Thunderdragons and kneesocks

Football, bloody football.

It appears to be the World Cup and I am meant to care about football again. I don’t, much. I’ve only been to a few matches in my life: one was Bologna versus Napoli when Diego Maradona was playing, and I learned some filthy Italian football chants. Another was when I wrote about women’s football when it was REALLY ignored and disdained, and went to Fulham Ladies. Ladies! WOMEN ffs.

But once I went to a match that I loved, loved, loved. Because it was in Bhutan, and it was the Other World Cup Final between the bottom two ranking FIFA nations. I’ve mentioned it before, but as my creative brain is filled with book proposal writing, I’m going to cheat and post it again. It was a hoot.

1.
Dzongkhags and drunkhags are divided into gewogs which are governed by gups. The King is called Dragon, has four wives – all sisters – and 10 children, but heads a family planning campaign called “Small family, happy family.” All the men wear kneesocks and tartan dressing gowns called ghos, which must be pleated properly. On Tuesdays, shops on the upper side of the street close. On Wednesday, it’s the opposite side. Sometimes the King decides to have a vegetarian month, just like that, and serving meat in restaurants becomes an offence. There are more monks than military personnel.

They say Bhutan is like nowhere else on earth. They are right.

The Land of the Thunder Dragon is a tiny country surrounded by big countries. A Bhutanese saying goes like this: “If all China pees at once, we’ll be swept away. And if all India farts...” This saying is actually said with gusto by Thuji Nadik, deputy tourist minister. He describes himself as a “Hindi-speaking Chinky,” though he isn’t being accurate: actually, his first language is Dzonghka, related to Tibetan, and his second is English, spoken fluently, as it’s the language all school lessons are taught in here. His third is Hindi. He says, “When I studied in Birmingham, I would speak to the balti waiters in their own language and they were so shocked, they would give me free curries.” And he laughs.

Here is a curious thing: when graduates from developing countries go overseas to study, they often don’t come back, even when they have to pay back the tuition fees. In Bhutan, they come back, always. Bhutanese university students get visas for the US almost automatically, because they will never overstay. One of the tourist slogans about Bhutan has been “the last Shangri-La.” They say this place is paradise. Is it?

Thuji Nadik laughs at this. He’s gloriously indiscreet, and he makes my guide wince. “The Shangri-La image is fraying a bit at the edges,” he says. “It’s obsolete.” Instead, Bhutan is going eco, to promote green adventure tourism. As it’s is possibly the only country in the world to have stopped logging and increased its forest cover (to 76 per cent), this won’t be hard.

The Dragon King decided to kick out the loggers. The Dragon King decides a lot in Bhutan, but he’s trying to cut down. Jigme Sangay Wangchuck, forty-seven years old, has already ruled for thirty years. He is a handsome and apparently principled man, and I’ve got a bit of a crush on him. Since 1998, he’s been trying to give away his powers to the people, and it’s not just rhetoric: there’s now a National Assembly, a constitution is being written, and Bhutan is on the way to a monarchic democracy. The assembly meets only once a year, and is of the stiff and deferential variety, but at least it votes.

My guide is provided by the Foreign Ministry, and is a young fellow called Karma. He takes me one day to the assembly, because I’ve been pestering him to arrange for me to meet His Majesty, and this is about as close as I’ll get. There he is, sitting quietly on a big dais at the far end of the ornately painted and carved room. Such is the air of deference, it takes me an hour to dare to cross my legs, because no one else is doing it. Outside in the corridor, I am standing with a bottle of water, marvelling at the ceremonial version of the national costume, which comes with groovy boots, when Karma hisses “the Crown Prince!” I hide the bottle behind my back, and I am crippled. Do I look at him? (Bhutanese aren’t allowed to look the King in the eyes). Do I shake hands? But the young prince is all charm, though he’s only just graduated from college, and we talk about final exams. “You must be nervous about your results,” I say, and feel stupid – what does a future king care about grades?

