Tiger's Nest

Climbing to the Tiger's Nest was not quite as hard as I had anticipated. A few days prior we had make a short hike up to a temple and I was surprised at how winded I was getting, due to altitude I suppose. Additionally right after that we crossed a high pass on the way bay through Thimphu to Paro and I got a headache and dizziness. I was a bit afraid that as we climbed up to the Tiger's Nest that I would feel tired and sick again, but it didn't happen. Whether that was because it was a slow ascent or because by that point I was a bit more used to the height, I'm not sure. 

We arrived at the base of the mountain at 8am and the forest was wrapped in a thick fog. There was not much you could see, but our guide pointed to some clouds and said, "its right there", which because a bit of a joke as we climbed. He said it would take us about 6 hours up and down, which I suppose was nearly right. We travelled in a group of three and I suppose if it were just Aya and me, or just me with the guide we could have moved a bit faster, but not by much. 

On the first part of the trail there was a track for horses as well as people and some hikers chose to ride horses up the first 1/2 of the way. We decided to hike it. It took us about 2 hours to reach the place were the horses turned around (too steep) and there was a small tea house which, supposedly, had a nice view of the cliff grabbing temple, but all we could see was fog. After a short rest for tea and cookies we continued on. There was a bit of a hard part as once you get close enough to the temple you can see it straight across from you, but you have to go down a few hundred stairs and then back up again to actually get there. Perhaps the clouds were a bit lucky for us though as at least it wasn't too hot. Upon arriving at the temple we had to wait for our guide to catch up and take our bags and things to a small hut to check them in. No food, water, etc, inside the temple. 

We entered together, and saw a few rooms were monks were praying as well as some very nice views of the valley. The most intense part was the room containing the Padmasambhava statue. Here were a dozen monks, blowing loudly on horns, chanting, and banging symbols. Quite the display.  It was a unique temple and there were lots of monks there, but also lots of tourists. Despite starting early many of the other tourists had caught up to us, by foot or horse. Or so we thought. On the way down we realized that there were even more on the way up! the temple itself was built around a place where a monk from Indian had meditated for three years, three months, three days, and... yes, three hours in a cave on the mountain. At one place in the temple you can enter the area where he stayed and see how he got water from the rocks in the cave. Oh, and did I mention he flew there on a tiger? That is how the place gets it's name. 

The way down was a bit easier and the sun had begun to burn off most of the morning fog, so the way down we had some better views of both the valley and the temple on the mountain. 

Tashi comes off the mountain

After getting off the mountain we headed to lunch and then, wearily, to our hotel to rest a bit before the last treat of the day, a hot stone bath. That was something else and well worth the effort to go to the farmer's house to jump in. Tashi and Choki had told of these baths and, Aya being Aya, she of course had already researched this. Apparently Japanese people quite enjoy taking the baths. 

At the farmer's house we took our bath, from hot stones take from the river and then placed in a fire, ultimately put into a tub to make the water warm. After the end of the bath we went inside the farmer's house for a nice home cooked dinner. This, of course, included the pepper cheese mix and many assorted veggie dishes, rice, and to my delight some ara, a rice alcohol similar to sake'. The meal, the company, and the bath were all an excellent way to end our last day in Bhutan. 

A Sporting Chance

Twice in Thimpu we came across people playing some of the national sports. Archery is very popular and Bhutan is somewhat well known for their archery. On the first day we went to the archery stadium downtown in Thimpu and watched about a dozen guys shooting arrows back and forth. It was pretty amazing since the distance must have been something like 400 yards. You could barely see the arrow hit the target on the other side.

The other instance we ran into a group of woman playing khuru, the national darts game. These dart are more like lawn darts, really heavy and kind of dangerous to be in front of. Two teams stood at opposite ends and lobbed the darts at targets set on the ground. Each time a dart struck the woman throwing it got another colored band on her belt. The fun part was there was a lot of taunting going on between the two groups and the small group of men on the side who were drinking beers and watching.

