Follow Your Heart: four tales of holiday romance
Years ago, I met some very nice Bhutanese people who were working in New York. We became friends, and they always urged me to visit their country.
And so in August 1994, I found myself limping along on a mountain road in Bhutan, trying not to panic. I’d left my very agreeable guide and driver at the hotel and set off on a half-day hiking adventure through Punakha, a heavenly valley filled with poinsettia trees and orange trees and temples in the clouds. There wasn’t a soul around, and I’d recklessly slipped off my boots and waded into the sparkling river that ran parallel to the road on which I’d been walking. It was fantastic until I slipped in the icy water and twisted my ankle. I climbed back up to the road and, struggling, put my boots back on.
Read moreGross National Happiness (GNH)
Looking down from Kungachoeling Monastery through fluttering prayer flags to the blindingly green rice paddies of the Paro River Valley below, one feels utterly escaped from the surly bonds of Earth. Not far from me, a solemn monk lights incense before the Buddha. In the silence of this remote and lovely refuge–one of the Royal Kingdom of Bhutan’s hundreds of functioning Tibetan Buddhist shrines–computer chips, frequent flyer miles, the World Trade Organization, and IPOs seem part of another world.
Especially here on the Indian subcontinent, awash in corruption, ethnic struggle, illiteracy, pollution, poverty, and the clash of civilizations, Bhutan’s pacifism, paternalism, and egalitarianism stand apart. It is hardly surprising that people here often speak of “the outside world” as if it were another celestial body. Under the spell of this tranquil monastery, the unexpected hum of distant engines is like an unwelcome tocsin awaking one from reverie. I spot a minuscule white dot against a peak as one of Druk Air’s two small planes drifts down out of the cumulus clouds toward the country’s only airfield.
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