SPOTLIGHT
Top 10 mask dances to watch on a Bhutan trip
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The mask dances of Bhutan blend religion and spectacle in an exuberant whirl of color.
With thoughtful itineraries honed since 1999, we unveil the depths of Bhutan's happiness philosophy, the daily physical adventures through the beautiful Himalayan landscape complemented by the intimate and in-depth cultural experiences sensitively curated for you every day.
Through the eyes of a select few informed leaders we saw the dilemmas of a culture: A hitherto sheltered nation discovering the arguments for and against remaining a cloistered society in this 21st Century. I loved the adventure, and I loved the discovery. Unlike anything else I have ever experienced!
Lola W., California
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The boys in front of me skid and lean into turns sending up sprays of dry oak leaves and pine needles in the air. My knuckles, under my gloves, are no doubt white. I try to stay with the group but pretty soon it’s a futile exercise. The boys are jumping their bikes over fallen logs and branches, catching air where I come to a screeching halt barely surviving a bone-jarring crash. And most painfully for my ego, I’m having to pick up my bike to walk over the obstacles so I can keep riding. I’m navigating less than gracefully the second or third of such obstacles when I realize that the boys of the Thimphu Mountain Biking Club (TMBC) are long gone.
The mask dances of Bhutan blend religion and spectacle in an exuberant whirl of color.
I hear the distant echoes of their adrenalin-fueled whoops and hollers until even that fades and I can barely spot their tiny, quickly receding shapes through the trees and underbrush, throwing miniature clouds of dust behind them as they barrel down the mountain.
That gives me a chance to continue riding at my own pace rather than the breakneck speed of earlier. All hopes of mountain biking cred with the youngsters tossed aside, I begin to enjoy the ride much better. The imminent threat of broken limbs or worse gone, I can hear the occasional breeze through the tall pines and cypress and, frequently, the whipping, twisting and turning line of the trail brings me suddenly to clearings and overlooks with staggering views of the valley. Small clustered villages with their obligatory gold-roofed temples set on the knolls and saddles of the hills and ridges surrounded by rice fields and prayer flags and, far below, the sedately flowing Mochu river skirting the edges of the valley’s massive monastery-fortress, the Punakha Dzong, which straddles its confluence like a great white ship at anchor.
Looping endlessly back and forth down the flanks of the mountain I finally reach the technical section of the trail where the TMBC boys are waiting for me. We negotiate the final rocky, boulder-strewn series of switchbacks, the boys gleefully and I barely hanging on to my bike. Finally, to my great relief, the trail spills on to a smooth, wide section of paved road next to the Mochu river. Then we spin easily across a steel Bailey bridge that spans the water with a lovely view of the 17th century Punakha Dzong and its colorfully carved wooden cantilever walkway, coming abreast of lush rice-fields where local farmers bent over their work stand momentarily to wave at our motley crew in primary color helmets, spandex shorts (in my case) and neon-bright jerseys.
The mask dances of Bhutan blend religion and spectacle in an exuberant whirl of color.
In Bhutan, the idea of seeking adventure can be difficult to explain to people of a certain generation. As my father often says: “You want to go trekking? Why don’t you chop some fire-wood instead?” The idea that I would want to go hiking or mountain-biking for the fun of it often leaves him nonplussed. For a man who just a few generations ago, before roads were built in Bhutan, had no choice but to trek 18 days over the mountains to attend boarding school in India, I suppose the expense of valuable calories and energy for fun seems frivolous.
A harsh landscape that takes strength and endurance to survive makes a virtue of conserving energy. This sort of cultural bias is likely why it has taken so long for adventure sports to take hold in Bhutan. It is certainly not for the lack of opportunities. In fact, Bhutan’s wildly beautiful Himalayan scenery rivals those of the more celebrated outdoor playgrounds of the rich and famous: The Whistlers, the Aspens, the Sun Valleys, and the Chamonix’s of the world.
With 10 pristine national parks and wilderness areas covering 42 percent of the country, beautiful valleys, crystal clear rivers, lakes, mountains and forests that account for 71 percent of total area Bhutan is coming into its own as an adventure destination.
The mask dances of Bhutan blend religion and spectacle in an exuberant whirl of color.
