Part 1
Dogs and dishes wake me at 6am. After breakfast, I watch the Thimphu street life start up. An old man seated in the middle of a field of sand slowly pulls off his pants and starts filling paper bags with sand, using a cardboard scoop. Dogs are loafing everywhere, and I watch one cautious cat repeatedly try to cross a field, only to be chased back by a dog each time. Young mothers watch their toddlers stagger off, kids climb on a manual cement mixer, chase dogs and throw rocks, a group of men place planks of wood under a blue tarp. Thimphu smells of woodsmoke and dust, the buildings grey and white, accented by dark wooden planks and colorful painted patterns - flowers, mandalas, symbols.
I meet Karsang, my trekking guide, at 9.30 for a practice hike to Phajoding Monastery, to see what kind of shape I'm in. He's lean and fit, about my height (short), dark eyes and dark hair with a wry smile. He's laidback but alert, attentive, and good company. We walk down past the post-office to one of the temples by the river, where there's a crowd for a festival. Or maybe it's just a good day for praying.
We walk to the left of everything. That's the good luck side. Prayer in Bhutan is everywhere - chorten temples with wise eyes, prayer flags, shrines, prayer wheels...Completing a full clockwise circle of a prayer, temple, or shrine brings luck, happiness, benevolence...which is why we walk to the left. Karsang and I discuss the role of dogs in Buddhism as we watch the crowd circle the temple - kids with dirty faces chewing sugarcane, elderly men mumbling mantras as they push past the slow, families smiling and chatting as they walk.
We catch a taxi up the hill with radio antennae above town and start walking. The path here is eroded by rain down to hard-packed clay. Karsang and I talk about bears, buddhism and girlfriends, and stop to drink at a spring in the trees, near an old man sleeping in the sun, and feed a very shy dog. Hiking further up into the forest, we pass an old man cutting bamboo with his knife, a good hefty blade, almost a machete, and then mingle with a group of student nurses on their way back to town. They're traditionally dressed in ghos and kiras, wearing worn-out flipflops and pretending to be exhausted from the hike. Their greetings to me as we pass run the range from shyly soft-spoken to curious to aggressively conversational.
When we reach the lower monastery, we go through an inner courtyard that's straight from medieval times - old wooden rafters, the stairs steep-cut notches in a grittily polished tree-trunk. The temple feels old and still, the floor thick smooth-worn wood beams. Small lamps shadowly light five incarnations of the buddha, with fading cash in their laps and at their feet, along with fruit and food offerings. Between deep bows and gestures of reverence, everyone lines up to roll a die. 5 and 8 are the lucky numbers. Karsang and I both get a 5 on the first roll, but the student ahead of me rolls 8 or 9 times and makes 2 donations before he gets a good number.
Back outside, five child monks in orange robes are stirring a large cauldron of grains mixed with a red dye. "What's it for?", I ask. "You eat!" they say, "You drink! You make a paste!", laughing so I can't tell if they're joking or just happy, and then an older monk comes and tells them to keep quiet.
At that time in my life, part of me was hoping to find something spiritually transformative in Buddhism. I was young, and didn't know much, but it was more appealing to me than the Christianity that I'd grown up in, not just because it was exotic, but I liked the core principals of peace and respect for life. I still carry the memory of that dark and quiet temple with me, but more strongly the memory of the happy boys, arms stained red to their elbows, laughing over their mysterious cauldron.