A Baby in a Backpack to Bhutan: An Australian Family in the Land of the Thunder Dragon

by Bunty Avieson

  I don’t have enough hands to push a trolley and a pram, and we become wedged in the airlock. It takes every ounce of strength but eventually I push the trolley so hard against the bulletproof/childproof/terroristproof glass door that it budges, millimetre by millimetre, until finally we stumble out to join the airport chaos.

  Getting into Bhutan is hard work for anyone. You can’t just buy an air ticket at your local travel agency and fly on in. Bhutan’s only airline, Druk Air, won’t issue a ticket to a foreigner without a visa from the Foreign Ministry in Thimphu. And the only place to collect that is inside the country, at Bhutan’s international airport in Paro.

  It’s complicated, confusing and usually handled by travel operators (for an organised tour) or diplomatic channels (for people coming in on business).

  Kathryn and I fall outside either of these categories, which makes it a bit harder. Mal has left me with a file of documents, including a letter from his Bhutanese friends, Mani Dorji and Karma Yangki, confirming that we are their invited guests. I read it standing in the queue at the Druk Air counter at Bangkok airport at 4 am and wish I had paid more attention to how Mal pronounced the names.

  The Druk Air people are pleased to see Kathryn but shake their head over our mountain of luggage. It’s a small plane with strict weight quotas so they charge an extra A$330, a staggering amount just to get Kathryn’s luggage to Bhutan – she only weighs six kilos. The pre-dawn check-in is because of the fierce winds that sweep across Paro Valley each afternoon. They make landing difficult, so all planes must be safely on the tarmac before noon.

  The flight itself is one of the most awesome in the world, with the plane following the face of the Himalayas. Mal has briefed me well: the best place to view it is at the back, on the left. By the time I get Kathryn, all our luggage and paperwork to the correct counter, we are allocated the last remaining seat – the front right-hand side, wedged into the curve of the plane, my knees, nose and baby pressed hard against the wall dividing us from the half-dozen business class passengers.

  Fortunately, Kathryn just sleeps. It has something to do with the vibration of the engines. As soon as we take off, her little head bobs a few times and she’s out. I give up any idea of struggling past everybody for a visit to the loo, or even crossing my legs, and settle in to think about something else for the five-hour flight.

  We stop briefly in India at Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) to pick up more passengers. The plane is now crammed full, every one of the seventy-two seats taken. Next to me is a large Indian woman, who lets me know straight away she doesn’t like babies. And I didn’t even have to ask.

  We reach altitude and the pilot announces that there’s a problem with an engine and we’ll be returning to Kolkata Airport. A ripple of fear runs up and down the aisle which I manage to keep in check until the flight attendant – amazingly handsome, like a young Elvis Presley but with more feline eyes – leans across my Indian friend and her husband to whisper so that only I can hear: ‘Make sure you hold on tightly to your baby. The landing could be . . . difficult.’

  Now I do want to panic – if only I had the room.

  Indeed it is a rocky landing, causing Kathryn to vomit all over my white long-sleeved cotton shirt. We taxi across the tarmac, stopping well short of the terminal, and are told to leave our personal belongings, take just our passports, and get off the plane. No-one needs to be told twice. All the passengers are off in a heartbeat, the woman with the baby naturally being left till last.

  I’ve noticed that on a plane, having a baby makes me less than popular. In an emergency, I’m beyond the status of leper.

  I have plenty of time to calmly collect some nappies and baby food, coo with Kathryn (who, having vomited up the contents of her stomach, now is blissfully unfussed), and then chase after the fleeing mob.

  Inside Kolkata terminal we are kept in a large hot room. As the sun rises higher in the sky, everything starts to smell – the room, the tarmac – but most of all Kathryn and me. We are putrid. A fresh nappy fixes her and I try to rinse her vomit off me with cold water, but it doesn’t stop the bitter tang of her gastric juices from following me like a cloud. Just the smell of vomit makes me want to vomit. I try to breathe as shallowly as possible and, as there is a hot breeze blowing through the open doors, keep downwind of the other passengers. After a few sweaty hungry hours we are told everything is okay, the problem has been fixed and we can board again.

