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A cyclist riding the highland trails near Thimphu, Bhutan, 2014.
In Bhutan, there is a king who rides a bicycle up and down the mountains. Like many stories that are told in this tiny nation, tucked in among the southern slopes of the eastern Himalayas, it sounds like a fairy tale. But it is hard news. Jigme Singye Wangchuck, Bhutan’s fourth druk gyalpo, or “dragon king,” is an avid cyclist who can often be found pedaling trails in the steep foothills that ring the capital city, Thimphu. Everyone in Bhutan knows about the king’s passion for cycling, to which he has increasingly devoted his spare time since December 2006, when he abdicated, relinquishing the crown to his eldest son. In Thimphu, many will tell you about close encounters or near misses—the time they spotted the king, or someone who looked quite like him, on an early-morning ride, churning uphill or darting out of a fog bank on the road near the Great Buddha Dordenma, the enormous statue that looms over the southern approach to the capital.
The statue, which is gilded and nearly two hundred feet tall, was built to commemorate the king’s sixtieth birthday. He is beloved in Bhutan, perhaps the most revered figure in the country’s history, with a biography that has the flavor of myth. He became head of state in 1972, when he was just sixteen years old, following the death of his father, Jigme Dorji Wangchuck. Two years later, he formally ascended to the throne. It was a heady moment in Bhutanese history. For millennia, Bhutan had been isolated: a land of devout Buddhism and pristine natural beauty cradled by the Himalayas, which served as a bulwark against both military aggressors and modernity. It was only in the late 1950s that the country opened to the outside world, abolishing serfdom and slavery and undertaking the difficult task of reconciling its medieval infrastructure, politics, and culture to twentieth-century life. Now the burden of that transformation fell on the shoulders of the teenage king. Under his leadership, electricity and modern medical care reached Bhutan’s hinterlands. The country harnessed the potential of its many fast-flowing rivers to establish a hydropower industry, and navigated the perilous geopolitics that come with its geography. Bhutan is tiny, landlocked, and wedged between giants. There are just eight hundred thousand Bhutanese citizens; the country is bordered by the two most populous nations on earth, China and India. In 2006, the king shocked his subjects by unilaterally ending Bhutan’s absolute monarchy. He led an effort to draft a constitution and institute democracy. In 2008, the country held its first general election.
Outside Bhutan, the fourth king is best known for his contribution to what might be called political philosophy. It was he, the story goes, who formulated the concept of Gross National Happiness, Bhutan’s “guiding directive for development,” an ethos of holistic civic contentment based on principles of good governance, environmental conservation, and the preservation of traditional culture. Gross National Happiness, or GNH, has made Bhutan a fashionable name to drop in international development circles and a tourist destination for well-heeled, usually Western, New Age seekers.
Somewhere along the way, the king took up cycling. It is rumored that he learned to ride when he attended boarding school in Darjeeling, about seventy-five miles from Bhutan’s western border. His education continued in England, at the Heatherdown School, in Berkshire, whose stately campus was crisscrossed by pupils on bikes, commuting between dormitories, classrooms, and cricket greens. Eventually, the Bhutanese royal family imported a bicycle to Bhutan. According to one story, it was a Raleigh racing bike, manufactured in Hong Kong, which arrived in parts and was assembled “upside down” by servants. The defect was spotted by Fritz Mauer, a Swiss friend of the royal family, who personally rebuilt the bike. The now-functional bicycle became a favorite possession of the young crown prince, who often took cycling trips in the dense forests abutting various royal family residences. He became famous—infamous, in the circles of nervous courtiers—for riding “along mud trails at perilous speed.”
The royal family’s bicycle was possibly the first bike in Bhutan, and Bhutan may well have been the last place on earth the bicycle reached. Prior to 1962, the country had no paved roads. Today, Bhutan remains, by the usual standards, inhospitable to cycling. It is, almost certainly, the world’s most mountainous nation. The average elevation in Bhutan is 10,760 feet. According to one study, 98.8 percent of the country is covered by mountains. Its roads twist through daunting climbs and hairy descents. Its rugged off-road trails, mottled with rocks and caked in mud, pose a challenge to the sturdiest bicycle tires and suspension systems.
