Bhutan: Lost in the Hidden Kingdom

What will you find in faraway Bhutan? No clients, no partners, no professors, no tests, no problems.

"Please be advised." It was our pilot, speaking over the plane's P.A. system. "If you've never been to Bhutan, the approach to the airport is a little different. You'll see trees and houses somewhat closer than you're used to." One of only a few pilots certified to land a plane in this mountain country, he signed off ambiguously: "Enjoy the ride."

Suddenly the engines whined; the plane dipped. By the time we'd pierced the soft carpet of clouds, steep green cliffs and cascading waterfalls were flying by at eye level, and I was looking up at the peaks. The plane banked right, then left, on its preposterous fighter-jet course, the landscape rising with each new glimpse-emerald-green rice fields, half-timbered farmhouses clinging to the cliffs. When we passed over the Paro Dzong, a colossal whitewashed monastery/fortress, it seemed the plane would accomplish what centuries of invading Tibetan armies could not: rip the roof right off. The Paro valley is one of just a few in Bhutan long enough to accommodate an airstrip. Still, this one couldn't have been much longer than it was wide. The plane touched down and shuddered to a stop. We climbed out into the chill, thin air of Bhutan, the last independent Himalayan Buddhist kingdom on earth.

Until the 1950s, only a dozen or so Westerners were known to have reached what the Bhutanese still call Druk Yul, the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon. Through the 1960s, this tiny mountain country-roughly the size of Switzerland and sandwiched between China and India-had no paved roads, telephones, schools or hospitals. In the past six years, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, the country's religious and temporal leader, has inched open the doors, allowing just a few thousand chaperoned visitors each year (all visits must be arranged through and guided by government-sponsored travel agencies).

But having witnessed neighboring Tibet, Ladakh and Sikkim get devoured by the region's superpowers and having seen Nepal degraded by overpopulation and pollution, Bhutan has entered the age of technology and tourism with deep ambivalence. It is determined to lift itself from an agrarian-subsistence past yet still cling to its role as a representative of Tantric (or Tibetan) Buddhism. Pressured from within and without, its ancient culture is now as endangered as the snow leopards that are thought to haunt the country's high northern peaks.

For the 600,000 Bhutanese, this anxiety toward encroachments from the outside world means living under an almost feudal autocracy. Even as the king surrounds himself with four wives and indulges an obsession with NBA basketball via satellite TV, his subjects must wear formal national attire (the kimonolike gho) and hew to traditional building codes (mud-walled houses brightly decorated with religious iconography). For the visitor, it's a chance to witness a vanishing way of life amid a stunning landscape that stretches from the subtropical jungles of the south to a range of frozen 20,000-foot mountains that are among the highest unclimbed peaks in the world.

You can see a lot of Bhutan by car, driving the country's twisting, stomach-churning roads to visit its temples and shrines, or attend masked dances at the religious festivals, or spot an array of wildlife that includes red pandas, blue sheep, golden langur monkeys and the occasional Bengal tiger. At night, you can stay in the country's simple chaletlike hotels and build back your body fat with the national dish, ema datse-chili peppers in cheese sauce. But this is a vertical country, with no cities to speak of and only a half-dozen paved roads, and eventually you'll have to travel as the Bhutanese do: by foot.

For five days, I trekked with two friends along the Druk Path, which leads across a ridge of mountains separating Paro and the capital, Thimphu. Led by our Bhutanese guides, we hiked past crimson- and saffron-robed monks spinning prayer wheels and chanting mantras to the pantheon of local deities. We wandered into a remote mountain village celebrating the high holy days, and accepted the villagers' invitation, in Dzongkha, to join them in archery and dance. Above the tree line, at 12,000 feet, we came upon an abandoned 17th-century monastery, now slowly returning to the elements, and slept in monks' cells beneath moonlight knifing through the crumbling roof.

In Himalayan Bhutan, where the topography is literally so close to the heavens, there's little distinction between the landscape and the spirit. Sheer, impassable mountainsides ripple with brilliantly colored prayer flags sending missives to the wind; cascading rivers turn waterwheels that, in turn, ring prayer bells to the gods. While traveling through a land where the line between the natural and the supernatural is so finely drawn, you eventually find yourself suspending a rational, Western frame of mind. One evening, my friend Jim went for a swim in a glacial mountain lake that, we later learned, was thought to be sacred. When we reached our campsite, our anxious guides were carving prayers in the ground to appease the wrath of the weather gods. What were we to think? We went to sleep under gathering clouds. We awoke the next morning under three feet of snow.