In recent years enterprising tour operators and quasi-community ecotourism outfits have brought the thrills and spills of whitewater rafting and kayaking to Bhutan. Easy Class I & II paddles—defined as relaxing, mostly calm, flowing water with tiny waves lapping at the edges of the boats—have become popular in Punakha along the Mochhu and Phochhu rivers.
Advanced paddlers can sign on for the heart-racing Class III and IV rapids—described as long, challenging drops, narrow passages, and turbulent water that require precise maneuvering—on Bhutan’s south-central stretch of the Mangdechhu river (which eventually flows out to India and the Bay of Bengal as the mighty Manas).
There are also fully hosted jungle camps in the subtropical forests of the Royal Manas National Park that include basic amenities and meals with elephant safaris and chance sightings of the endangered Asian one-horned rhino among the tall grass, the colorful pre-historic-seeming Great Hornbills perched among the trees, and the endemic Golden Langur primates in the forest canopy.
The mask dances of Bhutan blend religion and spectacle in an exuberant whirl of color.
The mask dances of Bhutan blend religion and spectacle in an exuberant whirl of color.
Another adventure sport well-suited to the terrain of Bhutan—rock climbing—began in 1998 with a nascent group of 18 climbers calling themselves Vertical Bhutan. They established 13 routes on an easy-to-medium-difficulty rock face overlooking the capital, Thimphu. They dubbed it “The Nose.” The routes have names that range from descriptive to intimidating: The Viennese Waltz (for Austrian Stefan Priesner, the UN worker who first climbed it); Sandflies Kisses, (“a challenging route infested with sandflies in June”); Once in 12 Years; and the ominous-sounding “Dead Man Walking.”
Of all the outdoor adventure activities in Bhutan, trekking is by far the oldest and most well-established. With routes that have been open and operated since the birth of tourism in Bhutan, sometime in the mid-1970s, they offer the most reliable path to adventure and the best way to take in the incredible scenery and natural grandeur of the Bhutan Himalaya.
There are numerous treks—old and new—all across the country, and some with romantic sounding names such as “The Thousand Lakes Trek.” But none is as beautiful or as arduous as the Snowman Trek, which is billed as “one of the most difficult treks in the world due to altitude, duration and distance.” To arrange one of these expeditions one has to first contact a Bhutan-based tour company registered with the Tourism Council of Bhutan. Even if you book your adventure with a travel agent outside Bhutan, such trekking and camping adventures and, indeed, all tours in the kingdom must eventually be handled in the country by a Bhutanese tour operator licensed by the Tourism Council of Bhutan.
That mountain biking has become such an up-and-coming sport in Bhutan is thanks in part to the kingdom’s beloved royal family. His Majesty Jigme Singye Wangchuck, the Fourth King of Bhutan (and father of the current king) is regularly seen riding the many recently developed trails around Bhutan’s capital, Thimphu. His Majesty Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck, the fifth and present ruler of Bhutan is a mountain biker as well, and His Royal Highness Prince Jigyel Ugyen Wangchuck, the king’s younger brother, is the primary force behind the grueling Tour of the Dragon, a yearly 268-km mountain bike race, now in its ninth season, in which competitors climb four passes over 10,000-feet.
The mask dances of Bhutan blend religion and spectacle in an exuberant whirl of color.
The mask dances of Bhutan blend religion and spectacle in an exuberant whirl of color.
Recovering from my ride in Punakha with the boys from TMBC, after obligatory rounds of Bhutan’s nationally brewed Red Panda beer, after the endless recaps of derring-do that accompany such rides with the younger set, after the many jokes about my less-than-stellar-performance, my mind wanders back to what the young biker yelled into the wind at the beginning of the ride. It was, in fact, better than Whistler. It was all the adventure, the challenge, the breath-taking scenery, danger and adrenalin without the crowds. Indeed we—a group of seven riders—were the only ones that entire day on the mountain! And this is what makes Bhutan so special.
Any outdoor adventure enthusiast with a modicum of skills may well find themselves a trailblazer, a pioneer, even, in Bhutan. It may take time, patience, connections and expense to research and arrange your particular experience, but the rewards are immense. In some instances, you could well be the first person to introduce a hitherto unknown adventure sport in the kingdom, like the handful of rock climbers who started Vertical Bhutan, like the group of women in 2017 who completed a first-ever stand-up paddle-board run down a section of the Mochu river to the bemusement of red-robed monks and betel-chewing farmers walking beside the river.