Temple Mania

Memorial Chorten in Thimphu

The first temple, or rather in this case stupa, that we visited was in Thimpu. This memorial was built in the 70s to the third king. What I found interesting about this place was that upon entering the gate we saw about 20 elderly people just sitting and spinning prayer wheels, some of them occasionally getting up to walk around the stupa, then coming back. Our guides had told us that younger people drop off their parents there in the morning, then pick them up at the end of the day, sort of like a day care for them. The main hospital is also across the street! 

Chimi Lhakhang Fertility temple

 The first temple we visited, outside of Thimphu, was the fertility temple. Penises were everywhere in Bhutan, painted on this, jetting out from doorways, for sale as roadside stalls. Long story short, a long time ago there was a buddhist master who lived in the area. Apparently he was quite the ladies' man and loved to drink and visit the wives of the valley. Well, there was this she demon who... something something.... and then this master smote the demon with his... manhood. On this spot the fertility temple was built. We visited the temple and when we were entering our guide told us that there was a fertility ritual we could participate in, would we like him to ask the monk? Ok, we said. Well, one catch, he said. The ritual consisted of the woman carrying a wooden penis around the temple grounds while the husband stayed in the temple to pray. We initially agreed to this as the wooden penises we had seen were of a "reasonable" size, handheld you could say. However, after talking to the monk, he pointed to the penis in the corner of the temple. This was definitely a two handed penis. In fact, you'd need a shoulder as well, indeed you'd have to carry it like a baby. So, Aya declined. I was cool with it, but she wasn't having any of it. Go figure.

Punahkha Dzhong

This temple was quite cool looking. It is at the connection of the Pho Chhu and Mo Chhu, the father and mother river. A day after we arrived we rafted down the mother river, but that is another story I can't rapidly tell (get it? rapids?). Crossing from the main road over a beautiful covered bridge you arrive a very steep stair, going up to the main part of the temple. Here there are courtyards and, what I assume are, the winter dwellings of monks as they come here in winter months for the temperate weather. The temple itself is about 400 years old, but that is kind of misleading as apparently the rivers flood every now and again and wash the temple away (amazing to think they keep rebuilding it). Far in the interior is a great hall where the Buddha resides. Here was toured around the interior, said our prayers, and then made our way out.  

Khamsum Yulley Namgyal Chorten

The following day we hiked up to the Tiger temple, about an hour up and hour down. The hike itself wasn't so bad, but we could feel the altitude as we huffed and puffed up the hill. Our guide, of course, had no problems and was nimbly hiking with us, dashing off in the bush here and there to grab gooseberries. They tasted awful and it became a nice inside joke for us later in the trip as he would keep asking us if we wanted gooseberries (no!). We had started our hike early and were the first to arrive at the temple (hooray!). So early in fact the monk had to be called down to open it for us. We made our way 4 stories up to the top where there was a viewing deck with great views of the valley below. On the way down we ran into a lot of other tourists and upon returning to the parking lot we ran into lots of buses and cars when just a few hours before we were the only ones. 

There were other temples along the way, but these four struck out the most, besides the Tiger's Nest, a temple worthy of it's own post. In many places we have visited before we have gotten "templed out" just like you might get "churched out" in Europe, but our guides did a good job of only going to one or two temples a day and keeping the explanations for things rather short. However, I do have to say by the end we had heard the same story so many times that we were actually learning about the history of the place! 

The Golden Buddha of Thimphu

The valley in Thimpu

Our first day in Thimphu Choki and Tashi picked us up from the airport, placing khata on us and then packing us into their van.  I'm sure that we didn't talk much on the way from Paro to Thimphu, our first destination, either because we were too tired or were actually sleeping. After checking into our hotel and have a quick shower/nap we packed back in the van to go to the post office where we had stamps of ourselves made (so cool!). Afterwards we went to eat lunch in a quiet spot off the main streets and then to visit the textiles museum. It was all pretty cool, very chill. There were many different clothes and styles in the museum and descriptions of how to make and wear them as well as accompanying jewelry. As I write this, I can't help but think, I'm getting old. Who gets excited about a textile museum? Probably not my younger self, but I do now. Unfortunately we were asked not to snap pictures, but someone did at some point in time, so you can get an idea of what it looked like. 

