Bill Murray's Blog, page 46
December 15, 2018
Quotes: On Africa’s 1st Bullet Train
“Why would I need to get from Casablanca to Tangier in less than four hours?” he asks. “Moroccans spend four hours sitting in a cafe. If we want to travel, we have time.”
Quoted here.
December 14, 2018
Weekend Reading
[image error]Windy and gray on our side of the hill today. Looks like an indoor weekend in the southern Appalachians.
The theme of today’s weekend reading recommendations is big European countries in turmoil.
The UK:
– The Divided Kingdom by Helen Dale
– Labour’s Brexit trilemma: in search of the least bad outcome by Laurie MacFarlane
– How Ireland Outmaneuvered Britain on Brexit by Dara Doyle
France:
– Notes on the Yellow Jackets by Claire Berlinski
– Macron Fans the Flames of Illiberalism by Pankaj Mishra
– Two Roads for the New French Right by Mark Lilla
– What Will Follow Emmanuel Macron? by Sarah Jones
– From Sans Culottes to Gilets Jaunes: Macron’s Marie Antoinette Moment by Sylvain Cypel
Italy:
– How Macron gave Italian populists a boost by Silvia Sciorilli Borrelli
– The Dangerous New Face of Salvini’s Italy by Walter Mayr
Enjoy your weekend. See you next week.
December 12, 2018
Book Excerpt: Trans-Siberian Railrway
A chapter about travel along the Trans-Siberian railway, from my book Common Sense and Whiskey, Modest Adventures Far from Home:
If you don’t speak Russian and if you decode Cyrillic gingerly, one letter at a time, it’s not completely effortless to come up with bottled water in Ekaterinburg, but it is possible, and I bought six litres.
The kiosk, alongside a tram stop, was just big enough to be a walk-in affair, not big enough for four, let alone our steamy tensome. The boys in front argued over what beer and candy to order one each of. I motioned for six bottles way up high on a shelf and all kinds of consternation rippled through the mottled impatience behind me.
In a few hours Mirja and I would be climbing aboard the Trans-Siberian railroad to Ulan Bataar, Mongolia. We’d be a week en route, so we needed all kinds of stuff.
As soon as I had all those bottles, though, I calculated we could get everything else at the train station. Six litres of water is heavy.
Today was Labor Day in the U.S. On the edge of Siberia, autumn held full sway. E-kat’s denizens plodded by cold and damp in an insistent, heavy shower. A lot of the older folks wore long coats. All day the rain beset.
•••••
Every account of coming upon the Ural mountains speaks of disappointment, and for good reason. The dividing line between Europe and Asia is just hills, really, and Ekaterinburg nestles just beyond their eastern slopes.
The Atrium Palace Hotel Ekaterinburg looked so nice on the internet that we mused back home that it had to be either German or mafia owned. Well, it wasn’t German. It was E-kat’s only “5-star,” with glass elevators and snuggly, fluffy Scandinavian bedding and BBC World on TV.
Still, it had its Russian characteristics: There was the hourly rate, Rule #2: “If you stay for less than six hours, you are charged for twelve hour accommodation.” And Rule #7: “The guests who troubled a lot before can not be allowed to stay at the hotel.” Hard to know if the guys in track suits grouped around the lobby drinking coffee were part of the problem or there to enforce the solution.
•••••
Mid-rises glowered down on ancient Siberian carved–wood houses. There wasn’t much spring in E-kat’s civic step. Down Ulitsa Malysheva, a second-tier comrade (maybe it was Malysheva himself) stood statuary guard near a canal. The flowers at his feet had long since conceded to summer weeds.
Old and dusty women tended the old and dusty local history museum. They turned the lights on and off as you moved through the rooms. The Communism section was closed.
During the revolution, in July 1918, The entire family of deposed Czar Nicholas was shot while holed up at the home of a merchant named Ipatiev here in Ekaterinburg – then called Sverdlovsk – and some days later the besieged Bolsheviks burned and buried the bodies outside town.
In 1977, local Sverdlovsk party boss Boris Yeltsin ordered the Ipatiev House destroyed. Fourteen years later Yeltsin, then in the Kremlin, financed exhumation of the bodies from the burial pit, and exactly eighty years after their murder, on July 17, 1998 the bones of Russia’s last Czar were laid beside the bones of previous Czars in the crypt of the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg. In the museum, black and white pictures of Nicholas and Alexandra were pinned up alongside diagrams of skeletons.
In a dainty candle-lit Orthodox church-let, hardly big enough for the two women inside, Mirja and I bought a tiny cross and a few icons. With a glass, the women inspected the back of each, like kids examine trading cards, and they proclaimed one Nikolai and explained of another, “Blogodot Denyaba.”
E-kat’s youth did a kind of country swagger beneath a huge billboard for “Ural Westcom” Cellular – written in Latin, not Cyrillic. Every kid in town walked up and down the sidewalk drinking big brown half litre bottles of beer. Maybe it was because they could.
Muddy Ekaterinburg, east of the Urals.
If your baseline was vodka, pivo (beer) was positively a soft drink in comparison. None of these young people – old enough to aspire to fashion and to drink and flirt and smoke – none of them remembered the days of vodka and The State. They were all eight or twelve at the Soviet Union’s demise.
The train station was white, granite and huge, a city block long and probably more, but it was hard to see why – they only used a tiny slice of it. There was just time to lug our stuff into the steamy waiting hall, and before you knew it, up rolled train number two, the Rossiya.
Here was a moment of some import. They told us our first class compartment was “very expensive,” but we didn’t care about that (it wasn’t that expensive), we just wanted to find it very empty. And so it was.
The woman under whose iron will Trans-Siberian lore demanded we cower – the provodnitsa – while no nonsense, appeared kindly enough as she studied our tickets, nodded, and handed over the key to cabin nine, between cabin eight, with a baby, and the toilet.
Inside – impeccably clean. Mirrors on each wall made a not very big space bigger. All six lights worked – the overhead fluorescent, lights on the walls, and tiny reading lights over each bunk.
The window was structurally shut and it was warmer than it needed to be. Satiny print curtains covered the window but Mirja moved them above the door. That way we could have it open and see out, but people in the corridor couldn’t see in. Brilliant.
A small writing/eating table. Bunks with bedding, the rough blankets in a Scottish tartan pattern.
Home sweet home on the Trans-Siberian.
A samovar sat at the provodnitsa’s end of each car (ours with bits of drying, fresh-picked wild mushrooms arrayed across the top) to provide water for chai or coffee. I’d remembered every possible gadget, but I’d forgotten plates and towels. I stole a towel and paid good money for plates from the hotel, but there was a plate with sweets and sugar and packets of chai, and a towel for each of us.
All the hubbub and noise of the station mixed with a sustained period of fiddling and adjusting as we fell over and bumped into one another, settling into home for the next several days.
Ours was the last unoccupied cabin in the carriage, so it made sense it was down at the end by the toilet, and Mirja rather liked the idea because it was convenient. And the toilet flushed with water, there was ready cold water in the wash basin, and there was even a roll of toilet paper, at least to start. They scrubbed it down sometimes. It didn’t even smell.
The baby next door kept waddling down to peer into our compartment. His parents, bless them, kept the kid quiet.
Everything eventually settled out and darkness came up to close around the Rossiya as we moved east of E-kat, in the rain.
•••••
Movement and noise, action and business at every stop. Traders crowded under the lights with food, furs and shawls. The Europeans and Americans popped onto the platform to stretch and take videos of the locals, and the wheels were checked and the kiosks thrived (and they were well-provisioned) and then the Rossiya groaned back to life and pulled away, and everything aboard settled back into the torpor induced by the rhythm of the rails.
I slept from 1:00 a.m. and as I drifted in and out I saw Mirja sitting by the window gazing out at the countryside far into Siberia. The clouds pulled back, because later you could see that somewhere there was a moon. By 5:00 I was ready for coffee and sunrise but Mirja wanted darkness for a little while more, and I fell right back and slept until 10:00.
You could wash your hair in the wash basin if you had a sink stopper, and even feel positively fresh in the morning, as pale blue sky, high, benign clouds and beautiful white birch trunks rolled by. Shrubs and some of the smaller trees were giving over to yellow leaves.
During the night we’d stopped at Tyumen and Omsk, and by now we’d entered a region a hundred kilometers from Kazakhstan called the Baraba steppe.