Instead, he has to care about living up to his father, who – even cynical expats agree – is genuinely loved. “He rules quietly,” say people about His Majesty, and you can often see him driving through Thimphu, the one-horse town capital, on the way to his modest palace. (A website description of His Majesty: “He has four wives and drives a Toyota.”)

And he treks a lot. There’s no other way for him see his people, and he likes to see them, almost constantly. Recently, he’s been trekking to the south of the country, where Indian militants fighting for the independence of Assam have set up camp. Nine camps, actually, though the militants have promised to close five after protracted negotiations. Whether they have or not is a mystery: A reporter on the Bhutanese Broadcasting Association told me that Bhutanese journalists have never been to the camps to check them out, because they don’t have the money. “Yes,” says Karma, over Bhutanese whiskey at Oms bar. “But the King has been there. He wanted to see what was happening, so he went.” But he says this very quietly.

2.
This is a place where people speak carefully, and where reserve is a national characteristic. Bhutan only let the outside world in in 1974, at the King’s coronation. Even now, it gets only 6,000 tourists a year, while next-door Nepal gets millions. “In twenty years, Bhutan has leaped from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century,” says Thuji Nadik, deputy Director of Tourism. “Nowhere else on earth has done that.” In just over two decades, the Bhutanese – an overwhelmingly rural society – havevhad their first experience of paved roads, cars, aeroplanes (Bhutan’s Druk Air pilots are now expert at landing between mountains at Paro airport), telephones and TV, which the King decided the population was “sufficiently educated” to receive three years ago. The capital may have cyber cafes and scores of hotels, but it also has hordes of stray dogs, not a single traffic light, and smelly, dusty streets.

There were good reasons for Bhutan’s isolation, and equally good reasons why it decided to end it. The most secluded kingdom in the world has opened its door partly by choice and partly by necessity. “We are sandwiched between India and China,” says Karma. “We have to keep our national identity.” It hardly takes a genius to figure out why. Tibet is Bhutan’s neighbour, and everyone knows what happened there. In the other direction, Bhutan looks at the examples of Sikkim or Ladakh, both independent Himalayan kingdoms a century ago, now overtaken by India. Contact with the global community is Bhutan’s safety net from both its overbearing big brothers.

And limiting this contact preserves its traditions, environment and pride. Bhutan only has to look to Nepal to see what it doesn’t want – millions of tourists spending only $15 a day, with minimal benefit for the economy, and maximum damage to the environment. So tourists to Bhutan have to pay $200 a day to visit, and must come through a tour operator. No backpackers, no adventurers. “We want more money and less impact,” says Nadik. “People criticise our policy, but it’s very rational! If you have money, you can come here. And if you don’t, you know what you can do.”

In fact, the notorious “tourist tax” covers hotel, driver and guide. It’s actually quite reasonable. Too reasonable for Nadik, who says darkly that “it needs reform.” Six excessively luxury resorts are being built by theSingaporean Aman chain, whose website features much blue water, white clifftops and smells of money. Aman charges $500-800 a night, and has also proposed to convert one of Druk Air’s two planes into a luxury jet. “We’re open to ideas like that,” says Nadik, because he’s convinced that upmarket is safer than down. What he really wants, though, is gays. “It’s a very lucrative market. Professional, highly cultured, lots of moolah. But we can’t overtly promote that.”

There are other stumbling blocks to tourism, despite the pristine mountains and rushing rivers. Foreigners need permits to go anywhere. “It’s ridiculous,” fumes one foreign tour operator living in Thimphu. “They come here, and they spend three days on a bus, and they see a gorgeous dzong [fortified monastery and administration centre] and we have to say, ‘sorry, you’re not allowed in.’ So they have to go away again!” Karma gets me into a dzong, and it would be a shame to miss it: Traditional painted wood everywhere, gold Buddhas, untouched by tourism. But the permits are understandable, in one respect, as one ministry official points out: “Tourists visit monasteries, and the monks aren’t used to them, so they don’t have the defence mechanisms.” Valuable statues have been disappearing over recent years, and incidents are increasing.