After the museum we had a quick drive up to the mountain side to see the Takin, a rather surely looking animal, handsome and muscular. Tashi told us a tale of a man, a magic man, who at many animals in the valley. Then, one day, the people questioned if he was in fact magical. So, gathering the bones of the animals he had eaten, he restored them to life. After all the goats, yaks, etc. walked away there was this beast, the Takin, made up of all the extra parts. 

After getting the Takin to mug for the camera, we were off for our final stop of the day, the great buddha Dordenma. Click the link if you want to read more, but suffice it to say that it is one of the largest buddha statues in the world, adorned and surrounded by gold, silver, bronze and many statues of other deities. Inside intricate paintings surround you on the walls and the alter with alms to buddha as well. Many people had stacked flour, oil, and other food stuffs as gifts and in the corner there was a monk spinning a prayer wheel, chanting, and glancing at his iPhone under the table. He reminded me of many of my students, half heartedly do his work while also being distracted. 

At the end of the day we made it back to the hotel, had dinner at 7 o'clock with some delicious nan, curries, and spicy cheese and chili all washed down with some Druk lager. The end to a tiring, but great first day and about 36 hours of almost uninterrupted waking hours. 

Flying the Chute

Coming from Bangkok via Kolkatta I was pretty excited to make this flight since I had seen the flight on Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations" and while descending into the valley I saw that the plane had to make many turns. As we crossed into Bhutan we could see the Himalayas and Mt. Everest out the window. I'd only seen this once before when flying in Nepal and it is quite unbelievable that even from hundreds of miles away the mountains seem so close. 

As we came through the cloud cover and into the valley by Paro the plane began to make the banking back and forth between the low mountains to the flat section of the valley and Paro airport. It was really fun, a bit scary, but neat to experience and nothing went wrong. Arriving at the airport we were a bit surprised at how small it was and it kind of reminded us of the airport in Bagan where we'd been the previous winter. We were then told that Druk air, the only carrier allowed to fly into Bhutan, only has like 6 planes or something, so the airport has just a couple flight a day coming in. Pretty easy job for air traffic control if you ask me. The tower looked more like a staircase than an air control tower. In fact, I'm not even sure if it is enclosed or someone just climbs to the top and stands there, exposed, directing planes.

All Hand, All Hearts, and Barranquitas

7 years ago I volunteered with All Hands as part of the disaster response to the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. My time with them was something that was very special to me and I had shared the experience with a few friends. This year, one of those friends contacted me to say he was planning on going to Puerto Rico to volunteer with All Hands (Now All Hands and Hearts) to help with the damage from Hurricane Maria. At first, I think I drafted a nice response emailing telling him to do it since All Hands was such a great organization and, of course, the recovery in PR was a worthy cause, but somewhere along the way it dawned on me that maybe I should go too. 

Let me say, before all else, I was terrified to go. I'm an introvert. This would require spending 24/7 with 50+ individuals with near zero privacy among people and in a place I had no knowledge of and no control over, performing skills I had little business doing, for people I had little connection to other than our common humanity (certainly not a language or culture), but the pull was there. The weekend after my friend told me this I was watching the David Letterman interview with Barack Obama on David's new show and David said, "Nothing right in the world ever occurs without a fight." "Or at least some discomfort" Barack replies. "...that's why I always say that the way America has become more perfect, not perfect, but more perfect, typically has to do with ordinary people just sayin, you know what, that's not right." Well, I looked at this situation as I did with many others and thought, that's not right and I’ll take the discomfort to do something about it.