The guide book: “It appears as if there is a continuous forest in the distance.” Right about that, so it does….
“However if you walk towards it you will never get there as what you are seeing are clumps of birches and aspen trees that are spaced several kilometers apart. The lack of landmarks in this area has claimed hundreds of lives.” The Baraba steppe extends 600 kilometers.
Barabinsk train station.
By afternoon we’d reached Barabinsk (population 36,000), 1222 kilometers east of Ekaterinburg, founded a hundred plus years ago around the construction of the railroad, which curiously missed the older town of Kuibyshev, in view in the distance to the north.
Must’ve been 68 or 70 degrees, perfect air, as we all clambered out to stretch. They sold tons of some particular flayed and dried fish. The good people of Barabinsk still looked thoroughly European, not a bit Asian.
Alongside the rails, cabbages stood ready for picking and there were acres of sunflowers, but everything – plants, people, stray dogs – clung tight to civilization as represented by the rail line. Beyond lay nothing. We never saw a tarmac road between Ekaterinburg and Novosibirsk, over 25oo kilometers.
East of Barabinsk a particular aquamarine colored paint took hold of all the buildings. Siberian Green. The sky settled into a deep blue with puffy clouds, the kind of pollution-free weather you don’t get anymore back home.
The dining car menu spoke four languages, using “mith” for “with,” as a sensible cross between the English “with” and the German “mit.” On the theory that they can’t hurt you with soup, we enjoyed chicken noodle. The whole dining car smelled like last night’s party. Old beer and cigarettes.
The idea of keeping up with the hours fell away. The timetable showed local time and Moscow time, and we were either fifty minutes early or four hours ten minutes late, take your pick, at the next stop.
The sun slanted in as the Rossiya chugged into and out of the biggest city in Siberia, Novosibirsk, at 1.6 million, here solely because of the construction of the Ob River railroad bridge. In Novosibirsk boulevards were made of real tarmac. There was said to be an enormous opera house, and somewhere nearby was the purpose-built city of Akademgorodsk – a city of scientists.
Housing blocks stretched out, too many to count. Since this was a mere settlement in Czarist times, and didn’t really get going until Stalinism was the style, Novosibirsk was just flat plug ugly.
Out on the platform, Roma beggars displayed whining snotty children as evidence they were miserable.
•••••
Sunflowers hung their heads with nowhere to point. Pumpkins lay on the vine alongside the cabbage fields. All the hay was cut and piled in heaps tall as houses. Smoke rose above a few chimneys, but the temperature was bracing, and in light of the months to come you’d think they wouldn’t bother with fires.
It was morning, early, barely six, but already the villages stirred, those that rose up the rainy hillsides outside Krasnoyarsk. Children played on the gravel track.
A man all in gray, smoking, walked a sodden path, coat flapping at his flanks – a scene that could have taken place in the last century – or the one before that. From compartment nine Mirja and I took it all in – the mists in the trees, the elderly people clustered at the storefront door, the birches steadily losing their autumn fight, the smoke rising from this odd shack or that.
A battleship gray sky defined the whole world.
The Rossiya crossed the mighty River Yenisei, that rises in Mongolia, bisects Siberia, and means “wide river” in the local Evenki language. The Yenisei waterway energizes Krasnoyarsk industry, and the bridge across it brought a dramatic start to our day, as the clack-clacking sound of crossing the bridge jolted us awake. The train was still quiet as Mirja and I took drinks from the samovar.
She drank the chai provided in a heavy glass mug she got from the provodnitsa (whose name was Lydia Ivanova), and I, rather less in harmony with my surroundings, enjoyed Eight O’Clock brand instant coffee in my Evernew brand silver titanium 400 mug.
In Greenland, each settlement presents its worst side to arriving visitors. Since the only contact there is by sea, your arrival by boat is met by benzene storage tanks and refuse waiting to be hauled away. There was a little of that first-things-first frontier utilitarianism in these villages, too.
Giant metal gantries extended the power grid right straight over and through residential areas, and a hundred TV antennas sprouted, and then over time listed randomly over the rooftops.
After Novosibirsk, especially east of the River Yenisei, the Rossiya would crest a hill and we’d stare down at birch and aspen forest as far as the eye could see, broken sometimes by patches logged for firewood.
In valleys the sky was slate. Only from hilltops might you peek at distant pale blue, which might foreshadow improving weather in the afternoon – or might not.
•••••
By now it was easy to spend hours between stops in a dreamy half-consciousness – just be still and the movement of the train would do the work of the hypnotist’s pocket watch. Over the course of the week I dipped in and out of epic dreams starring everyone I’d ever known and featuring vague, unfulfilled intimations of desperate evil.
The hypnosis of the rails made travel across the taiga deeply restful. Hours slipped happily by. I imagined that in winter, with the darkness, that would be all the more true.
Kilometer 4375, Ilanskaya. Twenty minute stop. It felt good to get out of the train and stand in the rain. As you began to miss refrigerated drink, the cure was ice cream from the kiosks. Here, kerchiefed babushkas sold cucumbers from a bowl and the provodnitsa bought carrots. The baby next door was the star of the train and everybody played with him at the stops.
Buying dried fish on the platform.
By a town called Taishet, the music from tinny speakers on the platforms had ceased to be repetitive, cloying Russian pop. It had an Asian, maybe Indian rhythm. The Rossiya didn’t stop for long, just three or five minutes.
Taishet was once a gulag transit camp. The factory in Taishet where prisoners once died creosoting railroad ties still operates.
•••••
We planned to leave the train for a few days at Irkutsk, so one morning before her daily vacuuming tour, I visited Lydia Ivanova’s provodnitsa den down by the samovar and the drying mushrooms to make sure of our arrival time in Irkutsk. It sure was 2:25 in the morning. I had written “Irkutsk” in Cyrillic on a card and I said “pazhalsta,” or please. She smiled and turned away from her gossip magazine. I pointed at the word, my watch, and turned up my palms and shrugged.
She asked, speaking fast Russian and gesturing, “Moscow time or local time?” and since I knew how to say the word Moskva, I chose Moscow time and she clucked “nyet nyet nyet” and wrote it for me in local time (2:25 a.m.) and then in Moscow time (9:25 p.m.).
•••••
5:00 p.m., Nizhny Udinsk, kilometer 4680: A big stop. Fifteen minutes. The taiga had been running dense and hilly, and Mirja had been reclaiming sleep in bulk.
I shook some instant coffee into my mug and stopped at the samovar by the door. First we were trapped on a narrow siding, then a local train pulled away that opened up a long promenade of kiosks across the tracks.
A whitewashed building painted “toilet” was bigger than most houses, with six multi-paned windows along the side. The usual scruffy commerce went on beside the train, and three girls with high, Asian cheekbones and reddish hair panhandled. Only two, really, and very quietly. The other was too meek.
They were insistent, but not even faintly in the way of the souk, and they slipped away of their own volition just before Lydia Ivanova, Provodnitsa-in-Chief, strode up to shoo them away.
Basic provisions, gossip magazines, a newspaper. Things to pass the time were for sale in the kiosks. And cassettes: bootlegs with typed covers like Captain Jack ’97, Dance Rocket Part 2 and Hit Hammer, and several with women in lurid poses.
Gray and chillier now, and for the first time, in patches, the birches were completely yellow.
At dusk, lights glowed from inside the old wooden Siberian houses and smoke rose straight into the air from the chimneys. We sat before the window and considered compartment nine in carriage seven of train number two our own personal traveling theatre.
Typical house along the rail line.
The mist-green of the taiga and the soldier-blue sky merged in the fading light, and the light in the compartment reflected on the glass an image of the accumulated odds and ends of travel: Ms. Ivanova’s heavy, stout glass, chai bags and books and sugar cubes. Reading glasses and a roll of tissue, hot sauce and a plate and aqua minerale. Plastic cutlery and half a pack of raspberry sweet crackers.
Now we were stopped in front of an unlit stretch of track and people bustled about. Someone came and someone went, but it was all in the dark and we couldn’t tell. Was it Zima?
No, it was too short a stop. Zima would be more important than that, and then it would be four hours 53 minutes to Irkutsk.
But Zima never came. No cluster of lights ever suggested suburbs, and the Rossiya hurtled on through the dark. So I did the sensible thing. I went to buy some beers.
