Happy Times In Bhutan
A trip with his father leads to an unexpected visit with the coolest girl in the world
By Philip Andelman
I recently went on a father-son trip to Bhutan, for the sole reason that I had never been there before. Bhutan is an insanely happy
place. The economy is not measured in GDP like 99 percent of the
rest of the world but rather in GNH or Gross National Happiness.
That says a lot. And everywhere we went, the people were incredibly kind, generous and happy. It's funny, because while Bhutan is
not a first-world country, it is by no means a third-world country
either. When you travel to a lot of poorer countries, you see emaciated cows on the side of the road, squalid living conditions, people
missing teeth, looking gaunt. Everyone here was healthy and warm,
the animals were robust and abundant. I joked that the Bhutanese
were the Argentineans of the East -- a country filled with really really
really good-looking people!
The night after I took the picture of the little kid with a toy gun (at right), I had dinner at the home of the mayor of the tiny town we were in (which was basically a 48-plus-hour car ride to the closest airport!) and I asked him "Why, in such a happy place, does every kid I've seen have a toy gun?" The mayor shrugged a universal what-can-you-do shrug and said something to the effect of "Kids... they love playing with guns."
There's something really amazing about going to these beautiful temples throughout the country and discovering that you are the only white person there. Sometimes you're the only person there, period! It makes for great picture-taking opportunities, as you can't believe how serene it is -- imagine Notre Dame being desolate. But then, you would go four days further into the countryside and suddenly two buses' worth of tourists would arrive, and you would then see these same tourists for the next three days everywhere you went. Fortunately this was sporadic, and most people travel in small parties of two to six, which makes it less offensive. The only way to travel in Bhutan is with a guide or a driver. It doesn't feel like North Korea or anything, but they are hyper-sensitive as to what they show you. You can't just point to a restaurant on the side of the road and be like, "Let's go there!" Most likely because the food is horrible and they don't want you to get sick. You wind up in places that do buf- fets that each of these two-to-six person parties hit up at some point during the day, and no matter what part of the country you are in, the menu is the exact same. I'm a bit of a food lover and I struggled hard over here. I can't really think of anything that was remotely tasty, mostly because I had the same meal for 10 days straight. And a rather shitty one at that.
There was this one time when I was walking along with our guide by this stream in a small town outside of Bumthang and we ran into a bunch of school kids. I started talking to them, mostly through the guide, and as we walked they started splintering off as they found their homes. We were left with these three girls, probably about 12 years old. One of them, Pem, had only seen one person from outside of Bhutan, a Japanese tourist, about two years before. Despite this, she seemed fairly nonchalant about meeting her first Westerner. She had a very "whatevs" attitude that was seriously cool. As we continued to stroll, she invited us to her home for tea. I met her whole family and they were so unbelievably kind. Pem's room consisted of a small cot on the floor, a little corner covered in posters of the King (whom every girl has a major crush on -- he's 30, went to Andover, plays a mean game of basketball and is basically their version of Robert Pattinson, except he's royalty, not a vampire), a TV that she grumbled wasn't working, and then five little toys perfectly arranged on a shelf. It was so sweet the way she had arranged them, so methodically and carefully. All I could think about was your average American kid's room, stuffed with so much shit you can't see the floor. I told her a bit about what I did and showed her the Beyoncé video I'd just directed on my iPhone. She looked at it for a few seconds and then got the tea prepared as she remarked, "Yeah, I saw that on TV a while ago" and gave a little shrug. When I asked her what she would want from the states, all she asked for was a print of the pics I shot of her. She was quite possibly the coolest girl I've ever met.
Philip Andelman is a commercial and music video director living in Paris.
The night after I took the picture of the little kid with a toy gun (at right), I had dinner at the home of the mayor of the tiny town we were in (which was basically a 48-plus-hour car ride to the closest airport!) and I asked him "Why, in such a happy place, does every kid I've seen have a toy gun?" The mayor shrugged a universal what-can-you-do shrug and said something to the effect of "Kids... they love playing with guns."
There's something really amazing about going to these beautiful temples throughout the country and discovering that you are the only white person there. Sometimes you're the only person there, period! It makes for great picture-taking opportunities, as you can't believe how serene it is -- imagine Notre Dame being desolate. But then, you would go four days further into the countryside and suddenly two buses' worth of tourists would arrive, and you would then see these same tourists for the next three days everywhere you went. Fortunately this was sporadic, and most people travel in small parties of two to six, which makes it less offensive. The only way to travel in Bhutan is with a guide or a driver. It doesn't feel like North Korea or anything, but they are hyper-sensitive as to what they show you. You can't just point to a restaurant on the side of the road and be like, "Let's go there!" Most likely because the food is horrible and they don't want you to get sick. You wind up in places that do buf- fets that each of these two-to-six person parties hit up at some point during the day, and no matter what part of the country you are in, the menu is the exact same. I'm a bit of a food lover and I struggled hard over here. I can't really think of anything that was remotely tasty, mostly because I had the same meal for 10 days straight. And a rather shitty one at that.
There was this one time when I was walking along with our guide by this stream in a small town outside of Bumthang and we ran into a bunch of school kids. I started talking to them, mostly through the guide, and as we walked they started splintering off as they found their homes. We were left with these three girls, probably about 12 years old. One of them, Pem, had only seen one person from outside of Bhutan, a Japanese tourist, about two years before. Despite this, she seemed fairly nonchalant about meeting her first Westerner. She had a very "whatevs" attitude that was seriously cool. As we continued to stroll, she invited us to her home for tea. I met her whole family and they were so unbelievably kind. Pem's room consisted of a small cot on the floor, a little corner covered in posters of the King (whom every girl has a major crush on -- he's 30, went to Andover, plays a mean game of basketball and is basically their version of Robert Pattinson, except he's royalty, not a vampire), a TV that she grumbled wasn't working, and then five little toys perfectly arranged on a shelf. It was so sweet the way she had arranged them, so methodically and carefully. All I could think about was your average American kid's room, stuffed with so much shit you can't see the floor. I told her a bit about what I did and showed her the Beyoncé video I'd just directed on my iPhone. She looked at it for a few seconds and then got the tea prepared as she remarked, "Yeah, I saw that on TV a while ago" and gave a little shrug. When I asked her what she would want from the states, all she asked for was a print of the pics I shot of her. She was quite possibly the coolest girl I've ever met.
Philip Andelman is a commercial and music video director living in Paris.
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