Yet today there are thousands of bicycles in Bhutan, and the number is growing. In Thimphu, a city of about one hundred thousand with no traffic lights, bikes scramble up the hilly streets, navigating the one major intersection, where smartly dressed police officers direct traffic from an ornate gazebo that stands in the center of a roundabout. Meanwhile, government officials are increasingly voicing the aim “to make Bhutan a bicycling culture.” The idea is not altogether surprising, given Bhutan’s commitment to environmentalism and sustainability. Still, the idea of a “bicycling culture” taking root in the Himalayas is by definition eccentric. It is no coincidence that the societies that have most successfully integrated cycling into civic life are in northern Europe, where the countries are, as the saying goes, low.
The cycling fad in Bhutan is also noteworthy because the story begins with a king and his bike. We know this is not unprecedented: if we riffle the pages of history, we find various places in which bicycles first reached sovereigns and the sovereign-adjacent. But in the twenty-first century, at least, cycling fever does not typically spread from palaces to the people. “There is a reason we in Bhutan like to cycle,” says Tshering Tobgay, who served as Bhutan’s prime minister for five years, from 2013 to 2018. “His Majesty the fourth king has been a cyclist, and after his abdication, he cycles a lot more. People love to see him cycle. And because he cycles, everybody in Bhutan wants to cycle, too.”
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Each year, Bhutan holds a kind of national bicycle holiday, a celebration of the unique pleasures and rigors of Himalayan cycling. The Tour of the Dragon is a 166.5-mile road race that stretches from Bumthang, in central Bhutan, to Thimphu, about sixty-five miles from the country’s western border. It is a spectacular journey, following a route through unspoiled forests and fields, across rolling river valleys, and, of course, up and over the great big hills, touching a few tiny villages along the way. The ride is absurdly strenuous. Cyclists must tackle four mountain passes, which range in height from just under four thousand feet to nearly eleven thousand feet. In places, the road grade reaches 15 percent, and one uphill climb stretches on for nearly twenty-four miles. Tour organizers boast that it is the most difficult one-day bicycle race on earth.
The year I visited, the race was held on a Saturday in early September, at the tail end of Bhutan’s three-month-long monsoon season. In the morning, in Thimphu’s Clock Tower Square, a central gathering place in the city’s downtown, builders were assembling a stage for the presentation of medals. The sky was cloudy, but no rain was forecast: good cycling weather. Nearby, workers for the Bhutan Olympic Committee, which oversees the race, milled around the finish line, wearing orange uniforms with matching baseball caps. Several workers had pin-back buttons with photos of a dashing couple: Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, the current Bhutanese king, and the queen, Jetsun Pema. Like his father, the king is a passionate cyclist. In the weeks prior to his coronation in November 2008, he journeyed across Bhutan to “meet his people.” He made much of the trip by bicycle, occasionally staying overnight in the homes of locals. The king is known to take his bike out for spins in Thimphu. He has been photographed pedaling a tandem with his wife on roads adjacent to the royal palace.
It was eleven a.m. A banner posted in Clock Tower Square read, excellence through sports for all. At the rear of the big stage was a larger sign. It showed a silhouetted cyclist hunched over handlebars, riding in the slipstream of a fiery red dragon. The Bhutanese name for the nation is Druk yul—druk means “thunder dragon,” and yul means “land.” The national anthem, “The Thunder Dragon Kingdom,” has a searching melody based on an old folk song, but the lyrics are emphatic and grandiose:
In the Drukpa Kingdom of Dharma sovereign
The teachings of enlightenment flourish
Suffering, famine, and conflicts disappear
May the sun of peace and happiness shine forth!