In the restaurant car, Sasha exuberantly proclaimed our friendship. He sat with the lady in charge. Muscles bulged from his t-shirt, which was inexplicably drenched with sweat. He ordered three bottles of wine for himself. The attendant had to do the invoice on a calculator and in longhand and deliver the bottles before it was my turn, giving Sasha time to uncork and decant a couple of glasses.
“Sasha, Weelyum,” he shouted and stuck his finger in our chests. I had a gulp, we professed friendship, and I turned to find every eye in the restaurant car, amused, on me.
I pointed and explained, “Sasha.” They smiled and agreed.
Finally it was time to get back to our berth and break out the bags and fuss about, because we’d be getting off the train in four hours, or three, or five.
I am sure only God will ever know why, of all the world’s music, Funky Nassau (“Mini-skirts, maxi-skirts, Afro hair DOOs….”) ran in a continuous loop through my brain from Krasnoyarsk to Irkutsk.
And then Zima came to us as a slight strip of concrete between two trains populated by smoking Siberians, and nothing more.
The night provodnitsa said it was ten till seven Moscow time. According to Lydia Ivanova, day provodnitsa (who must have been kicking up her heels at this hour in the provodnitsa lounge), arrival in Irkutsk was expected at 9:25 Moscow, 2:25 Irkutsk.
•••••
At 2:00 I tried the bar car for a last minute take-away pivo. At 2:00 a.m. it was a rockin’, smoky, all-Russian party car.
The short-order cook by day ruled tonight, and he rose from beside Ludmyla, his puffy-haired paramour, and wondered what kind of pivo I wanted, starting to tick off Baltica,…. And I said Melnick (which means Miller) and he went to get some.
Ludmyla was convinced I was a secret Russian.
“Russki?”
“Nyet, Amerikanski.”
“Russki!” with a wag of a finger and a suggestion that we would all have champanski. But by now we were minutes from arrival in Irkutsk.
I paid the smiling short-order cook and smelled like a smoking factory as I bumped back down the corridor, and I got in the way of a woman entering the toilet. She stepped back – in her nightie – with her husband.
Flustered, I summoned the Russian “Spaseba,” and she replied, “Not at all” in flawless English.
•••••
More photos in the Russian Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
On the Road: In a Tough Neighborhood
My column at 3QuarksDaily as it ran on Monday:
On The Road: In A Tough Neighborhood
In the middle of the night of March 24, 1992, a pressure seal failed in the number three unit of the Leningradskaya Nuclear Power Plant at Sosnoviy Bor, Russia, releasing radioactive gases. With a friend, I had train tickets from Tallinn, in newly independent Estonia, to St. Petersburg the next day. That would take us within twenty kilometers of the plant. The legacy of Soviet management at Chernobyl a few years before set up a fraught decision whether or not to take the train.
Monitoring stations in Finland detected higher than normal readings. The level of iodine-131 at Lovisa, Finland, just across the gulf, was 1,000 times higher than before the accident, according to the German Institute for Applied Ecology.
Russian authorities reported the accident in the media, and I think they felt self-satisfied for doing it, but Russian credibility had burned down with Chernobyl’s reactor 4. Any more, people thought the Soviets, as Seymour Hersh said about Henry Kissinger, lied like other people breathe. And as usual, solid information was hard to come by.
A news agency in St. Petersburg reported increased radiation, and the Swedish news reported panic in St. Petersburg. A lady in Tallinn that day told me her mother had called from St. Petersburg and they were closing the schools and sending children home to stay indoors. The Finnish Prime Minister fussed that seven hours passed before the Russians told him. It was frightening.
No one believed the plant spokesman when he said on TV, hey (big Soviet smile), no problem. No one trusted the Russians.
•••••
In the same way that provincial Balkan towns had never thought of themselves as national capitals (like Podgorica, which became the capital of Montenegro, and Ljubljana, the completely delightful capital of Slovenia), Tallinn was, had been since Soviet occupation in 1940, an outpost, a modest administrative hub, though far more architecturally charming than Soviet in its medieval center, with round stone guard towers and ancient walls all around.
Back then, in 1992, there just wasn’t that much of it. Tallinn was far smaller than its close neighbor Helsinki, itself only half a million. As usual when Soviet Communism got hold of a place, the difference between Soviet Tallinn and free Helsinki was night and day – in that order – even though they are unidentical twins, only 50 miles apart across the Baltic.
The Finnish-built Viru hotel where I stayed (“Viro” is “Estonia” in Finnish) is the tall building in the background of this photo. It was just about the only place foreigners stayed, and something of a mild Estonian legend. The Viru opened in 1972 and adventurous Finns (whose language is similar enough to Estonian that they can understand one another) crept over to have a look at the Soviet way of life.
Naturally, for the Viru’s first twenty years the KGB spied on guests.
The elevator showed there were 22 floors. The 23rd floor housed the KGB radio center, used to listen in on guests and high enough to communicate with Helsinki’s KGB station across the Gulf of Finland. Today a museum on the 23rd floor displays the listening equipment.
With Finnish Markkas around hard currency prostitution flourished. Girls came from across the Soviet Union and learned passable Finnish. A flight of stairs behind sofas in the lobby allowed prostitutes to surreptitiously show customers the soles of their shoes – on which they had written their price.
Tallinn was a rarity in the USSR, the only place you could watch western TV, as broadcast from Helsinki. Taru Mäkelä, director of a film about the Viru Hotel, said“Moscow boycotted the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984. The games were not televised in the Soviet Union. Then the whole of the Moscow elite travelled to the Viru hotel to watch the Olympics on Finnish television.”
•••••
Finnish TV stayed on the radiation leak all day and we were glad they did. A consensus emerged on the other side of the gulf that this was no Chernobyl. The Finns had boats out on the gulf measuring the air, and at Kotka up on the Finnish/Russian border they didn’t measure anything at all.
The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe had a politicians’ meeting in Helsinki that day. They showed it on Finnish TV and we decided that if that room emptied we probably ought to leave, too. The morning of the train, the Voice of America radio news had the leak as about its fifth story and we believed the Americans when they told us it was okay. We took the train.
A compartment of four – two Russians, a rotund but diminutive middle-aged woman unwilling to engage, a stern woman in a tight dress, my friend Steve and me. We Americans brought liters of water, a six-pack of strong Finnish beer called Koff, Elephant beer from Denmark and beef jerky.
Once the onion domes of the Orthodox church (Strong, confident, well-kept, the nicest place in town) fell away outside the compartment, the countryside slumped into a general downtrodden despondence.
Ask the woman with the abacus in the рестора́н, the dining car, where you can smoke on this train. She indicates a place between cars. It smells like smoke and out in the open air you discover makeshift ashtrays, tin cans with a picture of a pig on them opened three quarters of the way, the top peeled back and bent around a rail on the window. State of the art. And the only thing on the wall is a poster-sized calendar for two years before. That about sums it up.
Grim, gray, scant daylight. Snow weighed on the land, pressing it down, muffling sounds and dampening prospects, hoisting no enthusiasm for this halting new freedom, whatever it may mean. A nation born from Soviet cynicism expected no warmth, no easy living, only hard times. Official statistics put the “solved crime rate” down to 14%.
Nobody had any money and nobody had any jobs except those that paid in rubles. Which were not money. Estonians knew better than anybody that “Russian money is not good money,” and you were hard pressed to find anyone who would take it for anything. Finnish markkas, dollars and Deutschmarks, that was all. They would get a new currency the next month, the Kroon, also worthless, before a long climb out to the Euro.
•••••
With the Sosnoviy Bor accident, history seemed to repeat, the memory of Chernobyl still burned in. From his retirement sinecure fourteen years later, Mikhail Gorbachev used the 20th anniversary of the accident in April 2006 to finger Chernobyl as a turning point in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“The Chernobyl disaster,” he wrote, “opened the possibility of much greater freedom of expression, to the point that the system as we knew it could no longer continue.” He wrote that he “started to think about time in terms of pre-Chernobyl and post-Chernobyl.” He protested his administration’s innocence, insisting “nobody knew the truth.”
“Of course, the world first learned of the Chernobyl disaster from Swedish scientists, creating the impression that we were hiding something. But in truth we had nothing to hide, as we simply had no information for a day and a half.” That is not true, for within sixteen-odd hours of the Chernobyl explosion, Moscow’s radiation hospital had 129 patients already under treatment, airlifted from the blast site.