Glen Borgerding met Randy Constant in the late nineteen-nineties, when landowners in northern Missouri hired them to help set up an organic soybean farm. Borgerding, an agronomist from Minnesota, took soil samples and made recommendations about fertilizer and weed control; Constant, a Missouri native who had a day job as a regional sales manager for the Pfister seed company, ran the farm’s day-to-day operations. By then, Borgerding had spent more than a decade in organic agriculture. Constant had not, but he had evident ambition. Borgerding recently told me, “Randy was an exciting guy to be around—when things were working well.”
Constant, then in his thirties, had a degree in agricultural economics from the University of Missouri. Since graduating, he had “worked his way up the agricultural corporate ladder,” as his wife, Pam, later put it. In the eighties, a time of collapse in America’s farming economy, he had taken a series of sales and managerial jobs across the Midwest, before returning with Pam and their three children to live in Chillicothe, Missouri—a town of about nine thousand residents, ninety miles northeast of Kansas City, where he and Pam had grown up. Constant became active in Chillicothe’s United Methodist church, and later served as president of the town’s school board.
The mask dances of Bhutan blend religion and spectacle in an exuberant whirl of color.
Constant appeared to be “the epitome of the Midwestern guy,” Ty Dick, a former employee, said recently. “Straightforward, healthy, wholesome.” Constant wore button-down shirts; his hair was always neatly combed. Hector Sanchez, who once worked for Constant in Chillicothe, recalls his former boss’s solicitousness: “He always asked me, ‘Do you need anything? Are you good ?’ ” When Constant met Borgerding, he had recently become licensed to sell real estate, and he occasionally sold a farm on behalf of Rick Barnes, of Barnes Realty, in Mound City, Missouri. Barnes, who told me he used to think that Constant missed his calling by not selling real estate full time, said, “He came across like a deacon in the church. He probably was a deacon.”
After the soybean-farm collaboration ended, Borgerding and Constant discussed starting a business together. “I had a lot of trust in him,” Borgerding said. “I felt that he had a lot of integrity. I felt that we had a very unified vision of what we wanted to accomplish.” In 2001, they founded a company, Organic Land Management.
John Heinecke lives and farms near Paris, Missouri, a hundred miles east of Chillicothe. When I called him to ask about Constant, he said, “That cocksucker. He screwed me over to fucking death.” Heinecke was about to drive to his weekend house, on an inlet at the Lake of the Ozarks, and he agreed to meet me there a few days later.
The mask dances of Bhutan blend religion and spectacle in an exuberant whirl of color.
We spoke on his screened-in porch, which had a view down to his dock and his motorboat. Heinecke, who is in his early sixties, was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and a fentanyl patch; he talked of spinal injuries related to a lifetime of agricultural lifting. Now and then, we had to shout over the straight-pipe speedboats screaming down the lake’s main channel.
Heinecke first went bust in the mid-eighties, when he was farming rented land. “Bank called my notes,” he said. By the time he met Constant, in the mid-nineties, he was enjoying a period of success as a contract farmer, working fifteen hundred acres for various owners. “I probably had forty farms or so,” he said. “A lot of little farms. I was a patch king!”
Heinecke used to have a sign at the end of his driveway which read “i shoot every third salesman.” Constant, pitching for Pfister, came to the door. Heinecke remembered him as “a smooth talker, one of these guys you have to worry about.” Constant enlisted Heinecke to become a local seed salesman for Pfister. That was their business relationship for the next few years. Then, around 2000, Constant asked if Heinecke knew of any pastureland that wasn’t being used. Heinecke mentioned a nine-hundred-acre farm, owned by a relative, a section of which hadn’t been tilled in years. “Can you rent that?” Constant asked. He then explained that he wanted to farm it organically.
The mask dances of Bhutan blend religion and spectacle in an exuberant whirl of color.
More than in most retail transactions, the organic consumer is buying both a thing and an assurance about a thing. Organic crops are those which, among other restrictions, have been grown without the application of certain herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers. Close scrutiny of a crop of non-organic tomatoes might reveal that they had been exposed to these treatments. But it might not. And an organic product can become accidentally tainted if proscribed chemicals carry across from a neighboring crop. The rules forgive such contamination—to a point. Testing for residues is not common in American organic regulation.