  The elderly couple behind me (on a package tour from Alaska) spend much of the takeoff loudly discussing where the smell of vomit is coming from. The flight takes an hour and I hear lots of oohs and aaahs from the back on the other side of the plane as Mount Everest is spotted, soaring above the row of jagged peaks that poke through the sky. I try to join in the excitement and press my head hard against the seat on a sharp right angle so that I can just make out a triangle of vivid blue above the wing.

  That decision proves to be a mistake. Flying into Paro is quite simply terrifying. Even worse than navigating the high-rise buildings on the approach to the old Hong Kong airport.

  The plane flies frighteningly close to the mountains, heads straight for one particular peak, does a sudden last-minute turn, then drops out of the sky, soaring so low over fields and farm roofs that I am sure I could reach out and touch them. We land just centimetres from the end of the runway. Paro Airport has one of the shortest runways in the world – just 1830 metres – and the planes need every precious millimetre of it to pull up in time.

  All in all it is undoubtedly the worst and most uncomfortable trip of my life, which is a surprise to Mal, who greets me with a hearty ‘Isn’t the flight fabulous?’ It could be worse. He could tell me I stink. As it is, he doesn’t notice. He hasn’t showered for days and smells about as good as I do.

  For the past few weeks he’s been staying at an old logging camp, nearly 4000 metres above sea level at a place called Chelela. It’s primitive and cold. ‘Showering’ is done standing naked with a bucket of hot water and a plastic jug to pour it over you. Under those conditions Mal decided washing just wasn’t a high priority. Bed has been a mattress on the floor in a draughty wooden hut. While the cast and camera crew have been a few kilometres up the road shooting, Mal has spent most of his time on that bed, running the production from his laptop computer, with a walkie-talkie to talk to people on the set and a Bhutanese remote telephone to keep in touch with the world.

  Mobile networks aren’t up and running in the country yet but Mal has bought long-distance remote phones. As long as he stays within a few kilometres of the base station, kept in a local man’s bedroom, he can talk to anyone, though the cost is astronomically high.

  Kathryn and I arrive a few weeks into filming, just as they have finished on the first location – a small wooden hut deep in the forest – and are moving to the next, the luxurious Kichu resort in Paro. When Mal picks us up from the airport he takes us straight there.

  There are sixteen foreigners working on the film, including Hollywood lighting designer Ray Peschke, who turned down a couple of huge Hollywood movies to be here, and cinematographer Alan Kozlowski, whose special effects company won Oscars for Independence Day and the Robin Williams film What Dreams May Come. This film, Travellers & Magicians, tells the story of a young man who wants to leave behind old Bhutan with its quaint ways and simple joys to find a glamourous new life in America. He shares his journey across Bhutan with a group of travellers, including a monk, who annoys him with irritating truths hidden in a mystical story he weaves along the way, a story of magic, seduction, desire and murder. It is a story within a story.

  Part of Rinpoche’s vision in bringing film-making foreigners into the country is that the fledgling local video industry should benefit. Each foreigner has been teamed with a Bhutanese assistant, eager to learn more about the film business but even more eager to work for Rinpoche, who in this part of the globe is bigger than anyone Hollywood could ever produce.

  In Bhutan, Tibet and the Buddhist world
, Rinpoche is His Eminence Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche, revered as a meditation master, a reincarnate lama, who was removed from his family and raised by monks. Throughout his childhood he received instruction from the greatest Tibetan masters of this era. He is the reincarnation and lineage holder of the great nineteenth-century master Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo. In terms of Vajrayana Buddhism (also called Tibetan Buddhism or Himalayan Buddhism), they don’t come much bigger. To the film world he is known simply as Khyentse Norbu, the movie-making lama.

  Some of the foreigners are Rinpoche’s students and, like Mal, worked with him on his first movie. They have some idea of his maverick style. The newcomers – cinema heavyweights from Hollywood and Australia – have no idea what they have let themselves in for.

