Views from Another Paradise

By StanleySobari

# Wondrous views from the top at Chela-La Pass, one of Bhutan’s highest points

TUCKED between valleys and soaring mountains, it’s not difficult to find high points in admiring Bhutan’s natural splendor. A must-visit attraction in Bhutan and plastered across postcards countrywide, the Tiger’s Nest perches precariously 10,000 feet above sea level in Paro, where legend has it that around th eighth century, the reverend Guru Rimpoche flew across the mountains on the back of a tigress, and made the Taktsang Lhakhang home.

However, the best views go to Chele-La Pass, one of the highest points in Bhutan at 3.988 metres. The 90-minute ride up requires a driver’s experience and extreme skill across sharp pins and narrow paths, the air getting progressively thinner but the views achingly gorgeous. Spot the scenic Haa valley along the way, letting your guides regale you with Bhutan’s colourful past, as you gape at your driver from afar, who’ll make a jaw-dropping three-point-turn along the cliff’s edge to take the bus back to Paro town.

Pizzas, Bazaars and Chortens

By StanleySobari

# The whitewashed National Memorial Chorten

AS unusual a combination as this might sound, these were the top draws on a short day-trip to capital Thimphu. One of the most visited religious sites, the National Memorial Chorten was built in 1974 in memory of “Bhutan’s late third king, Jigme Dorji Wangchuck. The young and old alike come to spin the large prayer wheels for hours on end, devotees encircling the whitewashed chorten, adorned with elaborate statues and mandalas. A short walk behind the five-stars Taj Tashi is the Craft Bazaar, selling Bhutan-made souvenirs, textiles, masks and more, this the best place for getting souvenirs. Finish off with dinner at The Zone, located along Hong Kong street. Sogyal’s mixed special pizzas, expertly cooked yak burgers, and thick butterscotch milkshakes slurped down amidst a cosy café-pub setting was the perfect way to end the night.

SEVEROBANIKALSK to TYNDA

By StanleySobari

LONG before 1984, things had started to go wrong on the BAM. The free cars didn’t turn up (they still haven’t) and some volunteers were disillusioned. There were reports of BAM officials disappearing with funds on ‘business trips’ to the Philippines. Some history books paint a bleak picture of the later days of BAM construction – a dangerous cocktail of daredevil engineering and bathtub-brewed booze.

Meanwhile, the track itself was in a bad state. In some parts the permafrost had warped the rails until they looked like roller-coaster tracks; on others, train drivers instead on hanging out the doors so they could jump if their engine crashed off the rails.

Contrary to propaganda, BAM was only completed (with exquisite tragicomic timing ) in 1991, right after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The mineral wealth it promised to untap has yet to materialize. Some utopian cities along the route are now little more than ghost towns. BAM is seen by many today as a railway to nowhere – the punch line to jokes about the USSR.

But for all the jokes, BAM remains a lifeline for those still resident along the railway.

From Severobaikalsk, I join passengers bundling aboard a lunchtime train eastwards; supply teachers and dentists commuting to isolated villages, engineers on missions to set wonky rails straight. Everyone gathers in the corridors as se skirt the shore of Lake Baikal-a vast inland sea, capped by a six-foot-thick crust of ice during the winter months. In one doomed episode, long ago, rails were laid on this ice-resulting in at least one steam engine currently rusting in Baikal’s-mile deep waters. We pass fishing villages of rickety timber cabins and frozen wharfs. In the distance are the pincprick figures of fisherman drilling holes in the ice beside their cars.

Life on board quickly lapses into a lazy rhythm. The engineers potter off to play cards in their compartment. A carriage attendant knits a red scarf in her office. Day turns to night, cabin seats are converted into bunks and clock hands are adjusted as we enter another time zone.

Living in a country of almighty distance, Russians are accustomed to spending time on two rails. Trotsky plotted battle tactics in his armoured train; tsars ate caviar in their palatial carriages (which housed libraries, bathtubs and room for a cow to supply fresh milk). Space rockets, mobile hospitals and even chapel carriages have all rattled along Russian rails.