The sun did shine on race day, breaking through the scattered cloud cover around noon. A short while later, the first cyclist showed up in Thimphu: a short, slight man perched on a mountain bike spattered with mud. His bright-hued Lycra shirt and shorts were emblazoned with the word “nepal.” It was Ajay Pandit Chhetri, the five-time Nepalese national racing champion, who was riding in the Tour of the Dragon for the first time. He broke the finish-line tape ten hours, forty-two minutes, and forty-nine seconds after the race’s two a.m. start time, besting the previous record by seventeen minutes.
The Tour of the Dragon is not quite the Tour de France. That day, just forty-six riders, mostly amateurs, took part. Only twenty-two racers made it to the end, most of them straggling in hours after the winner. One of the most vigorous riders was an unofficial participant, a man often referred to in Bhutan by the nickname “H.R.H.”: His Royal Highness Prince Jigyel Ugyen Wangchuck, the crown prince and heir presumptive to the Bhutanese throne. The prince is the president of the Bhutan Olympic Committee, and the Tour of the Dragon is his brainchild. He spent several hours that day on his bike, pedaling alongside the racers, offering pep talks, tracing and retracing his path along the mountain passes. Eventually, he jumped off his bike and got into a chauffeured car, speeding ahead of the pack so he could greet the winner in Thimphu.
In the evening, the Tour of the Dragon racers assembled in a tent facing the stage in Clock Tower Square, before a crowd of a few thousand that had gathered to watch the medal presentations. The riders made their way to the dais, where they were congratulated by the crown prince and other dignitaries. When the ceremony was over, I caught up with Chhetri, the race winner. Did he plan to return to Bhutan the following year to defend his title? Chhetri said he wasn’t sure yet. How did the Tour of the Dragon’s course compare with those of other races in which he’d competed? The mountain passes were challenging but the scenery was beautiful, he said. Chhetri wore a big smile and spoke with the studied smoothness of a man who had fielded questions from journalists before and knew how to say very little, even when holding forth at length. His main agenda, evidently, was to express gratitude to the host nation, and his words seemed tailored to the land of GNH. “I’m just so happy,” he kept saying. “I’m so happy that I was able to come to Bhutan.”
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The subject of Gross National Happiness comes up often in Bhutan. GNH is both an emblem and a conundrum—a point of pride but also a subject of disquisition, debate, and confusion. Many in Bhutan find it hard to articulate exactly what GNH is. Many contend that the concept is misunderstood. Some observers of Bhutanese politics suggest that GNH is not so much profound as it is nebulous—less a philosophy than a brand or a slogan, vague enough to appeal to all comers, notably tourists with excitable Orientalist imaginations and ample spending money.
Kinley Dorji is one of the people most often asked to explain GNH. For years he worked as a journalist—he is the former editor-in-chief of Kuensel, Bhutan’s national newspaper—and there is still a hint of ink-stained wretch in his gruff manner. But by the time I met with him, he had moved on to a different job, as the head of Bhutan’s Ministry of Information and Communications, working out of a pleasant office in a Thimphu compound that houses many government ministries. “Here is the key point on GNH,” he said. “Happiness itself is an individual pursuit. Gross National Happiness then becomes a responsibility of the state, to create an environment where citizens can pursue happiness. It’s not a promise of happiness—it’s not a guarantee of happiness by the government. But there is a responsibility to create the conditions for happiness.”
Dorji said: “When we say ‘happiness,’ we have to be very clear that it’s not fun, pleasure, thrills, excitement, all the temporary fleeting senses. It is permanent contentment. That lies within the self. Because the bigger house, the faster car, the nicer clothes—they don’t give you that contentment. GNH means good governance. GNH means preservation of traditional culture. And it means sustainable socioeconomic development. Remember that GNH is a pun on GDP, gross domestic product. We are making a distinction.”
To visitors from practically anywhere else on earth, Bhutan presents itself as a startlingly different place. It’s a country of shocking beauty: soaring peaks, verdant valleys, centuries-old rope bridges that stretch across white-water rapids. There are monasteries nestled on clifftops. The terminal at Paro International Airport resembles a monastery, as does Changlimithang Stadium, a forty-five-thousand-capacity arena in Thimphu that hosts soccer matches and archery tournaments.
