The Wonderful Weirdness of Bhutan

A good many of the houses in Bhutan are proudly adorned with double-take-inducing, four-foot-high paintings of male reproductive organs standing at attention.... I bring this up to point out that Bhutan exudes a quality that is underappreciated in travel destinations: It is unapologetically, joyously weird.

Look, I love Gross National Happiness as much as the next itinerant idealist, but what made me fall in love with Bhutan were the penises.

 

Allow me to explain. As all visitors to Bhutan discover sooner or later — usually sooner — a good many of the houses there are proudly adorned with double-take-inducing, four-foot-high paintings of male reproductive organs standing at attention. Carved wooden phalluses dangle from the eaves like adults-only mobiles. Occasionally you even see them painted on license plates. In monasteries, penises crafted from marble or wood are treasured as religious icons; monks hit visitors over the head with them as a blessing.

 

This is all to honor one Lam Drukpa Kuenley, a man who would be dismissed as a drunk and a womanizer anywhere else, but who in Bhutan is venerated as a saint — the ''Divine Madman.'' Five hundred years ago he is said to have wandered the countryside clad in filthy rags, liquored up on cheap rakshi, seducing women with single-minded determination. Legends say he imparted teachings with his penis — they don't say exactly how — and that he transformed demons into protective deities by clubbing them over the head with it. One of Bhutan's most popular shrines, Chimi Lhakhang, is dedicated to him.

 

I bring this up not to suggest that Bhutan is obscene or perverted — which it most decidedly is not — but to point out that it exudes a quality that is underappreciated in travel destinations: It is determinedly, delightfully, emphatically, unapologetically, joyously weird.

 

We need places like this, and there are damn few of them left in a world made numbingly familiar by McDonaldization, 24-hour news and YouTube. One definition of a traveler is someone who feels at home while abroad, but I'd rather feel like a stranger in an exuberantly strange land — like I've stepped through the looking glass, like I'm a character in the Book of Marvels, like I've walked out of a black-and-white farmhouse into a world of munchkins living in oversaturated color. I want to go to places that still fill me with childish wonder.

 

Bhutan is that kind of place.

 

I knew this as a small boy, long before I could point to the remote Himalayan kingdom on a map. All I knew about Bhutan was that it issued the most wonderfully strange postage stamps the world had ever seen: stamps honoring Elvis and Donald Duck. 3-D stamps. Scented stamps. Stamps made out of steel. Stamps that were tiny phonograph records that played the Bhutanese national anthem. I knew nothing else of Bhutan except that it was weird, and that I desperately wanted to go there.

 

I got my chance a few years ago when I accompanied GeoEx's Jim Sano and Tom Cole on a trip to scout the approaches to Gankgar Puensuum, the world's highest unclimbed mountain. Its exact location was something of a mystery — nobody was even sure whether it was all in Bhutan or partly in Tibet — and the fact that in this age of global positioning satellites a mountain five miles high could just go missing added to the allure.

 

Our plane from Calcutta plunged down through thick clouds into an alarmingly narrow Himalayan canyon, where the walls were so close we could make out individual branches on pine trees. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a hidden green valley opened before us, dotted with golden-roofed fortress-temples. We bounced to a stop on a grassy airstrip that doubled as a yak pasture and were met by a delegation of men in striped silk robes.

 

In real life you just can't get any more ''Lost Horizon'' than that.

 

In Thimpu, the capital, I saw a sharply dressed policeman standing in the middle of an intersection, performing what I at first took to be the graceful, unhurried movements of tai chi. ''Actually,'' someone told me, ''he's directing traffic.'' Bhutan doesn't have a single traffic light: It installed one a few years ago but removed it after one day. Back then it didn't have a whole lot of cars, either, although I understand this is changing.

 

We never made it to the wildlife reserve set aside for the midjum, which in Nepal is called a yeti and in England is known as the abominable snowman. And we never got to see the basketball-crazy prince — now king — playing in shirts-and-skins games with his subjects. (Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck is said to be deadly from three-point range, but one imagines that whenever he chooses to drive the lane, the defense parts like the Red Sea.)

 

But we did get to spend a week walking through glorious mountains no outsider had ever seen before. The Himalayan bamboo forest we hiked through had just been discovered to harbor Bengal tigers; this, apparently, is the only place in the world where the habitats of tigers and snow leopards overlap.

 

We never saw either, but we did meet nomadic yak herders who had never had any contact with Westerners. They didn't seem terribly interested in us, which I thought was a good thing.

 

One afternoon I got separated from the group, and as evening turned to pitch-black night I was groping my way through the bamboo forest, not entirely confident I knew where I was. Suddenly my hands fell upon the heads of two tiny Bhutanese men in striped robes. I could smell the rakshi on their breath; they were very, very drunk. We were, as far as I could tell, many miles from the nearest yak-herder encampment. What were they doing out here?

 

I imagined they thought the same of me. I tried to ask directions, but my English inquiries elicited only replies in slurred dzonka, the Bhutanese language. Then, without so much as a goodbye, they spun on their heels and staggered off into the darkness like hobbits on a bender.

 

I thought: What a gloriously weird place this is.