The Druk Path to Paro was a well-worn route long before any tourist came to Bhutan. The most notable historical figure to pass this way was the Buddhist saint Ngawang Namgyal, known as Shabdrung Rinpoche. The Shabdrung was an ancestor of the four present-day Queens, hence the royal visit to Jele Dzong. It was here, where the dzong is now situated, early in the seventeenth century, according to monastic chroniclers, that Shabdrung Rinpoche had an encounter with a local deity named Mahakala—today incorporated into the Bhutanese Buddhist pantheon.

Shabdrung Ngawang Namgal

It was an event that altered the course of history in Bhutan. Mahakala, as a notice in Jele Dzong explains to visitors, is the overlord of the mountain gods, the tutelary spirit of crags and snowfields. The upshot of Mahakala’s mystical meeting with Shabdrung Rinpoche, according to the Bhutanese national story, was that the Shabdrung, under Mahakala’s protection, was able to defeat rival Buddhist lineages and repel a wave of invasions from Tibet, bringing unity to Bhutan for the first time.

In recognition of the event, pride of place in Jele Dzong today is given to arresting representations of the two divine beings. As you enter the main chamber—barefoot on the cold hardwood floor, with monks chanting and butter lamps burning—you are confronted by a fearsome painting of a wrathful Mahakala. Close by it, there is a still more striking image: a fifteen-foot-high gilded statue of Sakyamuni, the Buddha. It was to pay respects to these deities, to Sakyamuni and Mahakala, that the young Queen of Bhutan had climbed two thousand feet up from the valley that day.

Barefoot in the dzong, with no scholar of Bhutanese history to hand, there is a limit to how much a foreigner unschooled in Himalayan mythology can understand of such images. But the significance of the royal visit to Jele was clear: the two deities, Mahakala and Sakyamuni, and the fortress-monastery where they dwell, together form a symbol of the close relation between temporal power and religious belief in Bhutan—and between the wider world of religion and the local spirit of place. This was the case at the time of the Shabdrung and remains the case today. It has drawn foreigners with a taste for mountain scenery and archaic forms of life to this Himalayan kingdom since the day that tourism began.

King Jigme Singye Wangchuk and the four queens of Bhutan

The day that tourism began

The day that tourism began. There aren’t many countries where there is a date for that. But in Bhutan there’s no argument: tourism started in the summer of 1974, following the coronation of the present King, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who had succeeded his father, Jigme Dorji, two years earlier. Mass tourism it was not—neither then nor now. In Bhutan’s Year Zero of Tourism there were just two hundred paying visitors. When I first visited the country a decade later in 1988, tourists were still housed in draughty government-run hotels and tented camps, with attendants who brought water heated on wood fires.

At that time, in the chilly lobby of the government hotel in Thimphu, guests were greeted by a stuffed black bear proffering a basket of silk flowers. Behind the bar, with its ranks of Indian whiskey, were signed photographs of Yassir Arafat, Burt Reynolds, Henry Kissinger and other notable visitors, and a verse by Milarepa, the medieval Buddhist saint. Such fantastical juxtapositions made it easy to imagine that you were an official guest in some Himalayan version of Ruritania. And this was more or less the case.

All hotels in Bhutan have been privatized now, or assigned to other purposes, but they still bear traces of this combination of quaintness and exclusivity. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Bhutan continued to maintain a reputation for glamorous inaccessibility, while playing host to an increasing, though still tiny, number of visitors. By the year 2000, the annual figure was up to 7000, before it subsided again in the global down-turn in travel after September 11, 2001.

Today, in the third decade after Bhutan’s Year Zero of tourism, the industry has leapt back to the top of the national agenda. Direct foreign investment was authorized for the first time last year, and international hotel chains began to move in. At the time of my visit Aman Resorts, the most upmarket of all of them, was laying the foundations for three of their miniature dream-palaces—in Paro, Thimphu and Bumthang—with more planned in other parts of the country. Their local partner is a brother-in-law of the king, brother of the four queens. A 30-room luxury establishment is due to open in Paro in Spring 2004. Four Seasons and the Biki Oberoi group are among the other global hotel chains to make their presence felt. The Bhutanese government, meanwhile, is attempting to widen the range of niche tourism on offer. It aims to quadruple the number of visitors to the kingdom. And the search is on for the site for a new international airport—if they can find somewhere flat enough to build it.

