;)
The first thought you have after your plane lands in Bhutan is: I’m never flying here again. No one prepared us for the approach and landing at the Paro airport (the one and only commercial airport in the country), which is probably a good thing because I’m not sure I would have gotten on the plane had I known what was in store for us at the end of our hour-long flight from Kathmandu. Sitting at 7,500 feet in a small valley surrounded by mountains on every side, the sole runway at the Paro airport doesn’t exactly allow for the easy, gentle descents you typically encounter on commercial jet landings. Instead, as the plane continues to lose altitude, the pilots literally have to swerve back and forth to avoid running the plane into the long, pointy fingers of mountains ridges that reach down to the valley floor, all the while trying to make a steady rate of descent and keep the plane lined up for a runway they still can’t even see. And then, only seconds after the last banking turn around yet another mountain ridge, the pilot somehow has to straighten the plane out and drop it down on the runway immediately because, well, there are just more mountains lurking ahead.
Although our pilots handled the landing perfectly, it was definitely the most insane approach and landing I’ve ever experienced on a flight. (We found a video on YouTube of what a landing in Paro looks like from the cockpit of the plane – check it out if you don’t believe us. :) We later learned from a airplane pilot on our tour that, after the old Hong Kong airport closed down, the Paro airport earned the somewhat dubious crown of being the most dangerous airport in the world. Funny that we didn’t see any mention of that in our pre-tour readings materials or guidebooks.
;)
Zhiwa Ling, our wonderful hotel in Paro, was built in the traditional Bhutanese styleOnce we were safely on the ground in Paro and had a chance to catch our breath, it quickly became apparent to us that Bhutan was going to be a very different kind of place than Nepal had been — or really, any place we’d been so far on our trip. Bhutan was literally a breath of fresh air — the sky was actually blue, not the dismal brownish white that you find even on the sunniest days in polluted cities like Kathmandu and L.A. There weren’t throngs of cars and people clamoring and shuffling in every direction, and we didn’t see trash lining the roads or smell the chemical fumes of burning plastic. The ornate architecture of the homes and buildings looked like something from a totally different era, and even the Bhutanese men’s clothing — the traditional gho — made us feel like we were in a world apart. We were still sick and had no idea how the next two weeks were going to play out, but already we were so much happier being in Bhutan. (Check out our Paro album to get a better picture of the place. It includes pictures from our visit to Paro at the beginning of the trip, as well as our return there for a few days at the end.)
Our tour guide, Tsewang (“say-wong”), met us at the airport and talked us into joining the rest of our tour group for lunch in town before we headed to the hotel to rest for the afternoon. We were actually feeling a bit better than we had earlier that day, and Dustin even managed to eat some hot Bhutanese chilis with his lunch (a decision he would later regret… who eats hot chilis when they have the stomach flu?!?). There were six other folks on the tour with us, almost all of them linked to northern California in some way or another except for two guys from pretty much the polar opposite of northern California: Waco, Texas. Bernard & Jennifer owned a small winery in Oregon and also a place in Marin; John B. recently moved to Salt Lake City with his husband from SF; Pete was a retiree from Palo Alto; and Bryan and John were best friends from Texas taking a break from their busy lives back home. It seemed like a really good group, and with both of us feeling better, I had high hopes that we’d be seeing a lot more of all of them in the coming two weeks.
;)
Poor sick Dusty. This was what his first three days in Bhutan looked like.Unfortunately, those hopes didn’t last long. While I continued on the road to recovery, Dustin took a turn for the worse — much worse — after lunch. His fever returned, the terrible nausea returned, and he was forced to return to bed, where he pretty much remained for the next three days. Our only hope was to let him rest and hope for a miraculous recovery before our group left on the 10-day high-elevation trek two days later, but by the next day it became apparent there was no way he was going to be able to drag his poor, sick body up to 14,000 feet. We told Tsewang we’d have to remain behind and hopefully work out some kind of plan B with the tour company once Dustin was feeling better. This decision was definitely a bummer — we’d been looking forward to tramping around Bhutan probably more than any place we’d planned to visit on our trip. It was the first tour we booked after buying our around-the-world airline tickets, and we’d been talking excitedly about trekking in Bhutan’s mountains for months.
The interesting thing is that being forced to let go of our original plans for Bhutan ended up being a great lesson in Buddhist detachment. Maybe we were picking up on the chill vibe of a country that is 95% Buddhist, but I think we surprised ourselves a little in how we accepted our new reality and quickly focused on our energy on making as best of the situation as we could. Yes, Dustin was still sick. We couldn’t change that. And yes, we probably wouldn’t be able to see the high Himalayas up close. But we were still in a beautiful, magical country that only 25,000 tourists get an opportunity to see every year, and we were working with a fantastic tour company (Geographic Expeditions — we can’t sing their praises highly enough) that was doing everything they could to figure out a new plan for us that would still make for a meaningful couple of weeks in Bhutan. As Tsewang would say, it is as it is. What more could we do, really?