old man spinning a squeaky prayer wheel rambled across the stage, dipping respectfully toward the dignitaries. The clowns had released the atsara, and the fertility-blessing ceremony was about to begin. We were each handed a penis of stone or wood and lined up so the atsara could drip water from his phallus onto our heads. As we left, the governor shook hands with us and whispered, “I know you’ll be back with your tiny tots someday.”

  ONE OF THE MOST SACRED DAYS in the Bhutanese calendar is Lhabab Duechhen, the day Buddha is believed to have descended from heaven; this year, it happened to fall on the day we were heading back to Thimphu—and would be driving past Chime Lhakhang again. To visit Chime Lhakhang on Lhabab Duechhen is to be overdetermined, luckwise—sort of a providential belt and suspenders. So of course we stopped again, leaving the car in the same spot in the tumbledown village, tramping again across the broad, wet meadow and up the round hill to the Divine Madman’s temple. The young monk again met us at the gate of the
temple, and we climbed to the top of the hill along with a score of other people, all Bhutanese, who were there on account of its being an especially lucky day. Many of them were kids praying for good grades on their upcoming exams, but the rest were young women—dark haired, slim, somber in their brilliant kiras—who had come to ask Drukpa Kunley for help in having children. It was, just then, a particularly propitious moment in the history of the kingdom of Bhutan. The king was about to celebrate his forty-third birthday, and he and his four wives—four sisters from a prominent Bhutanese family—were traveling around the country in their royal blue Land Cruisers, dropping in at local birthday events. Also, the only remaining district in Bhutan that was without telephones had at last been connected; the phones were being turned on that day. The weather was especially fine, too—cold enough to suggest that winter would be coming, but so sunny that it was impossible to believe it would be anything other than a favorable day. We hadn’t had a chance to do any grocery shopping, so we didn’t have cookies and candy and butter and wine, and we wondered whether we would be welcomed in the temple on such a holy day. The monk who blessed us the last time came to the door and saw that we were empty-handed, but he made it clear that he remembered us and waved us in anyway.

  I went back to Bhutan a few months later, to take another look around. Right away, I recognized people I had met on my first trip, and they recognized me. “You were here with the American baby,” a lot of them said to me, then asked, “What happened to the women who came to Chime Lhakhang and the festival at Jakar?” I told them what I knew. Dina had become pregnant a few weeks after getting home but then had miscarried. Ellen was working with a healer and a nutritionist but so far hadn’t had any luck. Tovya had decided to spend more time with Rachelle Tashi and less time on the road, although she had organized another group to come for the fertility blessings in the fall.