All this is taking place in a country where a single-track hard-top road is still a rarity. And these new projects will not be coming to fruition for several years, hence the still-enduring solitude of the Druk Path. But there is a palpable air of acceleration in Bhutan. This is a striking contrast to 198os. At that time things seemed to be moving, if anything, in the opposite direction, and tour operators found themselves confronting a crisis that threatened the basis of their business.

On that visit, in 1988, I accompanied a climbing party led by the British mountaineer Doug Scott. The aim was a first ascent of Jichu Drake, one of the high Himalayan peaks that can be seen from Jele Dzong. We were lucky to make it to the mountain at all. An edict passed in the National Assembly that year condemned tourism outright, and climbers in particular: “The tourists’ actions in the temple-monasteries,” it ran,

such as taking photographs and touching on the statues, have invariably instigated wrath in our gods and goddesses… which belittles the value of blessings and mystic power.

Unseasonable storms, untimely death and sickness among livestock were blamed on climbers disturbing the mountain deities. The mountain god Mahakala, whose pact with Shabdrung Rinpoche had been the foundation stone of the country, was angry, it was said, and must be propitiated.

The edict imposed a ban on mountaineering and severe restrictions on tourists’ access to monasteries and sacred sites. Doug Scott’s triumphant ascent of Jichu Drake that year—he stopped just short of the summit out of respect for the divinities of the mountain—turned out to be the last of its kind. And the anxiety of the Bhutanese ruling councils extended beyond this to include almost all innovations in the life of the country. In one attempt to slow the pace of social change, video parlours were banned. It looked as though the whole tourism sector might be on a downward path.

In the last ten years, though, for better or worse, the world has drawn closer to Bhutan. And Bhutan, starting with the royal family, has moved towards a closer engagement with modernity. When King Jigme Singye Wangchuk, who has ruled the country since the age of 17, celebrated his silver jubilee in 1999, the event was marked, like his coronation, by a leap forward in relations with the outside world. First, there was the inauguration of television services: Bhutan may well be the last country in the world to get broadcast TV (well-off Bhutanese now have access to satellite too). Second, and perhaps more significant, came the provision of public internet access. It says something about the pace of change in the country that these two technologies, separated from each other by half a century in other parts of the world, should have arrived here at the same time.

As the country opens up, its rulers are coming to realise that the uninvited guests of the internet represent a much greater threat to the body politic—and their position in it—than flesh-and-blood tourists do. The ban on mountaineering expeditions remains—Bhutan boasts the highest unclimbed mountain in the world, Gangkhar Puensum, a 24,836 foot peak on the Chinese border—but controls on access to sacred sites have been relaxed. The ruling elites seem to have come to the conclusion that in the project of conservation—both preserving the natural environment and guarding the cultural heritage of the country—tourism may actually be their best hope.

Back in 1988, visiting a newly-built temple in Bumthang, in the centre of Bhutan, I was told by a senior monk there that I would not see the inside of it again. Once the temple was consecrated, he said, it would be closed to non-believers. As it turned out, when I revisited the temple this year—a decade and a half later—access was still permitted, at least to the main part of the building. But it preserved tradition in other respects. It was hard to believe that it was the same temple I had seen when it was under construction: the building conformed so precisely to traditional style and technique that it looked as though it had been there for centuries.

The monk who had guided me before was long gone, so I could not ask what he thought about the new dispensation. Travelling through the country, though, I heard the same message from many Bhutanese, from unemployed school-leavers, tavern keepers, military officers and reincarnate lamas: tourists were to be their allies, both in creating prosperity and in conserving the country’s heritage.

Kings of Bhutan: top left, Ugyen Wangchuk (1907-1926); top right, Jigme Wangchuk (1926-1952); below left, Jigme Dorji Wangchuk (1952-1972); below right, Jigme Singye Wangchuk (1972-2006). In 2006 Jigme Singye Wangchuk abdicated in favour of his son, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuk

Drukpa Kunley

The new openness in Bhutan has resulted, among other things, in the largely inadvertent development of some unusual niche markets. One of these is fertility tourism, package tours for foreigners with gynaecological problems. The high point of such tours is a visit to Chimi Lakhang, in the Punakha Valley, a temple established by the rambunctious Bhutanese culture hero, Lama Drukpa Kunley, a fifteenth-century monk who became a roaming naljorpa—a trickster and wonder-worker.