  The date for the first day of shooting, 29 September 2002, was set by mo, which is a form of divination done by beads or dice. In this case it was performed by another high Tibetan lama, Orgyen Tobgyal Rinpoche, who specialises in such things. He performed mos for many production decisions on The Cup, including hiring the crew. One mo concerned hiring award-winning film editors John Scott and Lisa-Anne Morris, who were in Paris when they received a call from their agent telling them they had been ‘chosen’ to work on a film with a first-time writer and director, someone they had never heard of, called Rinpoche. With no understanding of anything Buddhist, it is a testament to their sense of adventure that they said yes. The way John tells it, someone ringing out of the blue to say he’d been ‘chosen’ by the universe to work on a project was a pretty compelling invitation. He couldn’t imagine how he could have said no.

  Mal was used to working this way but it must have seemed like bizarre behaviour to some of the foreign crew.

  For the two weeks leading up to the nominated first day of shooting, it rained heavily. Buckets and buckets of it poured down. Their living quarters were awash with mud, lighting equipment was delayed en route from India, and everybody was miserable.

  But, right on cue, the morning of 29 September dawned bright and crisp, not a cloud in the azure sky.

  Before a single frame could be shot, Rinpoche conducted a puja, a ceremony to make offerings to the local deities, and invited everyone working on the film to participate. Possibly it was at this moment, breathing in clouds of pungent smoke and watching maroon-robed monks pour bottles of whisky into a fire, that the new crew got the hint: this was not going to be an ordinary shoot.

  Mal fills me in on it all as we drive through Paro Valley. It is strikingly beautiful, with willow trees lining the roads and terraced rice paddies rising up slowly to the craggy Black Mountain range. The soil is fertile and agriculture thrives, making this one of the wealthier regions.

  It also features some of the oldest and most spectacular buildings, specifically the Bhutanese dzongs, immense white fortresses built on hilltops and ridges throughout the country. Usually they are made up of two wings that house the government and monastery offices, with a courtyard in between. They are often so enormous that entire villages could find refuge there during wars. Each dzong is made up of a series of buildings with cantilevered roofs that follow the contour of the ridge or hill. The walls are inward sloping, which has the effect of making them appear even larger. Amazingly, they were built without blueprints or a single nail.

  One of the country’s most impressive dzongs is in Paro. It is an extraordinary sight, dominating the landscape. Bernardo Bertolucci chose it for some of his 1993 film Little Buddha, on which Rinpoche worked as a consultant. While Rinpoche was the expert on all things Buddhist, he took the opportunity to learn cinema techniques from the great film-making master Bertolucci.

  I start to get a sense of how differently they do things here when we drive down the main street of Paro. Some of the shops have a ladder through their front window – that’s how you get in.

  Kathryn and I are very happy to be reunited with Mal. For the next forty-eight hours she won’t let him go, or he won’t let her go. I’m not sure which. She spends every moment – awake or asleep – snuggled into his chest in a baby sling.

  Filming is going well and the cast and crew make us welcome, but it is a busy schedule so we really only see them at meals, which are rowdy buffet affairs held at a long table in the resort dining hall. The food is great but not so appealing to a baby just getting used to solids. If you take out the curries, the pig fat and the really odorous cheese, it doesn’t leave much. I carefully hide my solitary jar of Vegemite in her pram when we come to breakfast. It’s one thing I know she will eat but, with half-adozen Australians in the crew, there’s not enough to share it around. I feel like an idiot when I see similar jars dotted along the table and realise every Aussie has brought their own.

  After weeks in camp, the crew’s conversation centres mostly around the hot shower they just had and their comfortable beds, or they dissect the day’s shooting. For Kathryn and I the days are long and lazy, mostly spent hanging out in the resort. I write when she sleeps and take her for long walks among the wildflowers by the river when she is awake.

  For everybody else, it’s stress city. In many ways this film is a pressure cooker. The foreign crew members are mostly strangers, from all over the world – Australia, Canada, Germany and America. They are getting to know each other as they work, adapting to the high altitude and fiercely cold environment, all while living rough. That’s on the personal side. On the professional side they are shooting a film in a language they don’t understand, working to a tight budget and schedule, with no margin for delays.