It may serve the former General Secretary to see the collapse of the USSR on his watch as cataclysm, an event beyond the control of a mortal leader, but Gorbachev didn’t bestow the “much greater freedom of expression” he wrote that Chernobyl set in train. It rode in on the shock tide of the government’s opacity with vital health information. Soviet citizens offered up an appalled general disgust and prised the lid of Soviet secrecy from Gorbachev’s hands.
Radiation was mysterious, menacing, personal and permanent. Before, most people were good Soviet citizens in the same way you may be a good American or Malaysian or Chilean. Only dissidents were dissidents, there weren’t many of them and in Russia nobody knew much about them, or thought they were very important.
Chernobyl made things personal. Now we were talking about radiation in your little girl’s milk. They said the government mixed irradiated cow meat with uncontaminated beef and sold it across the land, to dilute all the contaminated meat.
Everybody believed it. Now your government was trying to poison you.
Hedrick Smith, a former New York Times Moscow bureau chief, wrote, “by the early 1980’s, the brightest people in the Soviet system could see the telling contrast between Soviet stagnation and western progress.” In a 1986 visit to Moscow I ate at a pizza restaurant with a dozen menu items but only one kind of pizza actually served.
Behind the monolith of Soviet government lurked only mortals, panicked and mendacious. The mask had slipped. Chernobyl punched holes through the Soviet ramparts and reality poured out.
Like Nixon with Watergate and Trump with his Moscow tower, Gorbachev preferred to change the subject. When Gorbachev took his road show to Havana in April 1988, Fidel Castro stroked his beard and declared, “Perestroika is another man’s wife. I don’t want to get involved.”
The General Secretary tried releasing political prisoners. Closing the gulag camp Perm-35, one of the harshest, got Mart Niklus, a zoologist and ‘dangerous recidivist’ from Tartu, Estonia, a bus ticket home. (‘Perm’ sounds like permafrost, like tundra, but it’s not so far from Moscow, on the non-Siberian side of the Ural mountains.) That summer hundreds of thousands of Estonians staged patriotic “song festivals.” Before the year was out the Estonian parliament effectively declared home rule.
The empire reeled, and at every extremity. In February 1989 Lt. General Boris Gromov’s fortieth army, untold columns of troops, tanks and armored personnel carriers, slunk back across the Friendship Bridge into the Soviet Socialist Republic of Uzbekistan, bringing to a close a nine year occupation of Afghanistan that cost 15,000 lives.
In 1989 the Soviet Union’s Eastern European satellites wobbled out of orbit and by autumn they fell from the Soviet sky. Gorbachev the traveling salesman visited Helsinki that fall. His spokesman Gannadi Gerasimov made weak light of the situation.
“You know the Frank Sinatra song, ‘I Did It My Way’?” he asked reporters. “Hungary and Poland are doing it their way.” (Funny the extent to which they still are.)
Two weeks later the Berlin Wall was down and now the Soviet republics themselves were afray. Soviet APCs dispersed a demonstration killing 20 in Tbilisi. Azerbaijani villagers beat Armenians and Armenians ejected Azeris, igniting the Nagorno-Karabakh War that lasted six years and killed some 30,000. Lithuania declared independence and Soviet APCs seized the TV tower in Vilnius, killing 13. And by then it was all too late.
Political prisoners were out of the gulag, the cat was out of the bag and over the two years to come the whole shabby Soviet edifice slow-motion crumbled.
•••••
Today Estonia is a European Union and NATO member. Last year it served as president of the EU Council. Stats show it top five in the EU in ease of doing business, number six in freedom of the press, just outside the top ten in perception of corruption, and dead last in public debt.
But Estonia’s physical location next to Russia is impossible to change, and pressure from its neighbor is unrelenting: Estonia’s removal of a Soviet war memorial in Tallinn brought about a three-week long cyber attack in 2007. In 2014 Russia arrested an Estonian security officer in a disputed area near the border (who was repatriated in a prisoner swap). Constant, low-level tension is a daily fact of life.
•••••
When the three Baltic leaders, Dalia Grybauskaitė of Lithuania, Kersti Kaljulaid of Estonia and Raimonds Vējonis of Latvia had their audience with President Trump on April 3rd of this year, Le Monde reported (here’s an English report) that the American president chastised the leaders “for starting wars in the 1990s that lead to the break-up of Yugoslavia.”
It’s not unusual that ordinary folks confuse the Baltics and the Balkans. Both are regions made up of small countries at the European periphery. But it has to be dispiriting to the Baltic leaders that the American president can’t be bothered to master this particular brief, especially since one of his most influential briefers – his wife – was born in Yugoslavia.
The Baltic countries are once again uneasy. The U.S. Ambassador to Estonia stood down in June, “telling friends that he cannot abide President Trump’s apparent hostility toward institutions that have stabilized Europe since the end of the Cold War.” Comfort, while avidly sought, is elusive in a western alliance thrown into turmoil by a transactional American president to whom the Baltics appear unlikely to yield a profit.
•••••
(Top photo from earthphotos.com. Others via Wikimedia Commons.)
Note: in my last 3QD column, On the Road: Wildebeest Crossing, I wrote that bees’ and ants’ “tiny brains don’t do complex decision-making, but individual bees and ants, genetically predisposed to carry out duties associated with a few jobs – ‘guards,’ ‘workers,’ ‘scouts’ – collaborate to create colonies. Termites form mounds the same way.” A subsequent article in Aeon titled Bee Brained surveys research that suggests insects may have a richer intellectual life than I portrayed.
Book Excerpt Tomorrow
Tomorrow we’ll have a chapter from my book Common Sense and Whiskey, Modest Adventures Far from Home about travel along the Trans-Siberian railway. Below, the station at Novosibirsk.
December 10, 2018
This Month’s 3QD Article
My monthly travel article on 3QuarksDaily is new today. It’s titled On The Road: In A Tough Nationhood, about a train ride past a Russian nuclear leak, post-Chernobyl, and birthing pains in the Baltic. Hope you enjoy it.
Book Excerpt: Bhutan
A chapter about Bhutan, from my book Common Sense and Whiskey, Modest Adventures Far from Home:
Only about thirty of us were flying to Bhutan, so the back of the plane held cargo: a couple of computers strapped to the seats, a boom box, a crock pot, several unmarked boxes, a quilt. And in the back seat a flight attendant drank in sleep – I mean, she snored. She, Mirja and one more were the only women.
The river Brahmaputra wound out toward the Ganges near Dhaka. Sunlight glinted and skipped across tens of thousands of acres of flooded rice paddies, miles and miles north of the Bay of Bengal. Sometimes the clouds lifted over northern Burma and Bangladesh.
Four hundred miles north of Rangoon a bend in the river ate half a town. It was July 4th. Americans celebrated independence while South Asia grappled with the monsoon.
When time came to drop through the clouds into Bhutan, the pilot announced, “We will maneuver the aircraft in the valley. This is a little different from large commercial aircraft. It is standard procedure. You will see the houses and trees a little closer than you are used to. The scenery is beautiful. Please enjoy the ride.”
He just picked a hole in the clouds and dove through. He did a 180 into the Paro valley. The automatic sensors called out, “too low,” and for the record he kept repeating, “acknowledge, override,” into the cockpit recorder.
This was George, bluff, barrel-chested, a real dude with a wide gray mustache, and one of just fourteen people ever to fly for Royal Bhutan Airlines, aka Druk Air. We said we’d buy him a beer if we saw him in town and he told us he’d drink it.
The only airport in Bhutan is in Paro, an old west one-horse town spread three hundred feet, and no more, across the valley floor, hardly movin’ in the midday sun. Uniformed Indian soldiers lolled about drinking “Thums Up” brand cola.
•••••
Phruba and Jigme, our guide and driver for the week, gathered us up for the trip to Thimpu, the capital and main city. Irrigated rice grew just about before your eyes, and every river was a tumult.
We crept and powered around corners (all week) in a Toyota Yokohama van. Jigme and Phruba both wore traditional skirt-like wraps called ghos, a lot like Burmese longyis (chapter six). Phruba’s legs stuck out below the knee. All week long he sat in the passenger seat, the picture of Buddhism, calm, legs hairy and hands clasped.
Tall and 28, he used to play basketball with the young King.