TASYHET to SEVEROBANIKALSK

By StanleySobari

# The village of Bailkaskoe near Severobaikalsk.

IT is just before dawn as train 72 crosses the Bailkalsky Mountains, and the winter wnoe falls thickly outside the cabin window.

It is not the fluffy snow of the Christmas –time Coca-cola adverts. It is bad-tempered, Russian snow the sort that can freeze your eyelids together, turn your skin beetroot red and leave tiny icicles dangling inside your nostrils. It settles silently on a winter landscape coloured pale lilac by the pre-dawn light on endless forests of birch and pine, on mountain streams long since frozen to a halt.

In 1868, a party of engineers set out into this landscape, surveying for the construction of the world’s longest railway line: the Trans-Siberian. But upon reaching the Baikalsky Mountains, things started to go wrong. They found themselves blocked by mighty peaks; greeted as an all-you-can-eat buffet by mosquitoes. Buggerthis, the engineers soon decided. Plans were revised: the Trans-Siberian instead took a detour through easier territory to the south, where it trundles alogn happily to this day.

It would take almost a century before another railway ventured where the Trans-Siberian feared to go – a line that struck through the Baikalsky Mountains and onward into the coldest, loneliest landscapes ever crossed by ion rails. For train 72 has begun its journey on the Baikal Amur Mainline – the ‘BAM’ – a railway with a story of triumph and tragedy worthy of a Tolstoy novel.

Little heard of outside Russia, BAM was described as the greatest building project in human history when work started in 1974: a 2,700 mile line running through frozen wildernesses north of the Trans-Siberian. The soviet union billed BAM as the ultimate showdown between Mother Russia and Mother Nature at their most inhospitable; a glorious-rich project to open up remote corners of mineral-rich Siberia. It was a project as ambitious as the Soviet space programme, covering similarly vast distance.

Few tourist visit BAM today. Those who do go for the simple, hypnotic pleasure of watching endless landscape rolling past the window. A BAM journey can feel more akin to a sea voyage than a train ride.

We emerge from a tunnel, and the landscapes the first BAM builders battled against swing into view Narnia-esque forests and glaciers glinting in the first rays of morning sunshine. The only signs of human life are the reflections from our own warm railway carriages, skimming alongthe snowbanks heaped by the trackside.

In the 1970s, young volunteers from across the USSR came to Siberia to build BAM. Soviet propaganda promised a new utopian society in the model towns along the line-if that didn’t convince them, they also promised workers a free car. This was the dawn of a new era. When generations in the West had Woodstock and the ‘Summer of Love’, the young communists would have BAM instead. In between construction there were even music festivals (featuring Soviet glam-rock bands).

One man who volunteered for BAM duty was Albert Ivanovich – a former bulldozer driver who wears and impressive set of Soviet railway-building medals on his jacket, jingling as he walks. I meet him after our train hauls into Severobaikalsk – the model town to which he emigrated as a young man, set on the northern shore of Lake Baikal.

‘When I first came to Severobaikalsk it was August,’ he recalls. ‘The first snow had settled on the mountaintops, and the mountains were reflected perfectly in the lake. I knew this would be my home.’

Albert shows me around the town’s small BAM museum. The exhibits stir his memories: of days long ago clearing passes in his bulldozer, and summer nights singing around the campfire, nameless mountains standing silent all around.

Severobaikalsk, too, looks back fondly on its BAM past. Along the town’s wide boulevards are signs reading ‘BAM IS THE PROJECT OF OUR YOURTH’. Others offer advice like ‘REAL MEN BUILD TUNNELS’ to passing motorists. It is a town typical of settlements on the BAM: Soviet-era concrete tower blocks with puffing chimneys and tangled plumbing; homes where Virgin Mary icons hang on the walls, boots dry by the stove and the smell of smoked fish wafts about.

In 1984, Severobaikalsk joined in the celebrations as the Soviet Union announced the completion of BAM, in the museum there are pictures of the occasion: people cheering, children being hoisted up into the air. Rumour had it US spy planes were flying over, concerned by this miracle of engineering.

There was one small problem with this, however, BAM hadn’t been completed at all. It was all a whopping great fib.

