My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (24 page)

It wasn’t until my second day, when I was some distance from the airport, that I first saw the penises. I was driving through a ten-thousand-foot mountain pass called Dochu La when I came to a big farmhouse, broad hipped and white walled, with a traditional Tibetan-style beamed roof and a huge wooden doorway twice as tall as anyone who might ever walk through it. In the rocky front yard, a thousand or so chili peppers were spread out to dry in the sun. On either side of the door, someone had painted a huge phallus—peachy pink, with a matte finish, poised in a salutatory arc with little wisps of whatever curling from the bottom and the top. I happened to be in Bhutan with a group of American women who were hoping to get pregnant by being blessed at Bhutanese fertility ceremonies, so the penises were a big hit—a particularly auspicious symbol for those who were looking for that particular kind of good fortune. The owner of the house stepped out as we were taking photographs. He was a wiry and windburned little man, wearing blue knickers, a woven jacket, a red skullcap, and rubber boots. At first, he seemed puzzled by our attention, but after studying us for a moment, he nodded knowingly, then arranged himself by the doorway and puffed up with pride for our cameras. Whether it was pride in his house or his red hot chilies or his fertile mural, we would never know.

From then on, the penises were everywhere: sketched on houses in Wangduephodrang and in Punakha, on walls in Trongsa, and on a storefront in Jakar, where they were painted above muslin sacks printed with the Bhutanese population control slogan:
SMALL FAMILY HAPPY FAMILY
. At the monastery at Chime Lhakhang, which is the most auspicious of auspicious places to be blessed for fertility in Bhutan, the monk performing the ceremony had two penises on the altar. One was of hand-carved ivory, and the other was a piece of wood that was anatomically credible and is said to have grown into its shape naturally in a forest in Tibet, where it was found in the fifteenth century by Drukpa Kunley, the most popular saint in Bhutan.

Eventually, we began seeing penises that weren’t really there at all or were only vaguely suggested—the result, I’m sure, of that first, startling, two-pronged annunciation at Dochu La and also of the self-referential nature of the human mind. Any woman trying to get pregnant will swear that everyone she passes on the street is pregnant, just as anyone driving a new red Ford will swear that everyone in the world is driving a red Ford these days. At an immigration checkpoint on the way to Trongsa, we clambered out of the bus and took a turn around the village. In front of a café, there was a concrete piling or stone column, or something like that—an erect object about knee-high and rock hard, which might have insinuated a little of the silhouette, proportion, and character of the male organ. In any case, it was enough insinuation to make it, for this group, exciting. Within a minute, the Americans had gathered around the stone, examined it, discussed it, and shot off a few rolls of film. After the photo session, we killed time by visiting a shop in the village. The proprietor was a stout woman, and she had a half-dozen children of different sizes on her and around her and beside her. A couple of feckless-looking men loitered at the back of the store. We ordered tea and surveyed the place while she heated water on an electric burner. The children were unusually beautiful—dark haired and dark eyed, with skin like polished oak. We admired them and made gestures and signs to the woman: Were these her children? Yes, she indicated, all of them were hers. So the stone phallus works? one of our group asked, pointing outside. You have lots of children if you pray to the stone? The woman giggled and shook her head, and soon the men at the back of the store were giggling, too, and then the children started in, and the woman laughed even harder, and the men poked one another in the ribs and howled. It was a riot. When the woman finally caught her breath, she peered over the counter and waved her hands: That stone? No, that has nothing to do with having children. That’s where we clean the mud off our shoes.

THERE WAS A BABY
at the center of this particular trip—a ten-month-old seventeen-pounder from California, with ash blond hair and blue green eyes, named Rachelle (for her maternal great-grandmother, Ruchel, and her paternal great-grandmother, Ruggia) Tashi (at the bidding of the Bhutanese monk who had conjured her) McKellop (her father’s last name). For the few weeks we were in Bhutan, she was the most famous baby there. This was because she was the first American baby—actually, the first western hemisphere baby—to be born after her mother was blessed, in 1996, at the temple at Chime Lhakhang and the following year at a festival in Jakar. The efficacy of Chime Lhakhang and Jakar for getting people pregnant is old news in Bhutan—nice old news, of course, but not remarkable beyond the usual gladness that attaches to good but unastonishing news, like finding out that you’ve been approved for a mortgage. It would be bigger news outside Bhutan, because most people have never even heard of the place, and because many people are curious about anything that helps someone get pregnant, and especially because most people don’t associate Himalayan Buddhism—austere, solemn, anticorporeal Himalayan Buddhism—with issues like fecundity and sex.

In Bhutan, the real news was that a Westerner had been blessed. Bhutan wasn’t formally opened to tourists until 1974. Even then, the opening was more theoretical than actual. The airport wasn’t built until 1983, and the sole Bhutanese airline services only Bangkok and Kathmandu and Delhi, but only on a rotating schedule, and only when the weather in the Paro Valley is flawless, and only during daylight, and only when one of the scary-landing-qualified pilots is scheduled for the trip. You can’t just pop over to Bhutan when the spirit moves you. The Bhutanese airline has no competition, and flights are expensive. Tourists have to travel with a licensed guide, and they also have to pay a daily fee, which is now two hundred and forty dollars per person. The fee covers hotel and food costs but is intentionally steep, to discourage the sorts of aimless backpackers who tramp through India and Nepal on a nickel and with an open-ended itinerary.

