Back in another life, during the Dot-Boom, I put a poster of Bhutan up on the window in front of my computer, at the start-up ISP I was working at. We had racks of modems attached to phone lines, awesome amazing bandwidth in the form of multiple T1's (ok, 2), dedicated dial-in CS 900i's, Portmasters, and ISDN lines. And we had a bunch of college kids who wanted to max their hours in the summer, which meant I could take 3 months off. I looked at that poster of Bhutan, through fall/winter/spring, through infuriating calls by frustrated win3.1 and win95 users, through post-set-up office network discussions running on 28.8bps modems, through all the calls blinking hold when our network crashed, through paranoid crazies who'd lined their windows with tin foil looking for tech support, through people wandering lost through http protocols.
I was for awhile a Chief Network Engineer, surfing a wave I didn't care about, making more money than I could spend. I'd graduated and fallen into the gig a few weeks later, because I had a BA degree, no actual plans, and a close friendship with a couple I respected who had started an ISP in the late 90s. Internet Service Provider, for those of you who missed that phase.
Verizon, which was Bell Atlantic (BA) then was our nemesis and our host. We were, from their perspective, parasites - reselling their data in a way that was perfectly legal and profoundly problematic for them, since we were making more money off of it than they were. BA didn't know how to handle the Dot Boom, and suddenly we and others were interloping, buying up phone lines, ISDN lines, T1's and so on. That's what got me to Bhutan.
Bhutan, Land of the Thunder Dragon. Gross National Happiness, Buddhism, and Himalayan mountains. I had an inside in, thanks to H, who was leading infrastructure/redevelopment projects, which meant that I could visit without having to pay the set tourist rate of $100+ per day. I stayed for 3 weeks, long enough to get a taste. I lived the high life with H the first week, (relatively) top-class hotels and Landrover tours and free (for me) meals, which were dominated by hot peppers and local cheese. I walked through doomed primary cloud forests, where roads were beng bulldozed along steep valley slopes, causing landslides above and below, creating access for illegal loggers. I saw families, young women and children, hand-hammering rocks into gravel, walked sub-tropical stream glades following dippers and kingfishers, butterflies and exotica.
When H left, I moved to a cheaper garret room, unmemorable. I started negotiating for a trek. I I half fell in love with a tour planner I met, a stoutly gorgeous local woman, wrapped in the mandatory local dress, strong face and strong body structure, but she kept a professional distance. She hooked me up with a young guide, K, and we got along. K informed me that we needed a cook, so we brought R in, and then a porter, so we brought Y in. Then we got an assistant guide, and an assistant porter, which meant that I would be accompanied by a team of 5, plus as many ponies. I felt that I'd accidentally fallen into a Matthiessen expedition.
Our destination was Jomolhari, a pretty conventional trade route from Paro north up over a pass and back down another valley to Thimphu (the capitol city). Jomolhari was a sacred mountain, and our route just approached her feet. I was more used to climbing mountains than admiring them from afar, but when in Bhutan...
Bhutan was at the time a benevolent dictatorship, ruled by a Buddhist king. There were no traffic lights in the country - the main intersection in the capitol was a traffic circle directed by policemen wearing white gloves. Citizens wore traditional clothing, which was mandatory. Nepalese and Indian immigrants were mostly treated as second-class laborers. The locals practiced archery in the soccer field and looked forward to the next summer Olympics.
The main issue discussed in the weekly local newspaper, the http://www.kuenselonline.com/, was the problem of dogs barking during the night in Thimphu. As a Buddhist nation, trapping or neutering the dogs was not an option, who dozed peaceably in the middle of the road or wherever they were overcome by drowsiness, as cars and pedestrians went around. I came up with a hypothesis that the issue was not so much the dogs barking during the night, as their sleeping during the day, and felt that a concerted citizen action to keep the dogs awake in the daytime could alleviate the night-time barking.
Before leaving on the trek, K and I visited a monastery for a blessing, which went uneventfully. Most towns and villages had chortens or stupas, which one could circle as an act of prayer. Similarly, prayer flags attached to bamboo poles would "say" a prayer each time they fluttered in the wind, and many streams had small hydro-powered prayer wheels that would rotate.
I remember visiting a monastery up on a hill, where a number of young acolytes were excitedly grinding a cauldron full of bright red berries. When I ducked into the main room of the monastery, I was met with a cacaphony of chants and musical instruments. Later, I kneeled before an elder monk in a cool dark room with a smooth wood floor and bright hills in the windows, offered a white silk scarf, and was told that my trip would be fortuitous.
It was.