Bhutan

Rediscovering the Last Shangri-la

By Stanley Sobari,

#Above all the attention Bhutan has been given, this happiest kingdom on Earth is most revered for its resilient spirit and authenticity 

ONE TRIP would be enough to show me the allure of Bhutan. Or so I thought.

Bhutan is anything but predictable. It began with the flight – instead of a building-dotted landscape, my pilot darted amongst mountains in deftly executed twists and turns to land on one of the world’s shortest landing strips. Rather than human traffic, cow and horses sauntered lazily across narrow roads. Instead of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Bhutan favours instead the Gross National Happiness (GNH) index, which places heavy emphasis on spiritual well-being. Smiles are incessant; helping hands never short in supply. International hotelier names are nowhere in sight; neither is Starbucks or McDonald’s. Yet, the Tourism Council of Bhutan recorded a jump in tourist arrivals-from 42,990 in 2002, to 166,264 in 2011. It’s easy to see why. Trip needs are rolled into one with Bhutan’s tariff – ‘package’ rates of US$230 and up per night (dependent on season), which secures everything from accommodation, transport, guide to meals all round.

But like the ongoing mystery behind Mona Lisa’s missing eyebrows in Leonardo da Vinci’s famous portrait, my second trip to Bhutan unearthed deeper layers of this landlocked, Himalayan kingdom, while also amassing a surprisingly long list of ‘first’ in my travel list.

# A propeller plane landing at the bumthang domestic airport

Festival Flurry

After my maiden flight on Drukair, Bhutan’s national carrier, from Singaore to Paro last year, I found myself looking forward to another rollercoaster ride through the clouds. A fellow passenger recounted once hearing the captain announce, “if you think we are flying too close to the mountains, do not be alarmed. This is our normal procedure”. But that’s not all. My domestic flight into bumthang would take just 35 minutes – on a propeller aircraft. Watching the propellers push the plane into the air is exhilarating, completely safe, and frankly, addictive. We landed with a light push onto the tarmac, then filed into the solitarity one-leveled airport – another first.

Bhutan celebrates a festival nearly every month, when the country’s 20 dzongkhas (districts) take turns celebrating Guru Rimpoche’s birthday, the saint who introduced Buddhism to Bhutan, also regarded as Buddha incarnate. This year, the month of June was allocated to Bumthang in central Bhutan, also considered the heartland of Buddhism, our first festival was at Nimalung Monastery. Bhutanese’ faith is stunning – I was amazed to find locals pouring out from thick forested areas and onto the main road, whole families who had walked hours from home, mothers carrying their lunches in huge baskets behind their backs, and kids propped on their arms.

Arriving to deep, resounding drums and a flurry of excitement, the festival is split intor htre parts – blessing the land, subduing of evils, and the drum dance of victory. Every move precise and rehearsed, dancers strut in dramatic costumes and masks, colorful swirls of music, dance and camaraderie drawing the festival-goers into one. If you are early, you might just chance upon young monks hard at practice prior to the festival, dancing earnestly as their elder looks on, with some laughs along the way.

The city’s biggest religious ceremony of the year however, required me to rush out of the hotel by 6.30am, so I could get at good spot at Kurjey Lhakhang – a temple built around a cave which Guru Rimpoche was believed to have mediated and left an impression of his palm at. Temple grounds quiet under the still rising sun, closer inspection saw monks of various saffron hued robes dashing around, ladies in gorgeous kiras huddled in light chatter, drums in alignment and microphones set up for Kurjey Tshechu (festival). More people arrived, and in a minutes a commotion ensued – the three-tiered birthday cake to celebrate Guru rimpoche’s birthday had arrived. No time to lose, a symphony began and my attention shot upwards – over 20 monks and men had climbed to the temple’s roof, and in one unified movement unfurled the gigantic Thongdrel – the rare tapestry revealed only one a year, depicting the seated Guru and his eight manifestations. Amids alternate sessions of song and chants headed by central Bhutan’s head lama and entourage, I found two ladies gazing at the scene in awe, Singaporeans who were here for 10 days. “We would stay a month if we could, this might be a bit commercialized but it’s still on my bucket list because hey, this is the last Shangri-la!”