Even though it sits in the gorgeous saddle of the Himalayas and has a charmed and intriguing culture, Bhutan has had few foreign visitors. In 1997, twenty-three years after opening to tourists, Bhutan had a total of only 5,363 tourists. That same year, Nepal had 421,857 visitors. Tourism was viewed by most Bhutanese as an interesting, mildly significant development, but possibly a troublesome one. There was a certain dread of Westerners in hot pants and bush shirts traipsing through the ancient monasteries and a question of whether they would contribute to the king’s stated goal of increasing Gross National Happiness rather than Gross National Product.

CHIME LHAKHANG
is situated on a round hill above patches of rice fields and a thread of a river, about fifty miles from Thimphu, the capital of Bhutan. The temple was built in 1499, after Drukpa Kunley blessed the site. It is fitting that a site hallowed by Drukpa Kunley should be associated with fertility, because he was a hypersexed kook and a libertine. He was born in Tibet in 1455 and was given a traditional ecclesiastical education, but he veered away from it because he considered the Buddhist orthodoxy too stiff. He is said to have drunk a lot, is rumored to have had sex with his mother, to have spoken lines like “My meditation practice is girls and wine / I do whatever I feel like, strolling around in the Void,” to have once tied a special “blessing string” around his penis, and to have refused to travel anywhere without his little dog, Shachi. He was an obscene and shocking show-off, but only, it is said, in order to bring attention to himself and, consequently, to Buddhist teachings. People in Bhutan really like him. They refer to him fondly as the Divine Madman. His favorite sport, archery, has been adopted as the Bhutanese national game and is the kingdom’s only entry in the Olympics.

All over Bhutan, there are images of Drukpa Kunley—a chesty man in a predatory crouch with a bad-landlord mustache and wild black eyes, a kind of meat-eating leer on his face, and a little white dog by his side. His disembodied penis—usually a muted pink and energetically arched—is honored in paintings and sculptures and front-yard murals all over the country. Bhutan is a chaste society in which bare legs and shoulders are never seen, eyes are cast down in modesty, affection is never displayed in public, and propriety and simplicity and dignified shyness are cherished. To find the country adorned in such a way was as astounding as it might be if the Amish decided to decorate their barns with enormous breasts.

Chime Lhakhang is popular because of its connection to Drukpa Kunley and also because it is a beautiful old temple with a broad view of the valley and the spiky mountains beyond. It is one of the few temples in Bhutan whose grounds tourists are allowed to visit, although only people wearing traditional Bhutanese clothing are allowed to approach the altar inside. A few years ago, a Japanese woman stopped at Chime Lhakhang and asked a monk to give her the fertility blessing. The request was unusual, but somehow she prevailed—the first time, as far as anyone could remember, that a non-Bhutanese had been blessed. The woman became pregnant soon afterward. She was sure that it had been due to the Divine Madman, so in appreciation she visits Chime Lhakhang regularly and donates a hundred thousand butter lamps to the fertility festival in Jakar each year. Everyone in the kingdom knew about the Divine Madman’s Japanese baby. Actually, in a country with a population of only six hundred thousand, everyone always seems to know everything about everything, and in this case everyone talked about the baby because of its novelty and because of the lifting of the long-standing embargo on foreigners in the sacred rooms of the temple.

THE FIRST WESTERNERS
to visit Bhutan were two Portuguese Jesuits, who came in 1627, though not, undoubtedly, on a fertility mission. Quite possibly they were on a Christian mission, and they almost certainly left disappointed, since Bhutan is fully subscribed to Tantric Mahayana Buddhism, in particular the Drukpa sect of the Kagyupa school. Mahayana Buddhism preaches enlightenment for the welfare of all beings over the search for individual enlightenment; Kagyupa, one of its four major schools, emphasizes intense meditation and the relationship between teacher and disciple. The Drukpa sect is a Bhutanese variety of Kagyupa, which reveres certain favorite local saints like Drukpa Kunley. Bhutan is, in fact, the only sovereign Buddhist kingdom in the world now that the neighboring Buddhist states of Ladakh, Sikkim, and Tibet have been absorbed into India or China. Buddhism was introduced to Bhutan in the seventh century and then revitalized in the eighth century by Guru Rinpoche, the Tantric Buddhist saint whose teachings also galvanized Tibet. Since then, Buddhism has been as elemental as air in Bhutanese life. All ceremonies and most holidays are religious. All art is anonymous and sacred and follows the exacting rules of Buddhist iconography. The legal system is based on seventeenth-century Buddhist moral doctrine. Until 1907, when the absolute monarchy was established, a theocracy ruled the country.

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.”