Arriving in Puerto Rico, I had a day and a half in San Juan before I was heading out to the base for work. I walked a lot around the city observing life and even in San Juan you could see some of the impact of Maria in empty houses and some broken down infrastructure. The morning of the third day I got a driver to head to the hills and valleys of central Puerto Rico where I would spend time in Barranquitas, an inland province of Puerto Rico. So inland, you can imagine, that most people from the capital never make it there even though it is just over an hour away. In fact, a co-volunteer had an experience where an uber driver stopped half way to the site and refused to go further away from San Juan. So driving to and arriving on base was a bit of an experience.  My driver was nice and chatted my ear off about every thing she could think of and an hour and a half later I was standing in a parking lot not knowing what came next, but sure enough there was the cross fit gym I’d been wondering about. 

The Base for the All Hands and Hearts operation sits on a windy road just about a mile outside of the county seat of Barranquitas. The building itself is two stories tall with one story containing two smaller rooms of bunk beds and one washer dryer set (for all of us!). The upper half of the building contains the cross fit gym, the kitchen we use, a dining/meeting area and bunks for about 40 people. 

The kitchen is communal, breakfast and lunch are up to us, but food stuffs are provided. Dinner is provided by a local woman who comes to cook food the base has bought and it was simple stuff, but delicious. Bunks were made by the all hands staff and air mattresses are used by participants. The space between bunks is about 3ft, so enough for 2 people to pass, but not much more. Add to that all the bags and other crap people had gathered around their bunk and some parts were unnavigable. The first night trying to sleep was a quite funny experience, with 40 people either snoring, accidentally flashing lights from phones, whispering to each other, moving around on their creaky air mattress, and an assortment of other noises competing with the frogs, crickets, and passing traffic sounds coming through the open windows. I chuckled a few times, what can you do but laugh at the absurdity of some moments? There are two bathrooms off the main area, two porta pots outside, and a built plywood outdoor shower with 4 stalls. To have a moment of peace to use the toilet or shower was rare and you can imagine with 40 people that quite a few got up in the night to bang the bathroom door shut and let the lights shine brightly on all who were sleeping. Honestly though, other than the first night I slept like a rock since I was so tired from working in the day that all banging and lights didn’t phase me.

 

Work days started when the cross fit gym opened at 6am. No need for an alarm as the music and the sounds of dropping weights were enough to rouse us. By 630 mostly people were up making breakfast, packing lunches, using the bathroom and then dressed and ready to go at the trucks by 730. Then our smaller teams would discuss what tools were needed for the day and get them from the communal shed. My team leader was Addie, a slightly older woman who’d been at base for about a month with two weeks left to go. Along with her and 6-8 others we headed to the same house each day. Every team had something slightly different, either attaching corrugated iron to wooden roofs, cleaning or sealing concrete roofs, or possibly something else. The major theme was, roofs. Either build them or fix them. By the time I arrived on base, about 6 months after the first volunteers came, about 50 roofs had been fixed or constructed. We were told that it takes about 15 to 25,000 usd per roof in materials and manpower (the food for us).

  

We arrived at Miranda’s house each morning where usually Miranda had already left for work and her parents, Amerigo and Wanda would either be on the porch or just inside waiting for us. Hugs and kisses would be next and then our Spanish speaker would tell them what our plan was for the day. I’d say hello to Linda, the Chihuahua as well.

We’d then haul our gear up to the roof and do some morning stretches while talking about what needed to be done. The first day I arrived Miranda had a new cast on her arm. Apparently she slipped and broke her arm the day before when there were rains and water leaked into the house. In addition, mold was beginning to grow in places on the inner walls of the house. It was not a healthy place for people to be living.

Our roof took a lot of chipping away of old sealant, caulking of cracks, cementing cracks and corners, and then finally a new coat of seal before completion. Unfortunately, the roof was a day or two away from completion when I left, so I didn’t get to have that pleasure, but all the same I know my hours sitting on that roof will give the family a dry house. The night I was there it rained hard and we were all worried that again their house would be flooded, but because of some of the base layers we had already put down when we arrived the house was dry. Amerigo was very keen to tell us and a few of our team members shed tears at the thought of having reached our goal, though not full completion of the roof, yet

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Work on the roof was hard. I’m not a handyman and I’m not used to laboring all day, nor being in the hot and humid Puerto Rico climate. Each day I felt good to be doing something that serves others, but by golly did my body hurt. My muscles in my back and knees ached, my hands were sore the whole time, I got numerous blisters and sores from sitting, bug bites from just being in the tropics, chemical burns, sunburns, etc. During lunch I would lie flat on the concrete porch of Miranda’s house as it was flat and hard and made my back feel like new again for after lunch work.

