Source: The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/travel/bhutan-nepal.html
By Jennifer MosesLast May, as a 30th anniversary gift to ourselves, my husband, Stuart, and I went on a tour of Nepal and Bhutan. Post-child-rearing but before (fingers crossed) grandchildren, we wanted something big, something different, something outside our comfort zone that wouldn’t actually be uncomfortable. Which meant hiring someone else to do the planning for us, in this case, a Massachusetts-based tour company called Odysseys Unlimited.
Squeezed between the northeastern tip of India, where it loops around Bangladesh, and the southernmost curve of Tibet, Nepal has a population that is mostly Hindu. Bhutan, in the same neighborhood, is largely Buddhist. Bhutan is also the last of the Himalayan kingdoms to remain a kingdom, with a hereditary monarchy and a culture largely untouched by the ravages of Hollywood’s fashion and pop dominance on the one hand, and that of environmental degradation on the other.
Until 1974, Bhutan didn’t let foreigners in. Since then, it’s been reinventing itself, casting itself as the world’s happiest nation and measuring its overall welfare not in terms of G.N.P. but by “gross national happiness,” as set forth in 2008 in the Constitution of Bhutan. For tourists, this means a $250 a day tariff (typically folded into other costs, including the required guide).
A country that, for many of the most ambitious mountaineers, all but invented trekking, plus a pristine sliver of the Himalayas that celebrates both happiness and Buddhism? We signed on.
Golden statues at Buddha Point in Thimphu, Bhutan.Credit Poras Chaudhary for The New York Times
But we had some concerns, mainly having to do with our preconceived ideas of organized tours. My husband and I are youngsters in our pre-60s. What if the others on the trip turned out to be downright old? And what if the guides spent too much time on stuff we weren’t interested in? Could you even get off the bus if you wanted to? We’d never been on an organized tour.
Yet what did we know about stupas? Maybe we needed the kind of tour provided by professionals after all.
Speaking of stupas, I’d never seen one until the morning after we arrived in Kathmandu. Delirious from lack of sleep, we met our fellow tourists in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency, boarded the first of the buses that would take us to and fro for the duration of the trip, and set off for Swayambhunath, a temple complex built atop a hill reached by hundreds of steps. At the very top is the stupa itself, white, with a 13-tiered golden spire.
Stupas are hemispherical structures, focal points for worship and meditation. As our excellent tour guide, Sanjay Nepal, explained, they’re typically painted with four sets of eyes pointing in four directions to symbolize the Buddha’s all-seeingness. My own set of eyes didn’t know what to look at first: the prayer flags fluttering in the sky, the prayer wheels being spun by the devout, the monks on their cellphones or the monks at their devotions?
Read more at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/travel/bhutan-nepal.html