The Bhutanese, whose sense of humour is on the bawdy side, are fond of stories about Drukpa Kunley. The stories generally involve sexual conquests and cuckoldry. Rather than teaching the negation of desire, it is related, Drukpa Kunley took it upon himself to be an instructor in whole-body enlightenment—involving a range of skills including knocking demons’ teeth out with thunderbolts, hanging his bow on sunbeams, and—this phrase is taken from his official monastic biography, The Sublime Life and Songs of Drukpa Kunley—praising women’s skill in the pelvic upthrust.

In Bhutan, on account of the last of these, he has become a symbol of fertility. On houses all over the country, in his memory, images of phalluses are painted on walls and doors, or hang from gable ends, like lucky horse shoes in European countries. At the temple in the Punakha Valley, women who have difficulty conceiving or bearing children make offerings of oil and incense. They are then anointed with a drop of saffron tea and a blow to the head with the Flaming Thunderbolt of Wisdom, an impressive phallic instrument of leather and horn. Children born to these supplicants are named Chimi or Kunley in his memory.

In recent years, I learned from the monk currently in charge of Chimi Lakhang, foreigners with similar difficulties have started to arrive here in significant numbers, to be blessed with saffron tea and a touch from Drukpa Kunley’s Thunderbolt.

“A Japanese lady made the wish,” the monk told us. “And she made many offerings. Later we heard that she conceived. So the lama here gave the child the name of the temple, Chimi.”

“Since I have been here,” he went on. “There have been fifteen foreign ladies who have come here to be blessed.

“But,” he added, “we do not hear from them. Mostly these ladies come from America. Are you not from America? Please inform them to let us know how they are doing.”

At Wangduephodrang Dzong

At Wangduephodrang Dzong, further east, towards China, I took tea with the Deputy Abbot, Lam Umze. The Wangdi Dzong was established by the Shabdrung in the seventeenth century—at the behest, it is said, of Mahakala the mountain god, who has been assimilated to the Buddhist pantheon as the wrathful aspect of the Buddha of Compassion. The dzong is a rambling palace of stone and wood, with ravens that caw on the roof and hoopoes swooping in the courtyard. The halls and passageways were teeming with inquisitive young monks. To a western eye it was an alluringly archaic scene, bringing to mind a school for wizards. It would hardly have seemed out of place if one of the monks had taken to the air on a broomstick.

Lam Umze entertained us in an upper room. Bars of sunlight fell on his maroon and yellow robes and bare arms. We were served bowls of tea—thick, salty Tibetan tea. Lam Umze spoke in Dzonghka, the national language, one of a dozen that are spoken in Bhutan, with my guide, Kezang, translating.

From his point of view, he explained, tourists were most welcome in the dzong. “We like to get rich people here,” he announced disarmingly. “Intelligent people. And we like to talk to them. It is not a problem. As long as people have faith—faith of some kind—and respect for us.”

“It is not everyone who comes here,” Lam Umze added, “And it may not be by chance when they do.”

“You, for example,” he said, smiling at me, “You have returned to Bhutan a second time. I feel you may have been Bhutanese in a previous life.”

Reincarnation apart, there are a growing number of Buddhist teachers in Bhutan who have a committed western following, with students travelling to Bhutan to study with them. This is another growth area in the travel business. Among the Bhutanese spiritual teachers who have an international following is Khyentse Norbu, a reincarnate lama in the Nyingma School of Buddhism, who presides over several retreat centres in the east of the country. Khyentse Norbu—or, to give him his official name, Lama Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche—is also a film director of growing international reputation. Among the features he has directed is The Cup, an engaging story of a group of young monks desperate to get access to television so they can watch the World Cup football tournament.

By chance—or by fate—I came across Khyentse Norbu on the main road between Bumthang and Wangduephodrang, where he was shooting a scene for a new film, a road movie about a villager who is travelling to the capital, Thimphu, in the hope of being given a visa to emigrate to America. The members of the film crew had set up their cameras in the middle of the road—there is not much traffic in Bhutan. They were struggling with a reflector in a high wind, which threatened to carry it and them into the valley below.