3.
World Cup Final, Bhutan style. I am officially in Bhutan to watch The Other Final, a football match between Bhutan and Montserrat, who hold the two lowest positions (202 and 203, respectively) in the FIFA world rankings. The press have been calling it a fight between “the worst countries in the world,” but I prefer the Bhutanese take on things – they’re calling it “baby football,” because Bhutan and Montserrat are relatively new FIFA members.

It’s taking place on the morning of the “real” World Cup final, and the Montserratians are looking nervous. Hardly surprising: they endured a five-day voyage from the Caribbean to the Himalayas, to a country they’d never heard of. They got stuck in Calcutta because of monsoon rains, then got food poisoning, then got altitude sickness – Thimphu is 7000 feet up – then motion sickness on a three-hour trip to Punakha, because there are sixteen zigzags a mile in Bhutan. Two days earlier, some players had spent much of the night in the Dragon disco, hardly ideal pre-match training. It will be a miracle if they get on the pitch at all.

Before the match begins, English referee Steve Bennett surveys the scene. In front of him, 15,000 spectators wait peacefully under their umbrellas in considerable heat. A group of yellow and red T-shirts indicate the supporters of home team Bhutan. The green shirts next to them support opposition team Montserrat, though every one of them is Bhutanese. Every five minutes or so, they break into the famous Montserrat’s de facto national anthem – “Feeling Hot Hot Hot” – before the next-door Bhutanese reply with a hearty rendition of “In Bhutan, where sandalwood is grown and found,” an equally popular and more obviously patriotic song. Behind the crowd, the Himalayas rise spectacularly under thunderclouds that gave Bhutan one of its names, and to the side, a Bhutanese band practices on long metal didgeridoos called doons. “Wow,” says Bennett, before he begins to adjudicate the furthest-flung match he has ever attended. “The Premier League would have to go some way to beat this.”

The match has been organised by a Dutch media agency, with funding from Japanese and Italian film companies. The organiser is a harried redhead called Matthijs, who says the idea came to him when the Dutch failed to qualify for the World Cup. “We thought this would be therapy.” They sent faxes to the Montserratian and Bhutanese football federations, who thought it was a hoax. But the president of the Bhutanese federation also happens to be Prime Minister. Once he’d decided to do it, there was no objection.

Matthijs asked for sponsorship from the big firms – Nike, Adidas, Reebok – but they didn’t bother to reply. So The Other Final is devoid of logos. The ball is pure white. There are no advertising hoardings, no badges on shirts. Even the cola isn’t Coca.

The match is historic in other ways. This is the first chance for the national team – the Dragon XI – to resurrect their reputation, after a dark and traumatic defeat which Dinesh and Wangay, the Dragon striker and captain, are unable to forget. “Kuwait invited us to play, but it was fixed! China had just beaten Guam 19-0 and Kuwait wanted to break the world record. We got an official drunk and he confessed – the players were promised thousands of dollars if they got a goal. Even the goalie took a penalty!” The result was 20-0 to the Kuwaitis. The Dragon XI were vilified. They were determined to prove themselves. “The Montserrat team are big. But we’ll go under their legs.”

And so they do. It’s not difficult. The Monster Rats – as the Monserratians apparently call their team, though I never hear them use it – are incapacitated and knackered. The Bhutanese nip at them and zip through them, relentlessly. Wangay scores a hat-trick; Dinesh scores the fourth. The crowd roars, though half of them are supporting the opposition, apparently on the grounds that it’s only polite. “We’re cheering for Montserrat because they’ve come to our country,” says Tenzing Mindrel, a Thimphu schoolboy who spent eight hours handpainting a huge Montserratian flag. “They have a lot of culture,” says Devika Subba, in a country where McDonalds is unheard of. The support was genuine: every move of the Montserratians got a chorus of “hot hot hot,” to the surprise of the visitors. “Back home,” said veteran striker Pops Mitchell later, “our crowds would never cheer for the opposition. Sometimes they don’t even cheer for us.”