Bhutan is the only nation whose state religion is Vajrayana Buddhism. Its official language, Dzongkha, is spoken in no other country. Television and the internet arrived in 1999, but Bhutan’s embrace of twenty-first-century life remains tentative and ambivalent. The law mandates that all buildings be constructed using “classical” Bhutanese designs and methods. Government workers and schoolchildren are required to wear traditional dress, the kimonolike garments called gho (for men and boys) and kira (for women and girls). Bhutan’s success in combating the Covid-19 pandemic—only three Covid deaths, through the end of 2021—has been ascribed to geography and topography: the Himalayas are great social distancers. But the efficiency with which the government vaccinated nearly the entire adult population underscores another kind of Bhutanese exceptionalism, the bureaucratic competency and social cohesion that shield a small developing nation from the pathogens, and the pathologies, plaguing the theoretically more sophisticated wider world.
The most exceptional thing about Bhutan is the land itself. A majority of Bhutan’s citizens still live off the land, practicing subsistence agriculture and animal husbandry. The country’s tropical lowlands, pine forests, and alpine heights are bastions of biodiversity, populated by creatures found in few other places on the planet: the clouded leopard, the one-horned rhinoceros, the red panda, the sloth bear, the serow, and Bhutan’s national animal, a stocky ungulate called the takin, which looks a bit like a goat that’s been doing a lot of barbell work at the gym.
The preservation of these ecosystems is a top priority in Bhutan, which has been called “the world’s greenest nation.” Almost all of Bhutan’s electricity comes from hydropower. Bhutan’s constitution mandates that 60 percent of its land remain under forest cover; currently, forests cover nearly three-quarters of the country’s approximately fifteen thousand square miles. All those trees have helped to make Bhutan a carbon sink: it absorbs three times as much CO2 as it emits, and is one of only two carbon-negative nations. (The other is Suriname.) An additional 4.4 million tons of annual CO2 emissions are offset by hydroelectricity exports, mostly to India, and Bhutan projects that the figure will rise to more than 22 million tons by the year 2025. The government has set ambitious goals for further progress. By 2030, Bhutan intends to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions and produce zero waste. By 2035, 100 percent of Bhutan’s agriculture will be organic.
All of this has earned Bhutan a reputation as an earthly paradise, the last unsullied place. (The New York Times has called Bhutan “the real Shangri-La.”) Bhutanese officials dismiss this notion—yet they trade on it. Once, Bhutan admitted only twenty-five hundred tourists each year; today the number has swollen to one hundred thousand, with luxury resorts springing up in remote regions to lure eco-tourists. Bhutan’s official tourist slogan makes a bald appeal to the Eat, Pray, Love crowd: “Happiness is a place.”
The realities of Bhutan are, of course, more complicated. On the streets of Thimphu, there are drug rehabilitation clinics and pizza joints, and when children get out of school, they discard their ghos and kiras for hoodies and skinny jeans. In 2020, the Bhutanese parliament passed a bill that decriminalized homosexuality, but gay, lesbian, and transgender Bhutanese are still stigmatized and subject to widespread prejudice. Gender equality is a work in progress. Few of the country’s elected officials are women. A 2017 study found that more than 40 percent of Bhutanese women surveyed had experienced physical or sexual partner violence and never told anyone or reported the incident.
Gross National Happiness itself is entangled with troubling history. According to the official narrative promoted by the government, GNH has been national policy since the 1970s. But the scholar Lauchlan T. Munro has argued that GNH is an “invented tradition” that originated with a quip by the fourth king in a 1980 New York Times interview, and was only elevated to the status of “organizing ideology of the Bhutanese state” years later.
