Bhutan.....

The only place in the world Britney Spears might not be recognised.
Where am I talking about?

Is there even such a magical land?

Where Perez Hilton could be a brand name and the word ‘gossip’ has yet to be translated?

Well there was such a place.

Bhutan is an idyllic Buddhist country, tucked high up in the Himalayas near Nepal and India. This breath taking country features amazing rocky cliffs, magnificent Buddhist temples and some of the most interesting political policies in the world.

But the most shocking part – especially for all you Foxtel IQ’ers and Twitters (which I must admit I’m guilty of now as well) – is that they didn’t get television and the internet till 1999.

Think back 10 years ago – I can never remember a time where we didn’t have TV, my parents can hardly remember a time when there was no TV. So what would it be like if you were bombarded by TV and the internet now? Having never had it?

Pretty shocking I reckon. Comparable to the feeling you get when putting about ten Listerine strips in your mouth at once. Actually no, probably worse.

Now spare a thought for the Bhutanese. Many of them had never seen white skin before. Travel into the country was previously only done by mule and tourists paid around US$200 per day to stay there. This was a policy to discourage foreigners, in order to maintain the country’s pure Buddhist essence.

But the King of Bhutan thought - stuff all that pure thinking and he flooded his country with The Simpsons, Paris Hilton and inevitably, the vicious consumerist western lifestyle. (But it was probably going to happen someday...Mr Microsoft made sure that no one could get away from his ‘globalisation’ anyway.)

Like it or not the developed countries seem to be quite narrow minded in their thinking i.e. this global sense of interconnection has been great for us so it will be great for everyone else. But you’ve got to stop and think – Bhutan doesn’t even have proper roads, it’s guided by the philosophy of GNH (Gross National Happiness – yeah I know flowers and rainbows anyone?) instead of GDP like every one nation.

So the western world hit Bhutan like Lily Allen’s drunken punch to a photographer – in a rather messy and disorganised way. Pre 1999 there were fields of marijuana growing rampant in Bhutan and it was treated like a weed (and no not in the way we call it a ‘weed.’) But when the Bhutanese started watching crappy American movies like “How High” – they discovered there were plenty of other uses for this ‘weed.’

Teenagers girls started wishing they had whiter skin – I totally wish we could do some sort of swapsies, the amount of money we waste on spray tans and solariums. And they wanted to wear jeans instead of their traditional ghos. There had never been any cases of violence and men started beating their wives, one man even murdered his wife and his defence was “because I could.” The Bhutanese people didn’t know how to deal with this outbreak, although the country had seen fighting in its past, it was basically peaceful. People started to get unhappy and unsettled with their lives, there was a massive sense of unrest, something which the country hadn’t seen in its 200 years of existence.

The country has developed more regimented systems – they now act as constitutional monarchy like the UK for example, as opposed to an absolute monarchy – where the King/Queen have most of the power. They have a democratic system and their first elections were in 2007. They also have a judicial court of law and an army.

I think why I find it so fascinating though is because this is somewhere which hadn’t been fully infiltrated by Western culture and because of this, when western culture was introduced you can see it’s infectious effect and how damaging it can be.

But I don’t want to have a rant about the western lifestyle, because I live in it, I’m a part of it - hey I’m creating it and fuelling it by writing this blog and rambling out Lilly, Paris and Britney.

I guess the comforting thought is that we know we can go somewhere that’s a bit secluded from our go, go, go lifestyle.

This website is an Australia couple who live in Bhutan and do tours of the country http://oursecretbhutan.com.au

I think it’d be so interesting to go there – but you never know, the teenage girls might try and steal our ‘white body paint.’



This is probably the clostest I got to Bhutanese monks - Thai monks!