A Dutch journalist predicts that the 25 Bhutanese team will let the Montserratians score in the last five minutes, “because they’re such kind people.” (He also says: “I’ve been to hundreds of football matches, but this is the best atmosphere ever.”) From the Bhutanese crowd, cries of “give them one goal!” can be heard in Dzonghka. “If there was a slight chance of a penalty for Montserrat,” admits Steve Bennett, “I have to confess I’d have been tempted to give it to them.” But it wasn’t to be. The Bhutanese team are observant Buddhists. Before the match, they drove 45 minutes on a rainy evening to perform a prayer ceremony in a gorgeous mountain monastery, while I waited in the yard (I didn’t have the right permit) and the head abbot asked me to stay behind to be a nun, because of my short hair and maroon sweater. But today the Dragon XI are ruthless first and religious second. “Give them a goal?” says a passing player, after the match. “No way, man.”

Bhutan’s schoolchildren so impressed Prime Minister Lyonpo Wangchuck with their cheerful cheering, he declared the next day a school holiday. They impressed me too, because I come from a city where the football fans still make monkey noises at their own black players.

4.
My hotel’s manager is an Indian who spends a lot of time cursing mildly, because he’s running a book on the final, and it’s not going well. (Hotel staff are almost always Indian or Nepali, while all the labourers are migrant workers from Bihar.) I like the manager, particularly because he’s willing to be indiscreet behind closed doors, which is rare.

One evening, he tells me to ask my guide about the NOC. The Bhutanese government provides free healthcare – including treatment abroad – and education, for as long as anyone requires it. Or not quite anyone, says the manager. The No Objection Certificate is required for healthcare, education and most jobs, and is impossible to get if any relative has protested against the government or the King, no matter how far back or how distant the relative. It sounds nasty and Orwellian, as do other whispered secrets. “There’s a new police policy,” whispers one man one day. “If you’re caught not wearing national costume, they drive you for hours and you have to walk home.” This is considered more humane than a simple fine, which is the legally required punishment. Everyone I ask about national dress is suitably patriotic. “If we didn’t have the law, it wouldn’t exist.” “I don’t mind it at all. It looks good and it’s comfortable.” I believe this, until one evening function, when I borrow a kira – the women’s national dress – from Karma’s wife. There are two metres of material, an undershirt, a silk overjacket with long white cuffs, and a belt. Chimmi the housekeeper helps me put it on. It takes her half an hour, and when she pulls the belt, I wince. Are they all this tight? “Er...” says Karma, “you get used to it,” though he and his friends appear in the bars every evening in jeans, and it seems they are breathing better.

It takes the whiskey again to get a different version. One of the liaison officers is a high school teacher from the south. I wait for the third glass of whiskey and then I ask. “The national dress – do you mind wearing it?” He waits for a while. “You’ve tried it. What do you think?” I could hardly eat or move, I tell him. “Yes. Yes. Yes, I mind. Wouldn’t you?”

In an office, I ask a young man about the Gross National Happiness policy. This was instigated by His Majesty in the 1990s, and is a unique attitude to development: the people, he decided, needed to be happy more than they needed consumer goods. So Bhutan chooses its donors and its development projects carefully – no overbearing big countries like Germany or the U.S. Small, manageable ones, like the Netherlands and Denmark, who will give money and not interfere too much. Japan gives a lot. Maybe because, as someone tells me, Bhutan is like Japan was, “before they fucked it up.” Or because there is an unspoken market in sex tourism, fuelled largely by Japanese Office Ladies, salaried workers who can afford nothing in their own country, but plenty elsewhere, including a nice Bhutanese, correctly-featured husband (Bhutanese say they get hassled in India, because they’re mistaken for Japanese). But Bhutan keeps the upper hand, partly because it has huge potential wealth in its hydropower, and sells up to ninety per cent of its electricity to India, even though only thirty per cent of Bhutanese have it. If a donor wants to give money for a project that is not on Bhutan’s five year plan, they won’t take it. This is refreshing. But the Gross National Happiness, I ask the young man – don’t you feel it’s mocked? That it makes Bhutan seem comical? He looks very embarrassed. “You know whose idea that was, don’t you?” I do. “Then I can’t comment.”