“We would stay outside and pick teams,” Phruba told us. “When he was in a good mood the King would invite us in to play. When he was in a bad mood he would play with his bodyguards. He is very good at the three point shot.”
Being taller than the King sets up a sensitive question: Does one shoot over the King’s head? Yes. The King’s bodyguards are some of the biggest men in the country, Phruba said, so he reckoned the King was used to it.
•••••
“Phruba, is the King married?” Mirja wanted to know.
“Yes, he has four Queens” Phruba replied, and seeing an eyebrow cock, he tried to put that right by adding what must have seemed the obvious: “But they are all sisters.”
With only one newspaper in the country, Keunsel, a weekly that comes out on Saturdays, how does Phruba keep up with the world? His answer was simple, disarming and direct.
Phruba’s eyes twinkled. He laughed, “We don’t. We don’t read much.”
The national dish is called Ema Datse, literally chillies and cheese (It’s those long not-too-hot green chillies we call “finger hot” in a bowl of melted cheese, eaten with a spoon). Discovering our common love of chillies, Phruba’s face fairly radiated. “Whenever people travel outside of Bhutan they carry chilli powder. To Bangladesh, India, Bengal – anywhere!”
Whether they travel to India or Bengal, Bhutanese bring back a lot of India. Everything not Bhutanese was Indian: The uniformed soldiers in Paro, those horrid polluting Tata buses and the big cement-truck look-alikes used for general transport, all of them spewing the same ghastly black smoke that’s already spoiled, say, the Kathmandu valley.
There’s Mysore Rose Brand soap. Dansberg beers. Indian videos – there were posters for Suraj! and Insaaf – The Final Justice! and Border! All with exclamation marks!
And rupees.
The Ngultrum (Bhutanese money) is pegged to the Indian Rupee and you can spend either of them. Bhutanese share Indian punctiliousness and an inclination to paperwork. Pads of every kind of paperwork are done in triplicate with carbons – even restaurant orders.
•••••
They’re trying to keep Bhutan pure. I think intellectually everybody knows it’s a losing long-term proposition, but good for them just the same. In a lot of ways it’s working.
Most men wear traditional ghos. Guys walk together with an arm around their buddy’s waist. You get benevolent, open stares. So few people have stuck Nikons in their faces that they still smile back.
•••••
An hour and a half from the airport the Toyota rattled up the driveway of the Indigenous Art School. Trying to keep traditional ways alive, the government brings children who show talent here from all over the country to learn to create religious thangkas, or paintings, and to learn carving and sculpting.
Here they all sat, at wooden benches, windows wide open – no electricity in the building – working in natural light. We stopped methodically at year 1 year 2 year 3 year 4 year 5 and so on up to eight. Smiling boys in robes at dusty wood benches. A fairy tale.
•••••
There was a football match that afternoon. You could hear the stadium cheer from every corner of Thimpu. Phruba boasted (or did he rue?) that it was up to 27,000 or 28,000 now, Thimpu was. No stoplights yet, but there were two traffic cops. A sign on the road between them advised, “Dumping Strongly Prohibited.”
I treaded mud down toward the sound of the crowd, down by the river, the Wang Chhu, admission fee 5 Ngultrums (14 cents), and sat with four monks from India, each contributing to the betel-juice-stain emergency in Thimpu.
•••••
A delicate, clean rain began as the football match let out, and for a little while the streets of Thimpu (only a few streets), teemed. At the Phuntsho Meat Shop a man stood under naked light bulbs on a table high above the buying public wielding an ancient scale, weighing skinned chickens and fish.
I walked into the bar at the Hotel Taksang, directly opposite Pelwang’s Mini Mart and below the billboard explaining the “Sewerage Construction Project – for better health.” They already knew I lived in room 325 and they told me my wife was asleep upstairs. I was the only one there and they made french fries to go with my beer. In this bar one beer cost 54 ngultrums and two cost 104.
Stray dogs (I think about eight billion) gave a free, full-throated concert most nights. Strays are the bane of Bhutan, just like in Kathmandu and Rangoon and Tahiti.
Being Buddhist, the Bhutanese have a little problem. They can’t kill the strays, can’t even spay them. That would be taking a life. But they can appoint Indian Hindus as dog catchers, and have them kill dogs on the pretense of rabies or rash.
The Phuntsho Meat Shop, Thimpu
Neither tumultuous, chaotic nor edgy, the polite weekend market sold no disgusting pounded meats or goats’ heads or bowls full of crawling bugs. Everybody wore their traditional clothes and chewed betel.
One guy sat sorting fat green chillies. He’d pause and turn, spit betel juice in his right hand, shake it behind him, and dig right back into the chillies.
A short drive from the river, the only golf course in Bhutan doubled as the front yard for the Supreme Court. Across the road at the Indigenous Medicine Hospital (established in 1978 by the World Health Organization) the manager tried to integrate the traditional and the modern. If patients didn’t get well via one regimen, he tried the other.
They grew all their own herbal remedies in a garden out back. There were machines from Austria to package them. Three rooms were labeled like this: Powder Section No Admittance, Pills Section No Admittance, Tablet Section No Admittance.
A prayer wheel clanged because they always turned it, the patients sitting in the courtyard, which doubled as the waiting room.
Twenty or thirty people mashed bark into pulp at the oxymoronic “Jungshi Handmade Paper Factory.” They wet it, dried it, rolled it, spread it, and eventually produced coarse papers, some embedded with leaves or rose petals.
Down at Plum’s Café, you could read a three day old Times of India. It was the most up-to-date news in Bhutan. You could sit on a toilet named Hindware. Ex-pats and their kids took up too much space and fretted in the corner. Probably the calmest posting in the world, and still they fretted.
•••••
Up the hill, past the embassies of Bangladesh and Denmark, the Little Dragon Montessori School, the Druk Incense Unit (manufacturing and exporting) and the Motithang Fire Out Post, was a sanctuary for the mysterious cross between the sheep and yak – not the shack – the Golden Takin, preserved for its own safety in this place, behind a fence, some time ago when animal diseases spread across Bhutan.
Down on the valley floor, prayer flags flapped from a government telecommunications tower. Paddies ran right up to the Royal Palace.
The Royal Compound, Thimpu
Phruba declared that no subject has seen inside the palace. Mirja and I chewed on this for a while. Whattaya think’s inside? Jacuzzis?
You think they live like what, kings?!
•••••
For goodness sake, don’t ever quote me on Buddhism, and Phruba suggested we not quote him on spelling the names of the Bodhisattvas either, but at a nunnery and a monastery, here is what I understood: Girls can become nuns by the same rules that boys become monks – same rules for either sex.
The Dub Thub nunnery on the hill honored a fifteenth century Bodhisattva named Tonton Gyalpu.
“He built all the chain bridges in Bhutan,” Phruba explained, “But only one still exists, in eastern Bhutan.”
A cloth draped over one whole wall was “to protect dust and to keep out the breath.”
On the right of the altar, Phruba told us, pointing left, was a painting of a sixteenth century reincarnation of Tonton Gyalpu. Just below it was a 1994 calendar with a picture of the current reincarnation, now 17, who had left a month ago for a tour of the United States. On the left, he said, gesturing right, more pictures of the Bodhisattva.
Gods and men can be thirsty. Bowls of water, brought in at sunrise and out at dark, lined the altar as offerings. A bow to ancient Bon beliefs sat right atop the altar – peacock feathers and tree branches.
There were ceremonies four times a day at the Dub Thub nunnery, and flies twenty four hours. If you wanted your own ceremony, for good luck in a new job, for example, or in ill health, it could be arranged with just an offering of money and tea for the monks and nuns. Outside, nun’s wraps draped over the railing.
•••••
Bumping along the way to the next monastery, Mirja drew from her standard repertoire.
“Do you have snakes?”
“Oh yes!”
“Poisonous ones?”
“Yes, cobras!”
•••••
The Queens’ personal monastery, on a bluff over Thimpu town, honors a Bodhisattva named Avaloktsherwa, the “Buddha of Compassion” who you’ll see with nine heads, or eleven, or one thousand. He vowed to eliminate all human suffering and when he realized the enormity of his vow, Phruba said, “his head was exploded.”
Somehow, that’s why you see him today with nine heads, or eleven, or one thousand.
“You come here (to the Queens’ monastery) to get names,” Phruba explained. The monks name babies in a formula according to the year.
As we walked in, a young woman threw dice onto a plate held by a monk. Phruba observed for a while.