During this break in the filming, the director sketched the story of the film for me: the encounters the protagonist has with other Bhutanese on the road to Thimphu, his failure to make it to America and, finally, his acceptance that he may, after all, be better off in his own country.

The film—due out in 2003 under the title Travelers and Magicians—is the first full-length feature to be shot in Bhutan. Like The Cup, it seems to be both an expression of modernity and a critique of it. Khyentse Norbu, for all his fluency in the medium, has a conservative view of art. He compares film to a thangka, one of the traditional paintings that fill Himalayan temples and monasteries. Buddhism, he says, has a long tradition of using paintings and statues for religious purposes; film is their natural successor as a vehicle for transmitting spiritual wisdom.

Paradoxically, most monks in Bhutan will not be permitted to see this, or any of Khyentse Norbu’s films. Monks in training, at least in the dominant school of Buddhism, the Drukpa Kagyu school, are not allowed to go to the movies, nor may they watch television. Tourist access to monasteries there may be, but the liberalization in public mores has not yet reached the monk body. And for every movie-making monk like Khyentse Norbu there are a hundred hermits in Bhutan, monks who, after a dozen or more years of training in the monastery—including more than three years of solitary meditation—pass the remainder of their lives living in remote places, in caves or rough shelters, given food by local villagers in return for blessings and ritual performances. These monks don’t go to the movies or watch TV, let alone use the internet. They rarely see tourists; and they have never heard of Aman Resorts, nor the Four Seasons. Not yet, anyway.

In Thimphu

Back in Thimphu, the capital, I called on Lyonpo Jigme Thinley, the Foreign Minister of Bhutan, and former Ambassador to Switzerland (one of Bhutan’s few diplomatic posts abroad). Our discussion covered the history of tourism in Bhutan, from its origin in cultural tourism and trekking to the current move into the world of high-end travel.

Lyonpo Jigme is a cosmopolitan figure by Bhutanese standards, but there was little sign of this in his office. Public life in Bhutan is ruled, even now, at least outwardly, by obedience to custom, to the codification of behaviour in a system of dress and behaviour called driglam namzha—traditional etiquette. The Minister was wearing a green and purple kho—the heavy gown of woven silk or cotton that is prescribed national dress for men (a style laid down, like so much else, by the Shabdrung in the seventeenth century). He had immaculate calf-length boots of pale leather, and carried at his waist a ceremonial sword. Draped over his left shoulder, in the manner prescribed by driglam namzha, was an orange-coloured raw silk scarf, its distinctive shade the mark of office of a lyonpo, a minister.

Dasho Pem Dorji at Wangduephodrang Dzong. Photograph by Ken Griffiths

On the wall of his office was a thangka, a painted image on canvas of Guru Rinpoche, the Tibetan Buddhist master Padmasambava, the bringer of Buddhism to Bhutan in the eighth century, a still more venerable figure than the Shabdrung. According to Bhutanese tradition simply looking at such a representation of the Guru is a means of deliverance from false beliefs, bringing the spectator a step closer to freedom from the cycle of reincarnation.

I had been reminded of the importance of driglam namzha a few days before at Wanduephodrang dzong. As we entered the dzong, I forgot to remove my hat. When I confessed this to the Governor of Wangdi, Dasho Pem Dorji, he told me, with some relish, that he had personally expelled a pair of tourists who came to the dzong improperly dressed. The tourists returned, he said, having acquired full Bhutanese costume—khos, scarves and all. It wouldn’t be a bad idea, he suggested, if all tourists had to wear national dress—Bhutanese national dress, not their own—just as Bhutanese civil servants like himself were obliged to.