In the 1990s, trouble with the southern Bhutanese population – a people of Nepali origin – led to the movement of about 300,000 people into camps in Nepal. The Bhutanese call them illegal immigrants; the world called it ethnic cleansing. Either way, it’s something that still infuriates. “We didn’t know how to deal with the media,” says Nadik. “The other side had all the advantages.” Bhutan and Nepal are now negotiating over the return of some “immigrants” to Bhutan, though the rumours are that they will be removed from their fertile lowlands and stuck in the mountains. People who have never seen a yak before will be forced to become Himalayan.

5.
Every morning, I take breakfast with twenty-four Montserratians. They are perfect gentlemen, and I only getfour requests for my room number, which I take as the obligatory minimum. They mutter that there’s no swordfish for breakfast, but delight over Bhutan’s rushing rivers, which remind them of the Dominican Republic. Their own island is better known for the dry devastation caused by the Soufriere Hills volcano, which destroyed half the island in 1997, and which is still erupting.

“This place is so pure!” says Montserrat’s goalkeeper, Cyril. “So green! But man, it smells!” The capital’s open sewers are a little off-putting, as are the roads, built by the Indian Army to fit one military truck, making them just too small for two cars to pass easily. I think this is rude and colonial, but the Bhutanese laugh. On their classy websites, Bhutan’s 121 tour operators – who only need eighteen clients a year to make a good living – warn their customers to expect “modest and homely accommodation.” Apparently, Westerners complain about the toilets, which Bhutan hasn’t had for very long.

But the Dragon Kingdom is learning, at its own pace. On the way to a practice match three hours away in Punakha, the Montserrat team had been held for half an hour at an internal checkpoint. The Foreign Secretary, the rumour goes, is furious and embarrassed, and promises to bring up the issue of internal checkpoints at the National Assembly.

When in 1999, the King finally allowed TV, a radio tower was built and it now competes for space with fluttering Buddhist prayer flags, overlooking the valley where Thimphu lies, and where a cemetery fire burns permanently by the river. Up on Tango monastery, which glowers over a deep green valley with a beauty that even the jaded would stop to look at, the monks are online. Later, in a school attended by royal children, a very elegant headteacher tells me that she expects her pupils will change, what with Internet and TV, and their ability to create aspiration and frustration. She expects there will soon be gangs, and chafing. When I ask the children if they want to know anything about England, they ask, “Madam, where is Michael Owen from?” and I wonder whether they’ll be so polite, two years from now, and whether they’ll still think of marijuana – which grows by the roadside – as “pig fodder,” which it mostly is, for now, to the astonishment of the ganja boys from Montserrat.

“I bet you’ve heard the word ‘unique’ used a lot about Bhutan, haven’t you?” asks Thuji Nadik, laughing. I have. But it’s on everyone’s minds. On the “From the Readers” section of the Kuensel newspaper’s website, there is great support for the “one nation, one culture” policy of the King, which includes national dress and Dzonghka language television. Even though a Bulgarian volunteer here says to me “no one protests in Bhutan.” Even though I meet a French vet who says she has rescued two sexually abused monkeys from monasteries. Even though there are shadows to this Shangri-La, it’s a country with searingly lovely scenery, whose people are funny and kind – “they really are,” says a German doctor here, “I’ve been to the Philippines and Cambodia, and these people are the real thing” – and it is unique, for now. “We know we’re on the road to development, same as every country,” says Thuji Nadik. “We just don’t know where the hell we’re going.”

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There is a DVD of the match and I highly recommend it, if you can find it.