“That girl has exams starting tomorrow. She is seeing if she will do well.”
As far as monasteries go, Phruba confided, “I trust this one more.”
•••••
Back at the hotel, a savage fight broke out at the sewer construction site. A woman or two screamed, shouted at their men and slammed some car doors. The Buddhists watched in awe, and they shook their heads at the wrath and passion of the Indians.
Still, they needed them.
“Bhutanese people are great at many things,” Phruba declared, “But not with concrete.”
So the workers were Indian or Nepali, but that was a problem, because everybody in Bhutan knew that once they came, they would never leave. Free education and medicine made for better living. They would put on ghos or kiras, the women’s traditional dress, and it would be hard to tell if they were Bhutanese or not.
There is a derogatory term for these people, ngolops. All the district borders within Bhutan had checkpoints to try to prevent ngolops’ movement within the country. The weekly newspaper Keunsel always reported on parliamentary debates about ngolops.
I asked Phruba the pronunciation of “ngolop.” He pronounced it for me (“no – lop”), thought for a moment more, then told me, “It is better not to say that word.”
•••••
Indian music woke us, really loud and really early. I trudged downstairs to the breakfast room and sat at the window, staring sullenly at a man inside his apartment across the street because I thought he was the source of the music. He glared back at me.
I asked for orange juice and it came back grapefruit.
Phruba came in with a warning: We’re going east, and outside of western Bhutan you’ll have to be ready for toilets with buckets and maybe you can ask for a bucket to wash with.
•••••
Dzongs are fortresses, one for every main town. Our destination was the biggest one in Bhutan, the Trongsa Dzong. We climbed a pass toward Lobesa, a shimmering green little place where they’ve grown apples, oranges and brown jacket cardamom, exports to Bangladesh, for eight or nine years.
An immigration checkpoint for ngolops stood at Angtso. We pulled up behind an impossibly full van and stopped to wait beside Gakey Restaurant Bar and Grocery House #3.
A prayer wheel in a little concrete hut at the edge of the road turned by water power. This was terribly auspicious for the guy who built it because the more you turn a prayer wheel the better. He was set for life, or at least the life of the stream. People have even used tap water to turn prayer wheels, Phruba allowed, but that’s problematic now that they’ve started charging for water.
The road climbed to just over ten thousand feet, where the Dochula Pass was wholly swallowed in mist, an achromatic, ghostly place. The road, intermittently paved, was ever only eight or ten feet wide, and the ubiquitous honking before heading into hairpin turns was little beyond talismanic. Surely somebody above and 270 degrees around a switchback wouldn’t hear.
Wattle fence, to check landslides, ringed the road. Blue plastic canvas served as tents for road laborers, 130 ngultrum-a-day sentinels of misery, all wet all day every day way up here in the clouds.
Even on the most obscure patch of earth (and they had plenty of them), there’d be a painted background on the overhanging rocks, say a red rectangle overlaid with yellow Bhutanese script spelling out the six syllable mantra Om Mani Padme Hum, which for Buddhists purifies the six realms of existence, the worlds of God, God and human, human, animals, hungry ghosts and hell.
At the village of Thinlegang, workers bent nearly double in the paddies. Jigme pulled to the side of the road, jumped out, fired up a cigarette and tried tuning his shortwave radio.
“What’s on?” I asked.
“Nothing sir,” he exclaimed brightly. I could tell that, but I meant what was he trying to find.
“It’s Sunday. Our Bhutan national broadcast. I think it’s too early. Maybe at ten.”
After the road junction to the former capital of Punakha, we came alongside the massive Punak Chhu (chhu means river) as it lumbered through bottomland, bound for the Brahmaputra, Ganges and ultimately the Bay of Bengal. Beyond the Punak Chhu checkpoint we climbed, retracing the opposite side of the river up into the garrison town of Wangdi Phodrang.
Wangdi is Bhutan’s main military town. Indian troops train the Bhutanese army. A sign reads, “Join the Army and Serve the Nation.”
Jigme stopped to gas up the Yokohama and pick up box lunches. He reckoned it would be four and a half hours until the next shop, so we bought litres of Gold Star Water, a product of Eastern Traders, 44 Exra Street, Calcutta. Mirja thought it sounded like motor oil.
Wangdi was lined with ramshackle Indian-style trading stalls that Barbara Crossette (in her book So Close to Heaven) kindly observed, “defy all attempts to define them as quaint.”
There are two versions of how Wangdi (or Wangdue, as you’ll also see it) Phodrang got its name: One is that a 17th century leader, or Shabdrung, saw a boy building a castle with sticks and asked his name. The boy said Wangdi and the town was named for him, Wangdi’s castle. Or if you prefer, it’s because the dzong was built in a place where you can see all four directions, another meaning of Wangdi.
We had the requisite car trouble leaving town, but it was nothing a few whacks on the battery cables with a tire tool couldn’t fix, and we were off for Trongsa.
Mountain goats mingled with the cattle that roamed the roads. Somewhere we stopped and ate lunch on a hill. The inevitable pack of kids found us, marked out its distance, and stood and stared. They wouldn’t come closer and they wouldn’t talk until we left, when they hit us with a torrent of “Ok bye bye see you tomorrow!”
•••••
Time, language and numbers all had a random way in Bhutan. Ask Jigme and Phruba how long today’s drive would last and you’d hear ten and eight hours (It took a little more than seven). Along one stretch of particularly hellish road Mirja thought Jigme was in danger of dozing off, so she peppered the boys with random questions. One was how many employees their company had.
Phruba: “We have fifteen. Twelve guides, nine drivers, and we have trekking staff, office staff….”
In transliteration, “r’s” in particular come and go. Our destination was Tongsa on the map, Trongsa on the road signs. The signs gave a running count of the distance to Trashigang. The maps read Tashigang.
•••••
Way up in the fog, we rolled to a stop in front of six mildewed men with sledgehammers. They faced huge rocks in the middle of the road. They’d just cleared a tiny gap, and we picked our way through. Two huge Indian transport trucks full of logs came barreling around us down toward the slide. If they got through I’d have to see it to believe it.
Phruba piled us out onto the side of the road above a village called Rukubji to explain how a crazy spirit had visited there and had not been treated well. He cast a spell and that’s why the fine people of Rukubji cannot to this day grow rice. They grow wheat, and potatoes.
Stupa outside Rukubji
While Phruba was storytelling, Jigme found the Bhutan Broadcasting Service and a music program. “Bhutan disco,” he smiled. (Jigme preferred his nickname, roughly pronounced “Pudt-so.” It meant, same as it sounds in English, roughly “short and round.”)
Finally, we all got to unwind and stretch at the Sherubling Tourist Lodge, nestled on a hill just below the Trongsa high school. They brought us tea and Ritz crackers. We’d just taken most of the day to bounce 194 hard-fought kilometers.
The dzong itself is off limits to tourists, for it’s a very important place both religiously and politically. But there is a watchtower way up above that you can visit. It holds a monastery for healing the sick.
Up the muddy path, then up the nearly vertical monastic ladder steps, seven monks were just preparing to conduct a ceremony for the living, the dying and the dead, complete with horns, bells and drum.
They said we could stay and served yak butter tea. They chanted endless passages from memory, the natural afternoon light flooding through the windows, and made music until far after we had climbed back down the hill. Really fabulous.
Down in the town now. Only one real street. More ads for Indian videos “Auzaar” and “Ziddi.” A discarded box that once held “Aroma School Shoes.”
Phruba vaguely explained a game monks play with four balls and a stick. He pointed out cedar trees down by the dzong. cedars are the national tree of Bhutan. There was a time when they exported them to Tibet in exchange for religious teachers.
Four young women wove yak wool into colored patterns on ancient wooden looms at Tashi Tsering General Shop and Bar. I scared them with my camera flash and they giggled. An old man tried to get us to buy from his shop. He was another example of why the book Dental Arts in Bhutan would be more of a pamphlet.
Phruba told us as far as he knew we were the first westerners here since the sixth of June when he brought some French folks up. That would have been a little more than a month.
•••••
When the day came to an end, we sat in the dusk on log benches, barefoot in the wet grass. While we watched, mist first enveloped the river valley, then veiled the town, the dzong, and finally crept right up to where we sat.
