Haa

A few weeks ago, we decided to make a trip to the Haa valley, just west of Paro. Our friend David’s partner Britane was here for a month, and it was going to be her last weekend, so we thought we’d all visit this part of Bhutan that none of us had been to, even though it is only a 2-hour or so drive from Paro. 

As foreigners, we are not able to travel beyond the Paro and Thimphu districts without a permit. So we asked the faculty secretary to apply for the route permit for us, which is usually a simple process. Two days before we were planning to go, she told us that she had been told not to submit the application if we did not have a Bhutanese traveling with us. It was not clear whether she had been told this by the law school administration, or by Bhutan immigration authorities. 

 

We are not sure why, but we assume that we were denied traveling there by ourselves because the Haa valley is on the western border of Bhutan, which makes it a very strategic location. The southwestern-most part of Haa borders both Tibet, which is controversially controlled by China but technically an autonomous region of China, and the Indian state of Sikkim, which was also a sovereign entity until it became an Indian protectorate, and eventually an Indian state in 1975. Bhutan is very cautious and protective of its borders, being a tiny little country sandwiched in between two major powers that have absorbed much of the surrounding region. Bhutan has a very strong relationship with India, sharing trade, tourism, and expertise; within Haa town, in fact, is the headquarters of the Indian Military Training Team, which is responsible for training the Royal Bhutan Army, and maybe makes authorities cautious about foreigners traveling there. The relationship with China is much different, and even though their borders abut, there is no open crossing between Bhutan and China. One theory of why the 4^th king commissioned a constitution and declared Bhutan to be a constitutional monarchy with democratic institutions was that he wanted to strengthen Bhutan’s connections to the west and buffer it from (maybe) India (but most probably) China. I have also heard other explanations of why the transition happened, but at any rate, the geopolitics of this region is very complicated. Even writing this paragraph had me searching maps and histories, but I clearly still understand very little of it.

 

We did not want to put any of our Bhutanese colleagues or students on the spot by asking them to travel with us, as we suspected anyone would just say yes even if it was a headache for them to do it. So we gave up the weekend plan and instead decided to just drive up to the pass in between the two valleys and hike the ridge that straddles them.

 

Chele La pass between Haa and Paro is the highest in the country, at nearly 13,000 feet. To get there from the law school, we had to drop down almost to Paro to pick up the road to Haa, a single-lane, windy but well-paved road that took us through forests that felt very much like the Pacific Northwest. We left Pangbisa when it was pretty clear, and got to the pass with relatively good visibility, though there were banks of clouds floating around in all directions, and rain in the distance. 

 

We had heard that the trail from the pass leads to an area where sky burials are performed. Sky burial is a Buddhist ritual where, instead of cremation or burial, the body is laid out at a burial site where prayers are said, then juniper is burned to attract vultures, which consume the remains. I don’t think it is done very much anymore, but some people still do it, I have heard, for children. We were cautious about tromping off into an area where these rituals might take place, but the trail from the pass was clearly well worn (the dean I work with told me the next week about a hike he did there, so I felt okay about it). We just took off to see where it would lead us.

 

Which was into crazy wind and clouds and spitting rain! But it was still really beautiful, the whole way peppered with a melange of prayer flags on strings and poles, which are usually placed in locations where there is good wind to send the prayers far. We hiked for a while, passing through several places that maybe had been used for rituals, which we thought because of the large rocks, cairns, piles of embers, and prayer flags. When I finally got too wet and cold, we turned around, picking our way back down through the clouds that had poured over through the pass and overtaken everything.