This change, Munro says, was part of a “skillful and hard-nosed” response by the Royal Government of Bhutan (RGOB) to a series of domestic and geopolitical crises in the 1980s and early ’90s. During that period, a wave of Buddhist nationalism arose in Bhutan in reaction to the country’s rapid modernization and opening to the outside world. In an effort to appease traditionalists, and to address the social fracturing brought on by Bhutanese youth’s embrace of Western values and popular culture, the government began pushing a slew of new laws and reforms under the rubric “One Nation, One People.” These included the institution of a national dress and behavior code based on Bhutanese and Buddhist norms. At the same time, the RGOB enacted draconian measures against the population it refers to as Lhotshampa (“people from the south”), a mostly Hindu, Nepali-speaking minority in southern Bhutan. The government banned the use of Nepali in schools, forced the Lhotshampa to wear traditional Buddhist Bhutanese clothing, and conducted a census that was designed, critics assert, to delegitimize a population that had lived in Bhutan for centuries, designating thousands of Nepali Bhutanese as “migrant laborers” and illegal immigrants. According to one human rights report, “thousands of Nepali-Bhutanese were arrested, killed, tortured and given life sentences” during this period. In 1990–91, Bhutan’s army expelled an estimated one hundred thousand Nepali-speaking citizens, forcing them into refugee camps in eastern Nepal. Human Rights Watch has deemed these expulsions “ethnic cleansing”; Bhutan has been called the “world’s biggest creator of refugees by per capita.”
It was in the aftermath of these events that Bhutan began touting Gross National Happiness as its official doctrine, promoting “the image of a small, landlocked, plucky country” following an “alternative path to development based on happiness, not material consumption.” It’s clear that Bhutan’s commitment to sustainable development is profound and unique; it’s clear that the antimaterialist ideals of GNH are deeply held by many in Bhutan. But it is also true that GNH has functioned as propaganda, giving a gauzy New Age spin to a policy of ethno-religious nationalism. In Bhutan as elsewhere, happiness is a goal, an ideal. A place? Perhaps not.
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A place where you can reliably find happiness—or, at least, boisterous high spirits—is a residential section of Thimphu, northwest of the city center, where children gather to play on the hilly backstreets. No one is quite sure who created the pastime that youngsters in Thimphu call “bearing.” The name derives from the metal roller bearings that are attached to a wooden plank to create a vehicle, of a sort: a rudimentary conveyance that combines elements of skateboard, furniture dolly, go-kart, and sled. Some variations have a single wheel in the front and a pair of wheels on an axle in the rear; others have four wheels. There is also a wooden hand brake, nailed to the main plank. They are homely machines, but they serve their purpose. A kid can march up the steep roads of the city, crouch on the plank, and go zipping downhill.
As a child growing up in Thimphu, Sonam Tshering would go out in the evenings to play bearing with his friends. It was fun, and treacherous, and the vaguely illicit nature of the activity enhanced the excitement. As you barreled downhill, the scraping metal wheels would throw sparks into the night sky—a fireworks show that accompanied your headlong journey. Sonam learned to work the hand brake to vary the pace of his descent, but he preferred to move fast. He loved the speed and the danger, the feeling of the cool air rushing over his body, and the sound of the roller bearings shrieking across the pavement. “I have always been very much attracted to wheels,” he says.
He was born in Thimphu in 1988, the sixth of eight children in a devoutly Buddhist family. When he was a young child, Sonam imagined that he would grow up to be a monk. (A family friend, an astrologer, told Sonam that he was drawn to the monastic discipline because he had been a monk in a previous life.) As he reached his teens, more worldly interests took hold. He studied geography at Royal Thimphu College. When he graduated, he took a civil service exam and landed a clerk’s job in a government office in Thimphu.
It was an outcome that pleased Sonam Tshering’s father, who had worked for the government as a tax collector. But for Tshering, the allure of wheels would prove decisive. He had learned to ride a bicycle as a child, knocking around Thimphu a bit on bikes borrowed from neighbors. Shortly after his graduation from college, in 2010, a friend told Tshering that the Bhutan Olympic Committee was sponsoring a day-long bike race from central Bhutan to Thimphu. This was the inaugural Tour of the Dragon—not a race, per se, but a trial run to assess the feasibility of staging a competitive event. The Olympic Committee had provided five bicycles to be used by young Bhutanese interested in cycling, and one bike was still up for grabs.