Back in Thimphu, in the Foreign Minister’s office, I could see, through a row of windows with intricate carved wooden frames, the red roofs and golden cupolas of another fortress monastery, Tashicho Dzong, standing out against the dark forested slopes of the Thimphu valley. In the forest, groups of lofty prayer flags stood like exotic, multicoloured trees, scattering their blessings to the breeze. This view of Tashicho Dzong is a classic one, the subject of water-colours and engravings by the earliest Europeans to reach Bhutan, an image of the exotic that has long been a lure for travellers. It is the largest building in Thimphu and serves both as the office of the King and as the summer residence of the central monk body. Tashicho Dzong is an emblem, like Jele Dzong or the dzong at Wangduephodrang—like all dzongs in fact—of the enduring alliance of royal and religious authority in Bhutan. Inside, as the Minister pointed out, it is a treasure house, as other dzongs are, filled with sculpture and painting in the Tibetan tradition. With Tibet under the pall of Chinese occupation since the 1950s, Bhutan—with its ritual architecture, spectacular ceremonial masked dances and demon-ridden cosmology—has emerged as the last showcase of many of these traditions.

I asked Lyonpo Jigme to expand on the origins of tourism in the country.

“It was after the coronation of His Majesty in June 1974 that the first tourists arrived,” he said. “Before that, all visitors here were guests of the royal family.”

The coronation of the new King that year, the Minister explained, meant that accommodation had to be built for the large number of guests. Afterwards it was decided to put the buildings to further use.

“That was how tourism began,” he said, “and how it has continued until now. It is high value, low volume tourism.”

I mentioned the set-back that the industry suffered in the 1980s when the National Assembly banned access to sacred sites.

“Yes,” said the Lyonpo, “Tourism started when the country was still very uncertain about ending our isolation from the world. There were many anxieties, for instance about tourists being a conduit for the loss of artifacts from monasteries.”

A critical event, he explained, was when a particularly valuable statue of the Buddha in a monastery in the Bumthang valley turned out to have been replaced with a replica. Monks making offerings to the statue noticed the loss. The original, it transpired, had been stolen to order at the behest of art dealers in Nepal, who posed as tourists to photograph it so a copy could be made. On this occasion the thieves were intercepted at the Indian border. Other important works, though, according to the Minister, have been lost forever to the global art smuggling trade.

A further, more recent loss to Bhutan has been the destruction of one of its most celebrated sacred sites, Takstshang Monastery. Built high on a cliff in the Paro Valley at the spot where Guru Rinpoche is said to have landed after flying from Tibet on the back of a tigress, Takstshang Monastery was burned down in 1998, victim of an overturned butter lamp.

But Lyonpo Jigme’s views on the preservation of Takstshang are not what you might expect, unless you bear the Buddhist world-view in mind.

“I was Ambassador to Switzerland at the time,” he said. “People offered condolences for the loss, but I said ‘Why be sorry? I am not sad. This has given us the opportunity to rebuild it, to remember what it is for. After all it’s been burned down at least twice before.’”

“What I told people,” Lyonpo Jigme continued, “was that the importance of Takstshang is not the building; it is the place itself. Because it is where Guru Padmasambava arrived in Bhutan on the back of a tigress. And that fact cannot be destroyed unless the whole mountain is destroyed.”

An ecological nirvana

This intricate relation between landscape and spirituality in Bhutan—where peaks are divinities and no mountain pass or confluence of rivers is without its shrine—means that the conservation of nature and the maintenance of religious tradition go hand-in-hand. And for tourism, too, there is an overlap. For seventy per cent of foreign visitors, according to a survey in the national newspaper, Kuensel, it is the cultural heritage of the country that is the main attraction. But for nature lovers, at least for those who don’t want to climb virgin peaks, Bhutan is also a kind of Nirvana.

Dorcas antaeus, a stag beetle popular as a pet in Japan, is a protected species in Bhutan

With three-quarters of its land area covered in forest, the country is a model of environmental conservation. In Spring, as the snow melts, the high pastures are carpeted with alpine flowers; in the valleys thickets are full of rare birds; further south the forests and jungles are home to pandas and bears. In Autumn, the time of my visit, black-necked cranes were arriving on their winter migration from Tibet, an occasion that the government has elevated from a local children’s festival to an event in the world calendar of ecotourism.

Members of the Bhutanese elite often express their pride in the country’s record in conservation. In my talk with the Foreign Minister and in discussions with other officials, stress was put on the rigour of the government’s control of natural resources. Hydroelectricity, which is Bhutan’s other major foreign currency earner, has been developed, they point out, with caution. There are none of the large dams that have been so controversial and disruptive elsewhere in the continent, in China and in India for example. Export of timber has recently been prohibited; a quarter of the land area of the country is officially protected from human incursion. And abuses of conservation legislation—as I learned later from Kinley Dorji, the Editor of the national paper Kuensel—are taken as seriously as art theft. Shortly before I arrived, he told me, a Japanese tourist was detained at Paro airport attempting to smuggle contraband out of the country. It was not antiquities or illicit drugs the tourist was carrying, but a number of rare stag beetles (live beetles are a fashionable collector’s item in Japan). She paid a heavy fine.

