A Short Trek in Bhutan's Wild East — Page 2
By Michael Buckley



We finally make it to a campground near Sakteng. I crawl into a sleeping bag rated to minus 5 Celsius, wearing every stitch of clothing I possess—and still chattering from the cold. I have strange dreams about Yetis.

Legend says Yetis smell horrible. The females have huge sagging breasts. If there is a shortage of females in the area, Yeti males sometimes kidnap human females. Yetis intent on killing apparently like to play with their food, rather like a cat with a mouse—given to tossing prey up in the air and batting it around. Some Tibetans explain frostbite as Yetis dining on choice bits like fingers and toes—and testicles. 

At dawn, I peer out of the tent, staring straight at our yaks, tied to pegs staked at the campsite. They seem to be dusted in frost—but not perturbed at all. Their great shaggy coats keep them toasty and warm. Near the campsite is a sign listing wildlife of the area: red pandas, red foxes, barking deer, and wild dogs. But we have seen none of these creatures. All we have seen is birds. Bhutan has over 650 species of birds. Nearby are half a dozen yellow-billed blue magpies—magnificent birds with long tails.

Yak

Sakteng Casts its Spell

Sakteng seems more modern and prosperous than Merak—more corrugated tin roofs replacing older stone or wooden shingles. We lodge in an ancient farmhouse that serves as guesthouse. The owner is the biggest entrepreneur in town. He runs horse caravans. He runs a shop. Out the back is his greenhouse—growing spinach, cabbage, green onions and radish. The owner’s wife multi-tasks, attending to several kids while spinning wool and cooking at the same time.

Across the way is the village school. We sit in the sunny porch of the farmhouse, holding court—and handing out storybooks and crayons to the school kids as gifts. They are initially shy, but once the ice is broken, they crowd around, curious, asking questions. Where are you from? What is your job? I explain that I am a writer. Then comes a question that floors me. How do you write a good story? I turn this one over for a few minutes, and offer my advice.

School kids

The Brokpa endure freezing winters, with lots of time to tell stories. They are followers of Tibetan Buddhism but also adhere to ancient animist beliefs. I find out from Pema that the Yeti is regarded as a mountain spirit—one that must be respected. Pema explains that the Yeti acts as a guardian, because of its perceived status as attendant to other deities. Such as Aum Jumo, the resident mountain goddess worshipped by the Brokpa. We get to see her in person—actually a small model replica mounted on top of a full yak-skin, which is propelled around by two nomads inside the skin. This is a yak-dance or Yak Cham, performed for villagers once a year so that the spirit can be appeased—or else storms, flooding and calamity will surely ensue. The dance is performed for us as a money-raiser. And three atsaras, or jokers, come forward encouraging tips. If you tip, they jump and down in a frenzy and hug you. Nothing like a cash transfusion.

Brokpa

As night falls, and the cold moves in with a vengeance, we gather round a cozy wood-fired stove in the old farmhouse, warming our hands and swapping tales. You might think you are safe from Yetis around the fire. But not so—they apparently love a good fire, and eating chocolate, just like the rest of us. And mouthfuls of garlic, and young bamboo shoots. That is what distinguishes them from other animals. Some Bhutanese tales are cooked up to frighten kids and get them in line. Hearing an odd howl outside is usually enough to creep kids out. But this comes from another highly elusive creature—it is the mating call of the snow leopard.

For background reading, I’ve brought along Bhutanese Tales of the Yeti, by Kunzang Choden, Bhutan’s leading folklorist. In this book, she identifies two kinds of mountain bipeds, separated by their altitude range. The first, known as the mirgola, is about a metre in height, with long arms, and said to be fond of mimicry. It lives in dense forests above 2,500 metres. The second is the migoi or gredpo, better known as the Abominable Snowman or Yeti, which ranges from 3,500 to over 5,000 meters—the exact range of yak pastures. The Yeti is large and hairy—said to be the size of one-and-a-half or two yaks.

How can such a huge hairy creature elude expedition attempts to capture it? In 1960, the late Sir Edmund Hillary mounted a full-scale expedition to find one. The expedition lasted ten months, at the end of which Hillary concluded that the Yeti was all fabrication, compounded by superstition—and that the myth had been enthusiastically embraced by Western expeditions. What he was probably referring to was British mountaineer Eric Shipton, who was fond of hoaxes, and given to planting giant footprints in the snow. Back in the 1980s, the world’s foremost climber Reinhold Messner claimed to have sighted the legendary Yeti while summiting. But he also acknowledged having hallucinations at extreme altitudes. In 2000, Messner mounted an expedition in Tibetan regions to find the Yeti, concluding that the creature was a Tibetan bear that whistled and smelled of garlic.

In 2009, Discovery Channel mounted an expedition to find the creature in Bhutan, dispatching an Oxford-trained evolutionary biologist, a primatologist, and a British technical whiz to keep all their gadgets in working order. The team had camera traps, video cameras, and plaster of Paris for casting footprints, jars for hair, scat or tissue samples from the Yeti. The team came back empty-handed, except for some dark strands of hair—for which the DNA could not be sequenced. And so the mystery endures.

bhutan hike

The Bhutanese explanation for the human-eluding Yetis is simple. According to Pema, Yetis are in the same class as gods and demons in Bhutan. They have superpowers beyond human comprehension: they can render themselves invisible, for instance. And the Brokpa believe that the creatures have backward-facing feet, which bamboozles humans attempting to follow footprints in the snow.

The more I listen to Pema, the more I realize that the best chance to see a Yeti is an encounter in another dimension. In dreams. In virtual reality. Or on celluloid. The description of the mirgola somewhat resembles the profile of Gollum, the hobbit in The Lord of the Rings. And the Yeti description roughly matches the profile for Chewbacca, the loveable Wookiee from Star Wars.

From Sakteng, there’s a tortuous trek up and down ravines, out to a farm-road, where our vehicle awaits. Then a tortuous drive over potholed tracks to the town of Tashigang. There I ease my weary limbs into a piping-hot traditional stone bath. And so ends this round of mythical beast tracking.

Himalayas


Michael Buckley's latest work is a photo-based multimedia book, Tibet, Disrupted, published in 2016and available on Apple's iBooks Store or iTunes Store. This is a visual companion to his print book, Meltdown in Tibet. See the author's website, www.MeltdowninTibet.com and www.FB.com/MeltdowninTibet for more details.

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Related Features:
Pondering Happiness in Bhutan by Laurie Gough
Sacred and Profane: Tantric Buddhism in the Land of the Thunder Dragon by Tony Robinson-Smith
Breakfast in Bhutan by Michael Buckley
Stranded on the Back Roads of Tibetan Sichuan by Marco Ferrarese


See other Asia travel stories from the archives


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