Travel Travails
An irreplaceable part of boyhood memory so intrinsic to my upbringing and growth is that of travel, and the trials and tribulations thereof. Coming from a farming stock in a far-flung village clearly meant extensive travel, and therefore the inevitable exposure to the accompaniments of a journey by motor road that was yet to acquire the creature comforts of a drive we enjoy today. Those episodes of journey by bus and later by train formed a cornucopia of human elements, of joy and exuberances, of success and failure, and of high emotions of suffering and pain: all in equal measure.
My earliest memory of a motor road journey is definitely that of my maiden trip to the capital city. This arduous drive in the snowy winter of 1984 in a humongous four-wheel drive Tata truck took a good two days from Bumthang. That we had to be trans-shifted into an open-door Mahindra jeep-so much in vogue those days, plodding in near knee-deep snow at the Dochula pass, made this inaugural trip all the more memorable. I was all of six years, but still recall the descent down the pass, whizzing along the narrow road with hazy white surrounds on both sides, and clutching tightly at the helms of my aunt’s tego in a desperate attempt to stop myself from flying off the open door of the speeding jeep.
From then on it was a regular annual feature. At the end of each academic year I would be escorted to my village for winter holidays. The onus would usually be on my maternal uncle who would time his annual visits from South India to coincide with my school holidays so that he could be the dutiful chaperone. The only public transport that existed along this route then was the mail bus. It was a Tata. I saw it as another huge vehicle, and its coat of blazing red paint only lent it an added air of monstrosity. But lumbering along that narrow highway it dutifully ferried me and a hundred others for six years before my stint in Thimphu came to an abrupt end, and I had to move back to the place of my birth.
Though travel always provides one with a mélange of different experience, much of my earlier in-country travel experience was that of periodic bouts of melancholia. It was of happy breaks coming to unhappy ends, and of sickening feelings of a voyage that was often beset with grim probabilities. It was of leaving the comforts of familiar climes, an ache of which was compounded by the fear of the unknown and uncharted. It was about the weights of bounden obligations and of unflinching dreams and aspirations. And it was about being thrust into having a ringside view of the often varied and colorful tapestry of human character and behavior.
My mental state or emotional affection on those journeys often bespoke of the immediate situation under which the trips were being undertaken. Low-spirit and unsettledness draped in wistful expectations always marked those doleful trips away from home as a school kid. A homecoming was always about unmistaken enthusiasm and eagerness, and college trips were more of exuberance and spunk that bore the stamp of a confidence growing within. Likewise trips made on holidays were invariably marked with a certain sense of lightness and gay abandon, defining a spirit that was at its most hearty.
Those journeys formed a supplementary text book on human character and conduct. A demonstration of folk wit and no-holds-barred humor by rural elders were a routine fare almost as much as the certainty of a free show of unabashed banter with the opposite sexes. Given my age I was none the wiser, and those typically feisty exchanges, laced with sexual innuendoes flew past me without much registration. Nevertheless, it always provided me a much needed reprieve and for a moment I would lose myself in childlike awe. Unless one was amongst the elite few, everybody travelled by bus then and hence the diverse mix of travelers making for a colourful and an almost heady experience.
As I finished junior high in the mid-nineties there was a gradual but apparent transition. The old huge buses were slowly being replaced by a fleet of smaller, agile and technically superior ones. It was also around this time that we saw a whole new crop of crass handy boys and daring drivers at the helm of our journeys and with road safety regulations being still in its infancy, those naïve trips of yesteryears soon began to take on a more foreboding and a disconcerting appearance. Crude jokes and explicit remarks targeting young women travelers by brazen handy boys would go on ad infinitum, often with the drivers joining in the fun. Incessant wails of children and futile moans of cramped passengers in a bus filled far beyond and above its carrying capacity were a common feature, not to mention the piercing stench of puke and the sight of hapless people spewing it out! We were all mute witness to these. It was a time when drivers and their henchmen were a revered lot, and their freewheeling ways were rarely questioned. As a high school boy, I knew it well within myself how good it was in my own personal interest to not to attempt and dispense my own theory of morality. Like my fellow travelers, I was just a mere cog in the wheel and therefore we would invariably suffer those insolent audacities.
Travel episodes also thrust us into the unpredictable but irrefutable certainty of pain and suffering. I recall with much angst the hundreds of lives lost over the decades on those trips. Even painful is the recollection that some of them were familiar friends whose brimming lives were cut short in just one fell stroke of fate. Worse still, there are families who have lost more than two of its members in a single such mishap. There are then scores of others who have been physically maimed and mentally scarred for the remainder of their lives. I have been fortunate enough not to have been witness to any of these sad tragedies, but I have had near misses of my own a couple of times as a student. But as with any other aspects of life, one could only acknowledge them as travel hazards and move on.
The last time I took a bus ride was back in December 2003 on my return from my undergraduate studies. Those huge, sluggish and rickety buses have given way to their smaller, nimbler and cozier avatars including slick Toyota coasters along most routes. Road infrastructures have had a facelift since then. Road safety is coming of age. All these now contribute to making a bus journey much enjoyable and safer. Further, the upward mobility of most Bhutanese of our generation enthused by economic stability and fanned by access to easy finances has sprouted a whole cavalcade of private motorist on the road. Bus journeys are now mostly exclusive to students, the rural folks and some select individuals on unforeseen errands.
As I now ply these same routes in my car it often takes an effort to hold back that twinge of nostalgia and before long I find emotions gently evoked. My experiences as a traveler on those trips were a varied one, and unfortunately despair and gloom formed a large part of it. However, I look back to see in them a part of my life and the journey thus far. I discover in them an inexplicable sense of romanticism and a strange unfading allure. It was not for nothing that someone said, “Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.”