The conservative policy that Bhutan has followed in relation to tourism is in striking contrast to that of its neighbour, Nepal. Nepal opened its borders to travellers and backpackers in the 1950s and has been dealing with this and other consequences of globalization ever since. When members of the Bhutanese ruling class speak of Nepal they shudder. Nepal has five-star hotels, but it also, they note, has large-scale deforestation, atmospheric pollution, a growing Maoist insurgency, and—most recently—a royal massacre that has left the Nepalese ruling family decimated and the country in a state of shock.

The Lyonpo was too diplomatic to mention the last of these disasters. And for the rulers of Bhutan Nepal is a sensitive subject for other reasons. Their much larger neighbour is host to tens of thousands of migrants, Hindu Lhotshampa, who say they were driven out of Bhutan in the 1980s and 1990s. Bhutanese Government representatives dispute the claim; they say the majority are Nepalis, not Bhutanese. This has not prevented periodic criticism from international human rights organizations. There are some signs that the long impasse over the issue is beginning to be resolved, but for now, the refugee camps in Nepal remain a reproach to Bhutan’s image of harmony.

Educated Bhutanese tend to ascribe most of Nepal’s ills to the pursuit of modernity without regard for local values—an indiscriminate tourist policy being a major aspect of this. In Bhutan, from the start, the government set a price threshold that has kept budget travellers out of the country; so backpackers have never had a look in. (It’s often asserted that there is an annual tourist quota set by the government, but this is not, in fact, the case: the price mechanism is all there is to it.)

Since the beginning, every visitor, except a few who come as guests of residents, has had to pay an all-in rate, set by the government, currently US$ 200 a day. This applies whether you are in a tent or a hotel suite, and whether you are walking or travelling by chauffeured car. The government takes a substantial cut of it: US$ 65 or US$ 70, depending on the season. From the remainder, tour operators provide all board and lodging, plus guides, cars, drivers, mules, muleteers, cooks and horses. (Labour is cheap: US$ 200 is a guide’s monthly salary.)

So a trip to Bhutan may be costly, but when you consider what it includes it’s not that bad a deal. For US$ 200, you get all you can eat, all you can see, and a car and driver to take you and your luggage as far as you choose to go. (Or a horse, or a yak, if you are trekking in the North.)

The planned expansion of tourism is not going to make it cheaper to visit, however. Rather the contrary. The US$ 200 minimum will remain, but there will now be the option of spending more. The truly plutocratic tourist, Lyonpo Jigme pointed out, is a type that Bhutan has not yet encountered, whisked by helicopter from spa to spa, never walking—or even driving. Two-tier tourism is now on its way. Visitors will be able to spend additional funds on fancier accommodation, or on one of the emerging areas of niche tourism: river-rafting, health tourism, or spiritual tourism.

So, as well as trekking and bird-watching and visiting dzongs and temples, there will be the chance to bounce about on rivers of snow-melt and then, depending on your inclination, recover in the traditional medicine hospital in Thimphu, or sit at the feet of an incarnate lama. (Or, if you wish, be tapped on the head by Drukpa Kunley’s Flaming Thunderbolt of Wisdom.)

Why is all this happening now? And so fast? Bhutanese and foreign tour operators and hoteliers would clearly like to expand their business, but they represent only one of the pressures behind the change in government policy. As the Foreign Minister explained to me, there is another, more important factor in play: today, for the first time, Bhutan has an unemployment problem.

“The schools are turning out huge numbers of students,” he said. “And our economy is not expanding at a sufficient pace. What are the possibilities for us? The possibility of industrial growth in a country like ours is limited, and, as you know, we have very stringent environmental policies.

“The travel industry has been the fastest growing sector of the world economy,” he continued. “Bhutan needs to take advantage of this. And we are beginning to see tourism as a way we can promote our heritage, as a way of advancing national sovereignty.”