Nema, the slightly sodden hotelier, served dinner. Mirja thought her Golden Eagle Lager (of India) tasted “like our room smells.” She had a good point. You could smell the past in all the rooms in Trongsa.
Probably unwisely, I dipped into a half liter bottle of Jaching Brandy, produce of Bhutan, “Blended and Bottled by Army Welfare Project Gaylegphug Distillery.” We ordered our hot water for 7:30 a.m., left our empty bucket outside the door and fell asleep in the rain.
•••••
The Trongsa dzong dated back centuries but it had been rebuilt lots of times, after fires from overturned butter lamps and a huge earthquake that leveled just about all the dzongs. Nowadays the Trongsa Dzong had electricity and plumbing (The dzong in Paro, where the airport is, was just now getting power).
It was the heart of the nation. The first King of Bhutan was the governor of Trongsa, ruling from the dzong, when he overthrew the last Shabdrung to unify the Kingdom. The third King, the reigning King’s father, was born here. All kings did a stint here as governor before accession to the throne.
Although Bhutan has only been ruled as a Kingdom for a hundred years, it has had a sense of nation since the eighth century. In Papua New Guinea, nobody knew anyone in the next valley. PNG’ers were animists. Bhutanese had the bond of Buddha.
•••••
First light showed it had rained all night. Water dripped through the leaves, peaceful and delightful, but I worried that now maybe the road back was washed out.
A man in Punakha, the former capital, told me that when he was a tour guide in Trongsa in 1991, the most landslides ever happened. They finally airlifted the tourists out but it was a week before they reopened the road.
Maybe we’d stay in Trongsa, with our bucket, for some time.
“We have no helicopters in Bhutan,” Phruba declared preemptively. Just in case.
•••••
We made it out, and all the way to Punakha. It rained all day.
We didn’t pass another vehicle for more than two hours. People used the road to spread reeds and weave mats.
The rains energized the hills. Waterfalls appeared by the hundreds, thousands, and even more in secret little places across the valley, here now, covered and gone in a minute, dropping hundreds of feet at a bound.
We only passed two trucks the whole morning, instead mostly confronting cattle and horses run by muddy boys. Sometimes white stripes marked the center of the road, with four feet on each side.
•••••
The Pele Pass crouched shrouded in simple, utter fog. We crept around to the previous day’s slide. A new boulder the length of two men, waist high, lay across the road. Men from one of the blue canvas huts were beating on it. This was gonna take a while.
Jigme entered negotiations. Four or five sticks of dynamite materialized and were slapped on the rock and held in place by mud. Phruba, Mirja and I scurried back. Jigme rolled the van back around the corner to a place with no rocks above it. We waited.
Dynamiting the road at the Pele Pass
The blast rocked down and back up the valley and rocked us in our chests. It shook smaller pines out of the ground and sent them skittering down the hill in a hundred places. It cracked the rock. We crept around the corner and just then, shouts. Five men scattered in a flutter of ghos as clots of earth and rocks tumbled straight toward them, dragging a young pine behind.
Gingerly, they returned. In subdued triumph they laid the tree, cautiously, across the rocks they’d piled on the lip of the canyon.
Forty five minutes later a call went out. They’d pried and stacked enough of the boulder away that we could just squeeze though, barely.
•••••
Punakha made a dismal capital city, and Phruba said the third King knew it, so in 1955 he moved the capital to the broad Thimpu valley, giving it room to grow. Phruba rued that his own grandfather, who had land in both places, built the sprawling family house in Punakha, the capital, and only a small hut in Thimpu.
The hotel in Punakha had telephones, though. They didn’t connect to anywhere but the front desk and Phruba failed to raise the outside world via the radiophone behind the reception desk, but that was okay, the management used the hell out of ‘em.
“What time would you like dinner?” One call.
“What would you like for dinner?” Two.
Three: “Would you like your papads baked or fried?”
The morning calls started at 7:10 (We ordered 8:30 breakfast) but I don’t know what they wanted because we ignored them.
The Hotel Zangdho Pelri was owned by the parents of the four Queens.
Perhaps a word on why there are four Queens: In Bhutan, you marry the eldest sister in a family and her sisters also become your wives. Property is handed down to the females, not the males. Marrying all the females in the family is a way for the family’s wealth not to be diluted.
“It stays in,” says Phruba. “It doesn’t matter how many sisters, three, four, five – only one husband comes in.”
It isn’t always done everywhere anymore, he says, but absolutely still is in the more remote spots.
Mirja asked, “Do the Queens do charity work or anything?”
Phruba looked right back and told her, “No, they just live.” Sometimes they’ll open a business or a hospital if they’re asked, he allowed.
•••••
We planned a morning walk to the fifteenth century monastery called Chimmi between Punakha and Lobesa, high on a hill. Then we’d walk back through villages, ending at the Punakha Dzong.
But an insistent rain gave us time instead to ponder things like the government policy of allowing 4000 visitors a year, which equals 77 a week nationwide. Based on how many vacationers we’d seen – three besides us – they could go wild and let in a hundred next week.
•••••
Punakha Dzong sat at the confluence of the larger Mo (mother) and Pho (father) rivers. A suspension footbridge crossed the Mo, which coursed full-speed not two meters below your feet. It was at its highest just now, during the monsoon.
Phruba grinned. “This river also flows to the Brahmaputra. It is our water that floods Bangladesh.”
One end of the Punakha Dzong has been under semi-permanent construction. In 1994, six or eight prisoners on the construction detail died when their jail flooded. Phruba told us straight up, it was because they were trapped in chains.
Barbara Crossette writes that Bhutan was astonished to learn everybody didn’t chain their prisoners and when they found out, they immediately quit, embarrassed.
At the confluence of the Mo and Pho Rivers
Until 1955 Punakha Dzong ruled the country. Inside the center tower are no less than 28 temples and the biggest thangka in Bhutan, extending nearly all the way up the inside of the tower. It celebrates the eight original clans united into a nation.
Here Phruba got talking fast about a special ceremony with eight warriors, one from each of the clans, and how today they still have three days of absolute power. “They can even kill someone,” he told us.
Guru Rinpoche, who is said to have brought Buddhism to Bhutan, predicted by name that Shabdrung Namgyal, the unifier and first of eight Shabdrungs preceding the royal family, would build a temple at the spot he called Elephant Hill (it does slope like the head and back of an elephant). And Shabdrung Namgyal did have this dzong built.
But in 1651 when he died, the elders were afraid that if the people learned of the great unifier’s death the country might come apart. So they faked his continued health. Since that moment of his death, in 1651, the people haven’t been able to go into the special temple where his body (we guess) still rests. There are those who still invest supernatural powers in Shabdrung Namgyal and believe he still lives, just inside this chamber.
•••••
A dzong mixes church and state. It’s a monks’ residence and the seat of state government. There’s a tower containing the temples with a building built around it, incorporating a courtyard inside. One side of the tower is the administration for the state and the other is for the monks. The courtyards are for observances and festivals.
The governor’s office is inside, the first right. A stupa stands straight ahead in the courtyard. Here’s the vagueness of time in the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon: Phruba explained that “this chorten (stupa) was built in 1982 by the Queen Mother as a memorial to a very holy man who died in 1984.”
The guards, one of them with a fifteen-inch dagger on the end of his rifle, were just boys. I asked Phruba what kind of guards they were. “Royal Bhutan Police,” he exclaimed. “Most of them are over fifteen years old.”
•••••
In Bhutan, mysticism remains the coin of the realm.
For centuries Bhutanese women unable to conceive have come to spend the night alone inside the Chummi monastery. Somehow, it’s also famous in Japan. Not long ago a Japanese woman came here, went home, had a child and named it Chummi.
A boy in the Bumthang valley is known to be a reincarnation of his neighbor’s bull. He goes next door and gets down on all fours and he knew the name of the bull without being told.
The 68th head Abbot, or the Je Rhenpo, died three months ago in meditation. You don’t cremate someone who dies in meditation because he may not be finished.
Although, Phruba swears, “His jaws sag and he’s lost some body weight,” he’s still posed kneeling in the same spot right now, today, in Timphu. When he falls over they’ll cremate him.
•••••
Still it poured in Punakha. Jigme found out the National Archery Finals were this afternoon in Thimpu.
“What time?” I asked. Phruba looked puzzled. I guessed it’d be on when we arrived, and it was.
On the way we stopped to see a dart match in the mud, the local team in a tight match with the bad guys in the village of Thinlet Gang.