Tshering’s brother-in-law, a Bhutanese national raised in Germany, was a serious mountain cyclist. He had taught Tshering a thing or two about bicycles, including the basics of maintenance and repair. But Tshering had never cycled in the mountains, and he had never ridden a bicycle with gears. He was given a Trek mountain bike, a jersey, cycling shorts, and sunglasses. He received two days of training in Thimphu. On a Friday in September, Tshering was driven to the town of Jakar, in Bumthang, a district of lush mountain valleys in north-central Bhutan. The following morning, at two a.m., Tshering and a couple dozen other participants gathered on a mud road and set out on the ride.
The sky was black, the air was cold, and the terrain was forbidding. The riders followed a winding river road for about a mile before heading uphill, embarking on a nearly four-mile climb through soupy fog to the Kiki La Pass, at an elevation of ninety-five hundred feet. The bikes issued to Tshering and the other riders had reflectors but lacked proper headlights. The cyclists had been given cheap Indian-made LED bike lights, which they’d taped to their handlebars. The tape didn’t always do the job: one of Tshering’s fellow cyclists had to hold his light between his teeth for the length of the arduous climb to Kiki La. As the riders rode back down the pass, winding through the vaporous blackness around tight switchbacks, the flickering LED lights reminded Tshering of the sparks kicked up by roller bearings on the hills of Thimphu.
In that first Tour of the Dragon, Tshering gave out after 112 miles. But he was hooked. The Olympic Committee allowed the riders to keep their donated bikes, and Tshering spent the following year training and educating himself, learning about seat positioning, gearing strategies, and other technical aspects of mountain biking, while building up his speed and stamina. In 2011, Tshering again entered the Tour of the Dragon. This time, he won.
A few weeks before his civil service job was slated to begin, Sonam’s brother-in-law came to him with a proposal. The brother-in-law had developed a relationship with a French bicycle company and had decided to open a bicycle dealership in Thimphu, stocked with French bikes and mountain cycling gear. Did Sonam want to run the shop?
It was an easy decision. Wheels for Hills was the second bike store in Bhutan. When he wasn’t minding the shop, Tshering was out on his bike. He competed in international events, including several races across the border in India. He traveled to the United States to take part in the 24 Hours of Moab, a major mountain biking event held each autumn in the Utah desert.
I met Tshering early one evening at a spot well known to Thimphu’s cyclists, a high mountain road dotted with fluttering Buddhist prayer flags on the city’s southern side. Tshering had his bicycle in tow: a Commencal Meta SX, a spiffy French mountain bike with twenty-six-inch wheels and a hot pink aluminum frame. He was wearing a black T-shirt and fluorescent yellow shorts. On his lower left leg there was a tattoo of a grinning skeleton on a bicycle.
Tshering is one of the Bhutan cycling scene’s favorite sons. After his Tour of the Dragon victory in 2011, he was invited to ride with the prince, H.R.H. “The moment I entered the palace gate,” Tshering said, “I prayed from inside: ‘Let not this be my last time here.’ ” That winter, Tshering spent two weeks with the royal family at their vacation compound in Manas, in southern Bhutan. There, he met another mountain biking adept: His Majesty the fourth king, who Tshering, like many in Bhutan, often refers to by the nickname K4. Tshering told me that the rumors were true: K4 always wears his gho when he rides, and he is an exceptionally strong cyclist. “He is one of the toughest riders in Bhutan I’ve ever met,” Tshering said. “He’s not a very technical rider, and downhill isn’t his specialty. But climbing uphill—I don’t think anyone can top him.”