This, he concluded, was why the government was looking at the other end of the market, at upscale tourists, the kind who have stayed away not because the price is too high, but rather, in this land without five-star hotels, because it is too low. As Lyonpo Jigme put it, with a deprecatory wave of his hand, visitors have had to accept the absence both of luxury accommodation and haute cuisine. This, he said, is what the Government is now hoping to change.

The magic figure is the staff-to-guest ratio in the establishments that Aman Resorts and others are planning: twenty or thirty staff to one guest. That, the authorities hope, will take care of a good few unemployed school-leavers.

The prospect of luxury hotels in Bhutan is not something that all travellers are going to get excited about. The country has traditionally attracted visitors who are not bothered with star ratings. But the Minister does have a point about the food. Perhaps the least engaging feature of the tourist regime in Bhutan is the bland European-style fare provided for foreigners in most hotels. Local food, on the other hand, is the opposite of bland—too far in the opposite direction for most western palates. There is plenty to write home about after a visit to a Bhutanese tavern or restaurant, but not much that one can recommend without provisos.

There’s the famous salty tea, such as the abbott of Wangduephodrang Dzong served us, which is fine as long as you remember that it is better thought of as soup. Then there are tiny Tibetan dumplings called momo, filled with pork or cheese. These can be tasty, perhaps because pigs in Bhutan are fed, so it is said, on marijuana, which grows in profusion in the central valleys. And there is zow, cold, roasted rice, sometimes mixed with tiny red amaranthus seeds, and, finally, yak cheese, dried on a string (yak cheese and zow are both handy when you are on trek). These are OK, too.

On the whole, though, Bhutanese food is strictly for chili lovers. The menu in a tavern features strips of pork fat with chili. Followed by giant white radish with chili. Followed by yak cheese with chili. In Bhutan chili peppers are treated as a vegetable rather than a condiment. Arriving in the country in autumn, there’s a clear warning as you come in to land: the roof of every house is bright red with them, drying in the sun.

An illusion can only be sustained when it is shared by everyone

Gastronomic tourism, then, is something that will probably not be on the menu in the new era in Bhutan; and local food is an aspect of indigenous culture that most visitors will leave to the Bhutanese. What does that leave for further development as a tourist attraction? It leaves the incomparable landscape, the ancient religious heritage and the extraordinary architecture—classic tourist lures, exotic, but safe—and beyond this, cliché though it is, the grace and charm of ordinary Bhutanese.

That’s certainly enough for most visitors. But is it enough to justify the hopes that Bhutanese are currently pinning on the redemptive power of tourist revenue? Is it possible, as the Foreign Minister and others suggest, that an expansion of high-end tourism can cope with Bhutan’s youth unemployment problem, help in protecting the natural environment, conserve cultural heritage and regulate the pace of social change? And can it do all these things at the same time?

It’s a tall order. There is a danger that, just as tourism was thought by some in the 1980s to be the source of all evil, it may now come to be perceived as the opposite, a panacea that will cure every social and economic ill. So far, the Bhutanese have been lucky with their visitors, and vice versa. Each has had the best out of the other: foreign exchange, mutual respect and, often, an abiding affection for the country. The Bhutanese are still trying to hit the sweet spot of tourism: where visitors stimulate the local economy but do not destroy what they come to see.

Whether they succeed or not depends to an extent on forces beyond anyone’s control—on the state of the world economy and the threat of international terrorism, both of which are having an effect on travel throughout the region, and on the pace of social and political reform in Bhutan. But it also depends on outsiders, on the enduring compact between visitors and hosts in Bhutan. And, no doubt, on the tutelary spirits that rule the country’s still unclimbed peaks.

The delicate compact between hosts and guests—between the global economy and the spirit of place, between the dreams of affluent westerners and the realities of life in a poor country—may be best described from a Buddhist point-of-view. Recently Lyonpo Jigme published an article appealing for outside help in the enterprise. Appropriately enough, given the new times in Bhutan, the article appeared first on the web. In it he posed a rhetorical question.

“Is there anything absolute and permanent in the nature of prosperity?” he asked.

Then, answering his own question, he concluded: “No. It is an illusion. The only way that an illusion can be sustained is when it is shared by everyone.”