bhutan – bumthang and gangtey

Bumthang valley at dawn

Another day, another valley. Bumthang is much more gently sloping with flat bottoms and real fields, though it’s mainly cattle here, as it’s too high and cold for rice to grow. It has an Alpine feel with its heavily pine wooded slopes rising up and up, and there is a distinct Swiss influence, brought by a Swiss national who married and settled here, importing alpine cattle breeds, and knowledge of emmental style cheese, yogurt, beer and so on. The Bhutanese have never looked back and awarded him the equivalent of a knighthood.

We stay in a pleasant Swiss chalet of a hotel on the flanks of the valley, and have some gentle walks around the valley, visiting a little village where they open up the temple specially for us to see. An ancient wizened man and a hip-hop style youth take us inside. The afternoon sunlight slants across the dark space full of painted images and sil hangings. The village puja was held the weekend before and we are offered to drink the village rice wine brew – from a human skull – plus some holy water which we are meant to sip and brush on our hair in the approved manner.

The next day takes us to the head of the valley on the world’s bumpiest road, to the last village, Ngang Lhakhang – the next habitation going north is in Tibet. We are privileged to be able to see an annual village festival, or tsechu, where traditional dances are performed in front of the temple. Everyone from the valley and the hills around is there in their colourful Bhutanese costumes, down to the smallest child, and there is quite a buzz. People watch the elaborate rituals, lasting up to an hour, some of which are more like mime plays with masked figures acting out a familiar legend. A party of westerners are there filming as part of a project to record traditional dances before they fade out. An English guy in a gho collars us and talks enthusiastically about what we are seeing, interpreting the ritual for us. It seems the festival is held when the Pleiades ‘mate’ with the moon every year about this time. There are very few other tourists there and it feels very special to be witnessing this, seeing everyone enjoying themselves, from the smallest kids to the village drunk.

So this is the furthest point east and next day we retrace our route before turning off to the high valley of Gangtey. This is famous for the annual visit of the black necked cranes, which winter here then return to Tibet and Siberia in the summer. Only a few hundred exist and they are carefully protected. Rinchen takes us for a gentle early morning walk around the valley floor, which is like a peat bog in the wet season but dry now. The valley looks exactly like the Scottish highlands, though we are now at over 3000m, and a kind of dense, dwarf bamboo takes the place of heather. We are able to get very close to the grazing cranes, before they start nervously hooting and back off.

The valley has a very fine monastery which is being carefully restored. We were able to see the work being done there. There was intense activity amongst the monks when we were there, because they were holding a very special ceremony: drumming, blowing horns, some made from human thigh bones, and loudly chanting. Evil spirits were abroad in the valley and needed to be driven out. Later that night as we crouched round the big restaurant stove in the guest house, a party of monks, and masked figures, some with flaming torches, came screaming and chanting down the road, then rushed through every space in the building, throwing small stones and powder into every dark corner, to flush the spirits out. Every house in the valley was covered that night. Even Rinchen has only seen this a few times and it felt like we were closer than ever to the Bhutanese medieval culture.

The cosy guest houses at this end of our trip are good. The rooms each have wood burning stoves so that even though the temperatures are almost down to freezing at night, they are warm and friendly. The electricity is also off much of the time so I sit downloading the days’ pictures to my pc by candlelight. The rich traditional painting and wood and colourful woollen weaves of the curtains and spreads give everything a warm glow into which my pc’s cold blue light seems like an intruder.