  They are all creative people, and Rinpoche welcomes everyone’s input. That sounds simple enough but is not usually the way film-making works, where everyone has clearly defined roles. On the set of this film, it takes some a bit longer than others to get used to. The first weeks were fraught with creative differences and clashes of egos – among the westerners, that is.

  Normally crews spend weeks in pre-production meetings in which every department (make-up, wardrobe, grips, lighting, camera, sound) goes through each scene to work out what will be required of them. Because the crew live in different countries and the film budget didn’t allow for getting them together before filming, pre-production was done mostly through emails, telephone calls and a website where everything available was posted, from photos of the cast and locations, to maps. The idea was for everybody to log in and get some sense of the place. But because Bhutan is such an extraordinary country, with its own way of doing things, none of them really knew what to expect.

  So the first weeks were tough as they adjusted. Having the first section ‘in the can’ and now to be staying at the comfortable Kichu resort means everyone has a chance to catch their breath.

  Jo Juhanson, the technical co-ordinator from Australia, is a gruff but jolly bloke. He has worked on films in New Guinea, Vanuatu and Mexico, as well as Australia (Babe, Chopper and The Year My Voice Broke), and is coping well with the physical rigours, but not so sure about some of the other stuff. He has never met a Rinpoche before, much less worked for one or taken part in a puja, and it’s all making him a bit nervous.

  ‘You’re not into this Buddhist crap, are you?’ he asks straight up over breakfast.

  I nod timidly.

  He shakes his head, clearly disappointed. ‘Jeez. If I go home Buddhist, my girlfriend will kill me.’

  The Bhutanese crew members, on the other hand, are finding this whole film-making gig to be a wonderful novelty and a social occasion. They are mostly from Thimphu and because the capital is so small, if they aren’t personally related, there is a fair chance they at least know of each other. They feel blessed to be working with Rinpoche and delighted to welcome all these foreigners to their country. They are happy and accommodating, no matter what they are asked to do.

  The cast is a wonderfully diverse group of people and includes a monk trained in pure mathematics who plays a tractor driver, an official from the Royal Monetary Authority (Bhutan’s Reserve Bank), a lieutenant colonel in the King’s bodygu
ard (a giant of a man whose muscular calves are bigger than Kathryn’s waist), a BBS (Bhutanese Broadcasting Service) TV reporter with a degree in journalism from the University of California and, in a starring role, a crusty old stall-holder from Thimphu market.

  As on The Cup, none of the cast has any acting experience. During that shoot, starring mostly Tibetan monks, the average scene required only three takes – which, according to Rinpoche, was a tribute to the powers of concentration from meditation.

  In Travellers & Magicians the cast are laypeople and each had to audition for their role. Eighteen months before shooting began and when the script was still at draft stage, two Bhutanese sisters, Karma Yangki and Phuntsho Wangmo, started scouring the country for suitable characters. A photo of each possibility was emailed to Rinpoche wherever he was in the world.

  Feature film making is almost unheard of in Bhutan. There is a fledgling video industry but it isn’t considered glamorous, or even a real job, by the majority of Bhutanese. Often the sisters had to be quite sneaky in their approaches, as when casting the important role of the film’s monk. Sonam Kinga, a highly respected Bhutanese scholar, who speaks eight languages and translated Sophocles’ play Antigone from English to the national language Dzongkha, was hired to translate the play. (Rinpoche had written it in English but wanted to film it in Dzongkha.) The sisters videotaped Sonam Kinga explaining his translations and how he saw the characters, and sent the tape to Rinpoche. In fact, that was his audition – and he passed brilliantly.

  Early in 2002, Rinpoche had held auditions in Karma Yangki’s lounge room. His annual personal retreat, during which he withdraws from the world to do private meditation practice, interrupted his participation but three months later he came back and did the rest. All the roles were filled except one: Tashi, one of the two male leads. The sisters had been unable to find someone with the special qualities that Rinpoche required and were still looking a fortnight before shooting started.