"The Red Panda: Mill Mountain to Maurer"

Red Panda Beer, the best beer in Bhutan.

People ask how Kelly and I can travel for a month throughout the Himalayas with our three tsunamis -- er -- children in full gear alongside us. Our answer?

Red.

Panda.

Beer.

This weiss beer is brewed in Bumtang by Fritz Maurer, a remarkable Bhutanese citizen of Swiss birth. His story is as good as the beer. Uncharted Travel tells the story much better than I can...*

"Fritz is an unusual name for a Bhutanese man, but then Fritz is no ordinary man.

Fritz Maurer was born in Switzerland and came to Bhutan in the mid 1960’s to help develop farming in the Bumthang region of Bhutan as part of the Pro Bhutan Foundation. He eventually married and started a Swiss cheese factory.

He now runs a Swiss Lodge style guest house, and produces not only cheese, but also honey and Schnapps. He speaks the Bumthang dialect better than most Bhutanese, and the locals refer to him as Dasho, a title reserved for high ranking officials. No one can remember the last time they saw him in western attire.

According to recent folklore, when Heinrich Harrer came to Bhutan he haughtily introduced himself to Fritz Maurer as “Heinrich Harrer, Seven Years in Tibet”, to which Fritz Maurer replied “Fritz Maurer, thirty years in Bhutan.”

Fritz Maurer is one of the few foreigners lucky enough to immigrate to Bhutan; of the others the vast majority are also Swiss. You can already hear rumblings on the streets of Thimpu over the number of Swiss immigrants, I think there are three altogether now. Others in the past included a Canadian Jesuit who was very proud of the fact that he didn’t convert a single person."*

It is worth noting that Kelly chose the red panda as her favorite animal long before we arrived in Bhutan. She saw her first red panda at Mill Mountain Zoo (www.mmzoo.org) in Roanoke VA, and instantly fell in love. Never mind how improbable it was that we find this zoo in the first place (a story of its own), or that there should be a Himalayan panda living in a small Virginia community zoo in the middle of the summer. It was meant to be, and her red panda love affair continues via the beer here in Bhutan.

*full credit for this excerpt: www.unchartedtravel.com/asia/bhutan/attractions/bhumtang.php?country=bhutan

"Picture Library"

For those of you interested in more Bhutan pictures, we are building a library here (Seth):

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.2103976191874.121834.1019573818&l=19c14db1a0

and here (Kelly):

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150308389814274.383974.647979273&l=0fba6f31c2

"EMS in the Himalayas"

The Health Help Center (HHC) in Bhutan is the centralized dispatch and EMS center for the entire country.

It is fascinating to see this being built from scratch. It is only a few years old, and the new EMTs only a few months out of training. There are numerous challenges to building an entirely new EMS system in a Himalayan country, not least of which is training an entire cadre of new healthcare providers of a type never before seen in this country. There is some skepticism here about the ability of non-physicians to be able to provide adequate field care -- reminds me of the United States in the 1970s, in the era of "Emergency!" and the first paramedics -- and I am proud to be able to share what great care non-physician paramedics can and do provide in the States.

On the other hand, there are unexpected benefits to building a system from scratch. I had wondered if there would be difficulty in citizens in an extremely rural country being able to access 112 calling (the version of 911 here). It would be a classic administrative mistake to spend millions of dollars establishing a communications center that nobody could reach due to insufficient access to phones. In fact, not only does everyone have a mobile phone (including in the rural areas), but the coverage is fantastic. We have not yet found an area, including wilderness areas, that we did not have full coverage... and this is in a country that, by law, protects over 60% of its forests as protected/wilderness areas, and has the highest fraction of protected land areas, as well as the highest proportion of forest cover, of any Asian nation. Kelly has a hypothesis that I think is correct: the national telecommunications infrastructure was established so recently that little effort was put into establishing landlines, and as a consequence, mobile telecommunications (towers) are extremely robust. This means that personal landlines may be minimal in rural areas, but mobile phones are ubiquitous, and have even better coverage than areas in the States with similar terrain. This also is helped by fewer telecommunication companies, meaning more consolidated networks. The beneficial consequences for Search & Rescue, rescue operations, and EMS are obvious -- and in ways like this, ironically, a robust EMS/rescue system may be easier to establish than in a country with a longer history of development. Other interesting technological advances include complete GPS control of each ambulance throughout the country via Google Earth (they are green when moving and red when stationary), and the use of the HHC as a "health advice" line. Telecommunicators can even send prescriptions via SMS to callers, and there is a full-time physician assigned to the HHC for on-line medical consultations from citizens who call in with medical questions.