At 4pm each day we would start packing up our tools, inform Amerigo and Wanda what we had done that day, a couple kisses on the cheek from Addie to them, and we were headed back to base. There we would unload our gear, race for the showers to beat other teams, and be in the dining hall for a meeting at 530pm. There each team would give an update from the day, general news would be told, and anyone leaving would be asked to give a speech, if they liked. Many speeches were similar, but not less genuine, expressions of gratitude to all present and the work done. After we would have dinner and then a few hours before quiet hours started at nine with lights out at ten and final curfew at eleven. Then the symphony of creaks, crickets, whispers and snoring would start all over again. Each day, just like this. Dirty and tiring and beautifully satisfying in its simplicity.

The day I left base I went around to a few of the volunteers I had come to know, including my team leader Addie, sharing hugs and tears. After saying goodbye and leaving the base room for contemplation began. Originally in San Juan and at base too, I questioned how daily life in Puerto Rico could continue for some people while their neighbors were in need. How could all these buff dudes come do cross fit while roofs needed repairing? Well, the answer to that is pretty simple. They were continuing with their lives, as we all do, even when there was need around them. As I too was doing by returning to my normal life. 

It is hard to put down normal life to reach out to someone. In the mainland and certainly where I live in China there is poverty and there are people that need help, but how often do we put down our normal lives to help them? The feeling among Puerto Ricans is that the US has forgotten them now that the sensationalism of the hurricanes initial impact has gone. Although the US government did come to give disaster relief initially, the depth and duration was not enough. Initially the lives lost were estimated to be about 65, but since then the estimate has risen to about 2,500 (I’ve seen some estimates as high as 4,500, but can’t find a lot of support for that number). Think about that 2,500 number for a moment. Compare that to the flooding in Houston. That storm killed 15. What about Katrina in New Orleans? That hurricane killed about 1,800. Put in context, the discussion around and response to Maria has been oddly muted and most feel it is because Puerto Rico is a territory not a state, where people are US citizens, but don’t have rights to vote or be represented in the US government (so why should the US government care much about them?). Because of Maria and a number of other conditions, a record number of Puerto Ricans have decided to move, mostly to the US mainland and mostly to the east coast, in Florida and New York especially. Some estimates are that there are just as many Puerto Ricans living outside of as in the territory.

While working, Addie would often ask us if we were ok, how we were doing. Most of the volunteers are younger and chirpy and responded as you’d imagine, but being a bit older and wiser (and more tired) I would just shrug and say, “Well, you know, I’m fine”, and she would look at me with these tired and understanding eyes with a little smirk to say, yeah, me too. Because we were fine and that was something to ponder as we stood on a roof in Barranquitas.

The whole experience has left me a bit frayed, physically and emotionally. A few people along the way have expressed gratitude that I volunteered my time or said that I’m a great guy for doing this, but I wonder how much that is true. I feel like a bit of a fraudster. I fly in, do my time, and fly out, but what have I really given?

There is a parable that I can barely remember from being a youngster in church, something along the lines of a yearly tithe that is given and what the value is. One man gives a chest of gold while one woman gives two pennies. The question is who is making the greater gift? Well, it is the poor woman, not the rich man, who is giving something that has a greater value to her than the man’s chest of gold does to the man.

I can’t, or at least currently I’m not willing, to give it all up and go on a crusade to help people. But having an experience like I just did leaves you with that feeling, that if only we all did more for others it would help others and ourselves. Wouldn’t the world be a better place? Couldn’t I give more time? More money? What am I willing to give, two pennies or a chest of gold?