Dylan Jones
From the air, Bhutan looks disconcertingly like Switzerland. Same snow-capped peaks, same wide, lush valleys, same tidy lodges peppering the mountains. Once you hit the ground, you realise there are no banks, no expensive watches and hardly any chilli-free cheese (unless you count the raclette at Fritz Maurer's Bhutanese Swiss Guesthouse), but you still feel as though you've flown halfway round the world to end up in the Alps. And so you look again and find that instead of billboards there are dozens of clusters of prayer flags, strung from poles, snapping in the wind. You have also landed at one of the most beautiful airports in the world.
Bhutan: small Buddhist kingdom in the Eastern Himalayas, home to districts such as Rainbow District of Desires, Lotus Grove of the Gods and Blooming Valley of Luxuriant Fruits. Bhutan:squashed 40 million years ago between the Indian subcontinent and Asia. It's illegal to fell a tree here, or kill a fish, and the population are so good at the national sport - archery - that the manufacture of targets recently had to be suspended until they made the bull's-eyes smaller.
Closed to the outside world for centuries, 40 years ago the economy was still based on barter and money was virtually nonexistent. There are only 700,000 people here (15,000-20,000 of whom are monks, 10,000 in the army), enough to fit inside 10 Wembley Stadiums in a country the size of, well, Switzerland. Most nationals are still farmers, although increasingly people are working in tourism (there will be nearly 20,000 visitors this year). There is also crime, which had previously almost been eradicated. Graduates educated in India are returning to a country that has no jobs for them, so they drink instead, and fight, and steal. And get arrested.
Television has been in Bhutan since 1999 and has had a predictably tumultuous effect, especially on the young. Western music and fashion has changed the way teenagers consume, and children now run around the parks with plastic guns imported from Bangkok. The government has tried to ban certain TV channels, namely pornography and wrestling, although more people seem interested in watching the Premiership. The Western influence is on the streets, too, with the men wearing Ray-Bans and Nike trainers along with their traditional gho costumes. The most recent status symbol is the mobile phone and, bizarrely, the hostess bar. Club owners recently overturned a ban, and many bars in the capital Thimphu (the only capital in Asia not to have traffic lights, incidentally) have started up again, masquerading as up-market karaoke bars. A rather hysterical piece on the subject on the cover of The Bhutan Observer last week was lumbered with the headline: "An Extravagant Squall". The exclamation mark was there in everything but deed.