It is extremely exciting to be a part of this project, and my hat is off to the Bhutan Foundation, the Bhutanese Government, the Ministry of Health, and the American HVO emergency physicians working here for recognizing that EMS and EM must grow together, with parallel progress, for either to fully succeed.

"Flight of the Thunder Dragon"

"Fire leaped from the dragon's jaws. He circled for a while high in the air above them lighting all the lake; the trees by the shores shone like copper and like blood with leaping shadows of dense black at their feet." --J.R.R. Tolkien

On July 2nd, we flew from Bangkok into Bhutan on Druk Air ("druk" is dragon in

རྫོང་ཁ་, the native language of Bhutan). We were all hoping to get to see Everest -- the flight path goes right by it -- but the skies were too cloudy. We're hoping for better luck on the way back...

The landing in Bhutan is remarkable. It is best encapsulated in this excerpt from Travel & Leisure's 2009 article "World's Scariest Runways", in which Paro was the first airport profiled:

It’s 10:45 a.m. on a cloudy day, and the crew of Druk Air flight KB205 is preparing to land at their home airport of Paro, Bhutan. Suddenly, ominous warnings start blaring, alerting them that their flight angle is all wrong and their rate of descent is far too fast. They fly a series of unconventional right-and-left banks through a narrow channel of hillsides before centering the swaying jet and putting it on the tarmac.

An emergency situation? Not quite. In fact, this is a completely normal—however nail-biting—landing at Paro Airport, set 7,300 feet above sea level. Because of the airport’s tightly cropped valley, surrounded by 16,000-foot-high serrated Himalayan peaks, this drama replays itself on every flight.

According to the article, only eight commercial pilots in the world are licensed to fly in to Paro Airport. Indeed, on our flight the pilot got on the intercom before our landing to reassure us that the upcoming maneuvers were routine, and not to be alarmed. It was incredible to fly in to an airport, while seeing cliffs out the window only a short distance away.

Kinda like flying into Linville Gorge in a 747.

Protocols

Kai, ever the stickler for protocols, reviewing the hostel's copy of Do's and Don'ts in Thailand. (It must be said that this is after Ethan had devoured the entire book the day before -- well, except for the parts banned by his parents about Red Light District etiquette.)

After reading the book, Kai in particular took great delight in bowing deeply to every monk he saw. This made for a lot of bowing. And a lot of puzzled monks.

"Bonus Picture"

And now, playing off Noah's famous "sometimes it just doesn't matter how cool the next DC monument will be" picture...

Sometimes it just doesn't matter how cool the next buddha statue will be!

"The Land of Rivers & Buddhas"

Bangkok truly earns its name of Venice of the East, with a remarkable series of canals and rivers. We loved the Jim Thompson house and got all sorts of ideas from this house-on-a-river for our own Riverwoods home (get ready to go Thai, Greg Hoff!) The kids were amazingly enthusiastic about touring various religious sites, partly because it meant cool rides on funky river ferries. Ethan in particular developed a fascination for the various Buddhas and lead a long and comical trek to find the enormous Reclining Buddha, which indeed was worth the effort in the end (thanks Ethan). In the picture to the right, Kelly, Kai and Noah give their own interpretation of the Reclining Buddha.