When the time comes, the team stagger out of the tent, exchange their drinks for huge, deadly, metal alloy bows, do a little dance, then line up to fire at a target 30 inches high, and 150 yards away. The extraordinary thing is that most of them either hit it or come damn close. I suppose that’s the ultimate macho achievement. To be able to drink yourself silly and deliver a bull’s eye while being told by your opponents that they’ve been shagging your wife for the last three weeks.
End up the day on a very different note. In the Queen Mother’s Temple, a ceremony has been laid on to wish us good fortune for the rest of the journey. In a room, covered in beautifully detailed paintings of the various stages of the Buddha’s life and incarnations, a group of eight monks has assembled for music and prayers. The chantmaster, or udze, sits on a dais and leads a chant in Cholkay, a variation of the Sanskrit in which Buddha himself wrote. The other monks chant with him or play oboes, drums, cymbals and the dungchen, the long trumpet that rests on the floor and makes a deeply mournful sound.
It’s a serene and rather moving ceremony, quite unexpectedly interrupted by the sound of a mobile phone. An elderly monk, next to the chantmaster, fishes around inside his habit and switches it off.
Day One Hundred and Fifteen : Paro
The highlight of the last day of tsechu, and, indeed, the highlight of the festival itself, is the unfurling of the greatest treasure of the Paro dzong. It’s a thangka measuring almost 100 feet (30 m) by 150 feet (45 m), and is known as a thongdrol. The survival of this huge tapestry when the dzong burnt down in 1915 only added to its reputation and merely to look on it conveys the very highest merit. Thongdrol means ‘liberation by sight’.
To avoid such a precious object being damaged by the direct sunlight, it is unrolled at dawn, so our last full day in the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon begins at 3 am.
When our bus pulls out onto the main Thimpu to Paro road, the valley seems to be already awake, if indeed it ever slept. Lights are on in the houses, buses and taxis are picking up people along the roadside. To add to the sense of great events, a full moon stares down from a cloudless sky.
Pilgrims are pouring over the covered bridge, fingers telling prayer beads and lips moving as they join a candle-lit procession winding its way up the hill. It’s a quiet crowd. Buddhism is celebrated in song and chanting, but prayers are never shouted or hymns bellowed, and this morning the great throng, which must number several thousand, is almost silent.
In front of the five-storey building that will be completely covered when the thongdrol is unfurled, a line of butter lamps is lit. The men wear khos, of course, but today they also have white scarves across their shoulders and some wear them over their heads, lending an incongruous touch of the mosque.
To the sound of drum and bell, monks in procession emerge onto the forecourt and, dividing into two lines at right angles to the building, sit on the ground while the abbot, in a gold silk robe, takes his place on a raised dais between them.
Once this glittering scene is settled, the thangka is rolled out, up from the ground to the roof. At its centre is the figure of Padmasambhava, 20 feet high, flanked by his two consorts. In a circle around him are depictions of his eight manifestations.
The pilgrims press forward and, one after the other, pass along the base of the thangka, touching it, saying a prayer, and, in some cases, covering their heads with it.
Dancers come out now and some particularly intrusive, flash-popping tourists meet their match. As they push forward for their trophy close-ups, a couple of them are sent flying by a whirling dancer.
The dawn light slowly fills the sky, and as the time draws near for the thongdrol to be put away for another year, the line of pilgrims wanting to touch it surges forward. Not for the first time at tsechu I fear for the children and the frail older people who get caught up in this religious fervour. I count only six police at the front to deal with any emergency. But somehow, it never gets nasty or aggressive. The joy on the faces of those close to the thongdrol speaks of fulfilment not frustration.
The chill of the night softens and the sun begins to climb, revealing the full glory of this immense tapestry and the size of the crowd, banked right up the hill on both sides, that has been drawn here to see it. I turn away and look out over the shining walls and towers of the fortress to the mountains rolling away towards the looming Himalaya. This is a ceremony to match the landscape. A collective act of belief, bringing together the mountains and the faith that people need to survive them.
Bangladesh
Day One Hundred and Seventeen : Near Sylhet, Bangladesh
At their closest point Bhutan and Bangladesh are some 25 miles (40 km) apart, yet they could scarcely be more different. One is entirely composed of mountains, the other flat as a pancake. One is among the least crowded countries in the world, the other the most densely packed. One is an absolute monarchy with a stable government, the other a people’s republic that has just topped the list of the world’s most corrupt countries. But there is something that unites them: the Himalaya.
Bhutan’s seclusion and stability is due largely to the physical inaccessibility of the Himalayan mountains. Bangladesh’s survival is due to the water that pours off them.
Bangladesh, three times as big as Bhutan, with 75 times the number of people, has a population of around 135 million, and the only reason it can support so many is because two of the greatest mountain rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, funnel down through the country on their way to the sea, depositing billions of tonnes of rich, recycled Himalaya.
Combined with the heavy monsoons that are the blessing and the bane of Bangladesh, this gives the country some of the most productive land in Asia. The price they pay is frequent and frighteningly destructive. The most recent serious flood, in 1998, inundated two-thirds of the country and left 22 million people homeless.
The River Pijain, in the northeast of the country, falls, not strictly from the Himalaya, but from that older rock on which Nagaland and much of western Myanmar rests. As soon as it enters Bangladesh it is harvested. Not so much for fish or crop cultivation but for stones. The country is strong on mud but very short on stone and the river bed at Jaflang, just across the border from India, is like an open-cast quarry, combed by several hundred freelance quarriers. Men, women and children, in narrow flat-bottomed skiffs, put out onto the lazy, meandering waters and dredge for stones and gravel, which they take ashore to be carried by trucks to the crushing plants that line the road for many miles.
In the West all this would be done by machines and conveyor belts: in Bangladesh, human labour is abundant and cheap. For a day’s work collecting stones, unskilled workers earn the equivalent of 70 pence.
To survive in such unregulated conditions you need an eye for the main chance and while the boatmen are arguing over who gets the BBC’s custom, a bright-eyed, obliging young man seizes his opportunity and offers me a ride out onto the river. It’s only after the smoke-belching little outboard has kicked in and we’re heading towards a very low, makeshift bridge with ten-tonne trucks rolling across it that I first take a good look at my crew. The captain is probably no more than 14 and his first officer 8 at the most.