The archery finals pitted Druk Air versus the Agriculture Ministry, these two teams winnowed from the original eight. Rain couldn’t dampen spirits, but not a gho on the grounds smelled fresh.
Spectators at the archery finals
A pickup team played football against the police. The whole town was there. It was a holiday. The sun even broke through. The afternoon turned beautiful as we set off for Paro. But I must say, I’ve NEVER seen so much traffic in Bhutan.
Phruba rued progress.
•••••
Setting out on foot from a stream on the Paro valley floor, Mirja, Phruba and I hiked up to an elevation of 3000 meters, at first along stream beds and through pine forests, then out across the sturdy red soil. The sun beat down and the air was perfectly still.
Phruba told us to stick to the main path – the shortcuts are too steep – and right away he fell back, only to appear ahead of us via a shortcut. Old guide trick.
We were alone as always, passing only two women and a boy resting by a prayer wheel. They were walking on to the Tiger’s Nest monastery to stay the night.
The Tiger’s Nest is just impossible, perched on a sheer hill. We gazed across a valley from a lookout point. I didn’t think I could walk to it, let alone carry on my back enough materials to build it.
There was a little cafeteria at the lookout point, which was the terminus for all but pilgrims and monks. The cook rustled up a delicious vegetarian lunch, and we sat at a little terrace and demonstrated our cameras to the assorted few who lived up here in support of the cafeteria/gift shop/outpost.
Phruba told us that at Tiger’s Nest, “Ceremony day after (He meant tomorrow) for weather making. It is big this year because this year we have two Junes.” He paused. “Sometimes we have no August.”
Excuse me?
He knew he had us and he warmed to the subject.
“Oh yes. Today is the ninth. Maybe sometimes we have two ninths and maybe no eleventh. This is decided by the monks and they always agree.”
It’s published in Kuensel every Saturday, so you have to check.
“This is why you cannot know when are the festivals.”
•••••
We drove to the national museum, perched on a hilltop above the Paro Dzong, (also called the Rinchen Pung Dzong, or “fortress on a heap of jewels”). From 1651 it had served as a watchtower. Thunder cracked across the valley and rain pelted the roof of the museum’s top floor, the stamp gallery.
Here were stamps commemorating: the 250th anniversary of the birth of George Washington, the Innsbruck 1976 Olympic Games, mushrooms (in 3-D), countless coronations, various non-aligned summits, the rose (scented), Apollo XVII (3-D), talking stamps (tiny phonograph records), international popular dogs, the 60th anniversary of the Boy Scouts, classic cars (3-D), insects (3-D), steelmaking, the Battle of Britain, and the Yeti.
Chains from a chain bridge (one of the eight of which only one remains) built by Saint Drupthob Thangtong Gyalpu (1385-1464) were on display. So was what they called an ancient water clock. It was a bowl into which 60 drops of water were placed. When they had evaporated, an hour had passed.
There were skulls or stuffed versions of indigenous animals, like the very endangered snow leopard, the barking deer, guar, alligator, wild yak and Tibetan gazelle.
In 1872 the future first King was imprisoned for six months by the eighth, and last Shabdrung, in the basement.
And there was this item, just so you know: “Self imbossed conch shell believed to be a tooth of Terton Pema Lingpa (1450-1521).”
•••••
Inside the Paro Dzong, boy monks played in the courtyard, the bigger ones stealing the smaller ones’ wraps, to hold out and wet in the rain where the gutters didn’t work. An ancient hall smelled that way, open, wood floored, with the stink of dirty wet boys of questionable hygiene.
Phruba had changed from his hiking clothes to his gho to enter the dzong. He was explaining how the high threshold at entrances to dzongs everywhere was essentially to keep Tibetans out in times of war, since they wore lower skirts than Bhutanese men, making it slower for them to step over the thresholds when invading.
As he told us, Phruba unwrapped the sash all Bhutanese men wear around their ghos in monasteries as a sign of respect. Another use of the high threshold: He began, “When we have our dead people….” and right there the only cross moment among Bhutanese flared because a Royal Bhutan Police monastery guard accosted Phruba demanding he put his sash back on.
They talked all in Dzongka and we just left them to argue, walking away up the hill.
•••••
Settling up at the front desk at the Hotel Olthang, I was waiting for my less than one dollar change (more than they ever seemed to keep behind any counter. They were forever having to run next door or down the hall to make change. This particular time they didn’t have Ng32 where Ng35 = $1).
The Indian guys beside me were in full rage, shouting “Give me that money please,” and grabbing at a wad the night clerk held back wide-eyed. They demanded a quarter of five wake up call and thundered that if you don’t call us we’ll miss our flight.
They made it. Both planes in the Druk Air fleet were in Paro the next morning. Our buddy George the pilot was off for Kathmandu, while we left for Calcutta. There were no x-ray machines.
Leaving Bhutan requires a little airplane acrobatics. Just into the air you must lean left, around the hill at the end of the runway, then lean left down the valley, back and forth for five minutes until you clear the hills.
Druk Air served spring rolls and salad for breakfast – with a croissant.
•••••
See more photos in the Bhutan Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
December 7, 2018
Weekend Reading
The possibility of a little wintry weather here across southern Appalachia this weekend will keep us close to the fire with a few interesting articles at hand. Like these:
– Matthew Engel on European train travel.
– In the Valley of Fear by Michael Greenberg, from which the quote in the previous post is taken.
– First sun-dimming experiment will test a way to cool Earth by Jeff Tollefson.
– This is unfortunate: What Are We Like? 10 Psychology Findings That Reveal The Worst Of Human Nature by Christian Jarrett.
– Now that’s a library: Helsinki’s New Library Has 3-D Printers and Power Tools. (And Some Books, Too.)
– I like Rafael Behr’s notion of “mild tyranny,” in this article:
“It sounds like an oxymoron, and certainly not the kind of thing citizens in a democracy might choose. But when you consider the relationship many of us have with technology there is something gently tyrannical involved.”
– Meanwhile in Mexico…
… and in Siberia….
Look for my monthly travel column next Monday at 3 Quarks Daily, and next week here, we’ll excerpt a couple of chapters from my book Common Sense and Whiskey. For now, enjoy the weekend. See you next week.
December 4, 2018
Quotes: On Migrant Labor
From In the Valley of Fear by Michael Greenberg in The New York Review of Books, on migrant labor in the San Joaquin Valley:
“Tomato picking is “stoop labor,” the most wearying and painful kind. But the Oaxacans went at it with dizzying speed. The pay was 73 cents for every five-gallon bucket they could fill, which workers prefer to the alternative of $11 per hour, California’s minimum wage. Younger workers filled two buckets at a time, yanking supersized green tomatoes from their plants, flicking off the stems, dropping them into the bucket, then racing to deliver them to the packing trailer hitched to a tractor fifty or sixty yards away at the end of the section. They then ran back to the harvest row, calling and shouting to one another like soldiers to keep up their spirits and pace. In five hours, a skilled picker could earn between $75 and $85.”
November 30, 2018
Weekend Reading
Another wet almost-holiday weekend in the southern Appalachians. If you’re inside, dry and trolling for a few worthy things to read, try these:
– Interesting article from 2000 titled The Last Island of the Savages: Journeying to the Andaman Islands to meet the most isolated tribe on Earth about Sentinel Island, the place that proselytizing American was recently murdered in the Andaman Islands.
– A few weeks back, my 3QD column on wildebeests addressed the mental capacity of bees, ants and termites. In Bee-Brained, two academics, Lars Chittka and Catherine Wilson, explore insects’ minds much further.
– The Uighurs and China’s Long History of Trouble with Islam by Ian Johnson.
– And finally, Sean Carroll has written a paper in which he tries to explain everything. (A timely sort of CliffNotes version from Martin Rees popped up in Prospect about the same time.)
Here’s a fun example quote from the Sean Carroll article:
“While a creator could explain the existence of our universe, we are left to explain the existence of a creator. In order to avoid explanatory regression, it is tempting to say that the creator explains its own existence, but then we can ask why the universe couldn’t have done the same thing.”
Carroll concludes that
“invoking a creator does not provide us any escape from the need to posit something that simply exists because it does, without further reasons to which we can appeal.”
That’s comforting because it means that after all, it really is turtles all the way down.
Enjoy your weekend. See you next week.