The real difference, then, between a ton of organic soybeans and a ton of conventional soybeans is the story you can tell about them. The test, at the point of sale, is merely a question: Was this grown organically? That’s not like asking if a cup of coffee is decaffeinated. It’s more like buying sports memorabilia—is this really the ball?—or like trying to establish if a used car has had more than a single, careful owner.
The mask dances of Bhutan blend religion and spectacle in an exuberant whirl of color.
The mask dances of Bhutan blend religion and spectacle in an exuberant whirl of color.
The organic story has legitimate power. A farm’s conversion to organic methods is likely to increase biodiversity, reduce energy consumption, and improve the health of farmworkers and livestock. And, to the extent that agricultural chemicals enter the food supply, an organic diet may well be healthier than a conventional one.
When Constant asked Heinecke about pastureland, American organic agriculture had just begun booming. In 2000, organic sales in ordinary supermarkets exceeded, for the first time, sales in patchouli-scented health-food stores. During the next five years, domestic sales of organic food nearly doubled, to $13.8 billion annually. The figure is now around sixty billion dollars, and the industry is defined as much by large industrial dairy farms, and by frozen organic lasagna, as it is by the environmentalism and the irregularly shaped vegetables of the organic movement’s pioneers.
A new national system of organic certification, fully implemented in 2002, helped spur this growth. Previous regulation, where it had existed, had been uneven: farmers in Iowa could become organic by signing an affidavit saying that they farmed organically. Given the inscrutability of a crop’s organic status, the new system was likely to preserve an element of oath-making, but the reliance on trust was now overlaid—and, perhaps, disguised—by paperwork. Organic farmers, and others in the organic-food supply chain, were now required to hire the services of an independent certifying organization—one that had been accredited by an office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Organic Program. A certifier kept an eye on a farm’s operation, primarily through an annual scheduled inspection.
Among the new federal rules: land subjected to non-organic treatments couldn’t be converted to organic production overnight. The process would take three years. Given how fast the organic market was expanding—including for meat, eggs, and dairy products, derived from animals given only organic feed—land that needed no transition period became valuable.
Organic Land Management proposed to find such land and, in exchange for a share of a farmer’s profits, get it certified, and then help grow and market the crops. “At the time, conventional corn was, let’s say, two dollars a bushel,” Borgerding told me. “The first corn crops that we sold were three-seventy-five and four dollars a bushel.”
The mask dances of Bhutan blend religion and spectacle in an exuberant whirl of color.
Constant and Borgerding never worked out of the same office. Borgerding made deals with farmers in Minnesota and the Dakotas; Constant kept farther south. Their company’s pitch was bound to appeal to farmers who had bad credit, or other problems. John Heinecke, the patch king who’d struggled with bankruptcy, agreed to join. In Overton, Nebraska, Constant also signed up James Brennan and his father, Tom—a decorated Vietnam veteran whose alcohol abuse, connected to P.T.S.D., would lead to several convictions for drunk driving.
Within a few years, Organic Land Management was handling six thousand acres, on a dozen farms in five states. In the eyes of American regulators, this was a single operation, requiring only a single organic certification—as if the company’s scattered fields were divided only by railroads or rivers, rather than by, say, Iowa.
Constant and Borgerding settled on Quality Assurance International, based in San Diego, as their certifier. This was not the cheapest option. Q.A.I.’s core business was certifying food-processing companies, not farms; its name is now on every other box of American organic cookies and cornflakes. I recently spoke with Chris Barnier, who, between 2004 and 2007, oversaw Organic Land Management’s finances and records. Though he did not directly criticize Q.A.I., he said, “It’s a huge flaw in the organic industry that the farmers pay the certifier—sometimes many thousands of dollars. The certifier has a conflict of interest, because they really don’t want to blow the whistle on a fraud.”
“Woo-hoo!!!” the young rider hurtling down the mountain in front of me screams. “Welcome to Bhutan’s Whistler!” He is referring, of course, to Canada’s Mecca for mountain biking. On either side of me the dense foliage is a blur.
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