Tshering has never entertained the belief that he can be a top international racer. His goals are more modest and community-minded. He coaches a local cycling club whose dozen riders range in age from ten to nineteen. He envisions a time when the club will have a state-of-the-art training facility and can compete at the international level. As for his own cycling: he finds the kind of fulfillment on a bike that you might expect of an erstwhile aspiring monk. “The feeling that you get when you’re riding on the trail, alone in nature, surrounded by all those nature sounds, it is one of the greatest feelings you can ever have,” Tshering said. “My happiness—my own personal GNH—is the mountain bike and the forest.”
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Tshering is not the only person who links cycling to Gross National Happiness. One day I met with Tshering Tobgay, the former prime minister, who is now Bhutan’s most prominent international advocate for environmental and sustainability issues. He is also a cyclist who has raced in the Tour of the Dragon. “GNH is about wholesome development,” Tobgay told me. “And cycling is about wholesome development. You cannot love cycling and not be an environmentalist. It is one of the reasons we must encourage more cycling in Bhutan.”
We are used to hearing such talk from bicycle activists in the traffic-shackled metropolises of the West. It is odder to find the same ideas circulating in the world’s most pastoral and environmentally progressive nation. Yet if you gaze down on Thimphu from the mountain roads where Sonam Tshering, the fourth king, and other cyclists like to ride, you take in a familiar spectacle: a landscape steadily being mutated by car culture and urban sprawl. Thimphu’s population has more than doubled in a generation. Everywhere you look, there are automobiles chugging up newly constructed roads and buildings rising behind bamboo scaffolding on land that, a few years ago, was a vast rice paddy, stalked by peasants and livestock.
But Bhutan’s bike boom is also based on a primal impulse, one we can trace through history, long before the automotive age. It is the desire that has compelled riders to meet the stiffest cycling challenge there is. Before mountain bikes hit the market with their fine engineering and gear ratios tailored to both grueling climbs and rapid descents; before the Repack racers souped up their old Schwinns and rode the slopes of Tamalpais; all the way back into the depths of the nineteenth century, when the bicycle was a novel and, in relative terms, primitive contraption—from the start, there have been cyclists who’ve had the urge to push their two wheels skyward, up and over the peaks that tilt toward the heavens.
The American author and adventurer Elizabeth Robins Pennell was the first woman to cycle over the Alps, in 1898, on a safety bicycle with just a single gear. “I was scorched by the sun, stifled by the dust, drenched by the rain,” Pennell wrote. “Long kilometers of climbing were the price paid for every coast.” Why did Pennell undertake this great trial and endure its afflictions? “I wanted to see if I could cross the Alps on a bicycle” was Pennell’s answer. Most people ride bikes simply to get around or to get exercise. Others have loftier ambitions. “I did not think I was very original,” wrote Pennell. “Other great people have crossed the Alps: Hannibal on elephants, Caesar in a litter.” The cyclist who summits a mountain gains glory; the world will gaze up at her in admiration. She also beholds glory, looking down on the world from such a high perch. For some, those great sights from great heights may also bring insight—wisdom to which those at lower altitudes, with their endorphins in a less riotous state, will never be privy.
Riding a bike in the Himalayas is, by definition, the most arduous cycling on the planet. But in Bhutan, the attitude toward pedaling uphill is, understandably, less awed, more insouciant, than in other, flatter lands. In Bhutan, all biking is mountain biking.
Tshering Tobgay, for one, doesn’t see Bhutan’s topography as an impediment. “In fact, our terrain in Bhutan is bicycle-friendly,” Tobgay said. “If it’s all flat, it’s no fun.” Outsiders have a bad habit of discerning Buddhist parables in even the blandest Bhutanese policy pronouncements. Yet it is tempting to find a deeper message in Tobgay’s words, a metaphor for happiness or, at least, contentment—Gross National, spiritual, personal. Tobgay said: “Here in Bhutan, with our landscape, there are ups and there are downs. Wherever there’s an up, there’s a down. Both parts are necessary. Both parts are fun. In that sense, I think Bhutan is perfect for bicycling.”