Ever present in my mind is The List: the countries I still haven’t gone to that I most want to visit.
Ethiopia is on The List. So is Indonesia. And South Korea. And Madagascar. And Taiwan.
Early on, my wife and I pledged to visit two new countries every year, and we mostly pulled it off. Then came Covid, followed by two babies, and we fell off the wagon.
This year we remembered that we were gonna die at some point and decided it was time to get things going again. We dusted off The List, picked a country that’s been at the very top for years, tossed the kids to the grandparents for a week, and headed off to Bhutan.1
Bhutan, if you’re not familiar, is a tiny 800,000-person country squashed between two behemoths.
Bhutan was unified in the 17th century after millennia of existing as a collection of warring tribes. In the time since then, it has somehow avoided being annexed by China or India. Today, it is the world’s last Buddhist kingdom, and I can confirm that it is both very Buddhist and very kingdom-y. Temples are everywhere, and the people are highly superstitious—our tour guide seemed to constantly be remarking about good luck and bad luck, promising omens and inauspicious riverbends. (The temples are beautiful, but so are all the other buildings. All architecture in the country, from the airport to the shopping centers, has a uniform Bhutanese style.)
The king is universally beloved and, at least the way they tell it, an exemplary ruler. A typical story we heard: 50,000 people work in the country’s tourist industry, all of whom were suddenly out of work during Covid. So the king gave these families $120/month, enough to get by on until the industry came back. He paid this out of his own pocket, nearly to the point of personal bankruptcy.
(Of course, I was also told in North Korea that it was only by the grace and courage of their magnanimous leaders that the people were prosperous and free, unlike their unfortunate South Korean cousins suffering under American occupation. But the situations are wildly different and I am inclined to mostly believe what I heard in Bhutan.)
One more story to illustrate what a sweetie Bhutan is: The country has a strict policy against killing animals and never euthanizes stray dogs, so there are a lot of them. They mostly live off the detritus of restaurants and hotels. When everything shut down during Covid, the king told people to bring cooked food out to the dogs and even wrap them in blankets during the cold months.
Bhutan does things differently than other countries. Hellbent on preserving their traditional way of life, TV and internet were banned in the country until 1999, and if it weren’t for the cars, I might have been convinced I had taken a time machine back to the 1600s. Tourism is limited, only possible in the form of a guided tour, and immigrating to the country is near impossible. They are so diligent about conservation that Bhutan is the world’s one carbon-negative country—their vast forests absorb more CO2 than their populace emits.
In 1972, Bhutan’s king decided that Gross National Happiness was a more important metric than Gross Domestic Product, and their policies cater to this value.2 It’s why Bhutan is famous for supposedly being the world’s happiest country, which I had no way to verify, but the people were very kind and seemed pretty happy I guess?
Sadly, Bhutan’s way of life is threatened now as many of its young people have left to find opportunity elsewhere. The king is attempting to fix this with plans to construct Gelephu Mindfulness City, an economic hub which will center around innovation, while preserving Bhutanese tradition. It looks like it’ll be incredible, though I was told not to hold my breath as it will probably not be finished for 20 more years.
All of this is to say that Bhutan is a special place—remote, mysterious, and breathtakingly beautiful. Which is why it was always prominently on The List.
A trip to Bhutan is better shown than told, so I kept most of the details to this video:
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More posts from The List:
Siberia
Tokyo
Nigeria
Iraq
Greenland
North Korea
And The genie question
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