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Taj Tashi Thimpu, Bhutan
Set in the heart of the Thimphu Valley, the Taj Tashi Thimpu, is a gateway to a land steeped in mythology and magic
By: Mary Gostelow
Kids walking past the hotel entrance on their way to school will be one of my lasting memories of staying at Taj Tashi Thimpu in Bhutan, says Mary Gostelow.
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Flying into Bhutan's only airport, at Paro, is breathtaking. The Airbus-319 of government-owned Druk Air (the only regular carrier here) twists and turns between wooded mountains and, with visual piloting only, zooms in on the runway, to universal passenger applause. We look out at the terminal. Forget the architectural exhibits that are Beijing, Heathrow Terminal 5, Hong Kong. This is a new wooden 'traditional house', dzong style, three floors high, the upper floors slightly cantilevered and magnificently carved and painted.
One hour's drive later, we arrive in the capital, Thimpu, after nothing that was ugly, or out of character (of course there was not much habitation, this 36,000 sq km nation has a population of merely 700,000). Thimpu main street is one way, with sidewalk pavements raised about eight inches. Closely packed buildings along a 300-yard stretch include at least 50 shoe shops. Most of the people, of all ages, are in national dress, the men in gho, full length coats with big white cuffs, that are pulled up over waist belts so that they are below-knee, the women in kira, long lengths wrapped around them, from above bust to ground and pinned over the shoulders, with a kimono jacket over.
We turn into the hotel's stone-floored drive. To the left is a three-floor mustard dzong with heavy wood highlights. This is still in finalizing stage. On the right is a matching five-floor dzong, the 67-room hotel, architect KTGY (the designer, P49, is also from Bangkok). It opened this January and all that is needed is that the indoor pool merely awaits some heat, though its adjacent hot tub is already working. In front of the main all-glass doors, a reception committee awaits, male staff in hotel livery - maroon and black striped ghos, black upper-calf socks and shoes, duty manager Yiki Sangay in an orange and grey kira and Punjabi gm Vijay Shrikent, a would-be army careerist, in a black business suit. We go into what looks like a temple, looking past the main upper lobby, where four giant heavy metal bells hang overhead, to an open interior space, which turns out to be the upper part of the main all-day restaurant, which soars from lower-ground up through two floors. To our left is the bar, discreetly hidden behind wooden fretting. To our right is the long front desk, with local paintings in oranges and yellows behind.
Somehow, as we are escorted up to suite 418, we meet our butler, Yeshi, an indispensable factotum who is to become our waiter at every meal, remembering I like water in a wine-glass and the juice must be fresh (he later recounts with glee the famous 2002 football match when Bhutan, 202 out of FIFA's 203 ranked members, invited bottom-ranked Montserrat, to a friendly game - the unfortunate dreadlocked Caribbeans flew five days to get here and, because of the 7,000 ft a.s.l altitude here, were thrashed 4-0). Yeshi, like everyone, speaks perfect English as all schooling in Bhutan is in English.
Interiors of this fascinating hotel have three recurrent motifs; there are bursts of clouds motifs as on pale tomato corridor carpets, and narrow dhungs horns inset into stair railings, and double-dorje enlightenment knots on some walls. Walls are pale cream, all doors and woodwork dark brown, with cloud motifs over. Door locks are not the hotel's highest point - electronic cards could not be used as Bhutan has no technical support for that software (perhaps worryingly, there is also no support for the elevators found in only about ten buildings in the entire country). Anyway, Yeshi manages, opens our door and inserts the key's energy card into a slot. There are long green and red fabric door-knob 'signs'. Our suite is all-cream walls and lots of wood - floors, and all doors, with clouds over. After a small foyer, with mottled chocolate marble floors, you turn left to the parlour, dominated by a yard-wide, ten-inch deep fabric lampshade at the far end, in front of a shallow window recess. Closer in is a five-wing dark wood ceiling shade. Fabrics are mostly soft tomato, including curtains, or soft gold, for sofa and chairs. There is a soft blue and ecru rug, and a yellow one. There is a big Samsung flat screen, a big desk and a bar, with coffee and tea-making equipment. A small corridor leads ahead to a closet room, with an Elsafe that is good practice for prostration (see below), or turn right to the bathroom, left to the bedroom.
The bathroom is all chocolate marble, floor and walls, two of which have big floor to ceiling windows with brown wood slatted blinds. There is a freestanding white hip tub, on silver claw feet. The single hemispherical American Standard bowl has taps over it marked Chaud and Froid. There are several displays of 40ml Forest Essentials toiletries, exclusively for Taj, and lots of white Trident of India towels, plus a pair of Passionate white wattle robes, from Mumbai. The electric towel rail, and under-floor heating, come off when the energy card is removed. Both shower stall, with rainforest and hand-head faucets, and toilet, with Kleenex paper, have frosted glass doors (which is sadly not the norm in new-builds in much of Asia these days). Kleenex tissue, in a silver holder, is meticulously replaced when needed.
The bedroom has a ceiling-high wood bedhead with a sand and silver cloud pattern painted inset, and fibre optic lights over both pillow areas; the bed is fabulously firm, a welcome relief after the costly and labour-intensive pillow-mattressing that operators seem to think the whole world wants, but does not. Here, the floor rug is soft sand, with a royal blue and green floral pattern. There is another Samsung flat screen, on a cloud-decorated base. There are plenty of Chinese-made Telematrix telephones, although nationwide connectivity is ace and even monks communicate via their mobiles: our second desk has a broadband cord and there are clouds around the overhead mirror. Being the corner room, there are two recessed windows with dull tomato walls, another window that is flush with the wall. There are slip-on, and thonged, fabric slippers.
Dasho Wangchuk Dorji, family representative of the owning company, the entrepreneurial Tashi Group (into everything from Coke bottling to meals and travel) said building this hotel was terribly difficult - and construction is another of its roles. The workers were all Indian, who had to go home during the cold winters. Many of the fittings are one-off items, from different manufacturers, and it is challenging to get maintenance engineers. Dasho's brother oversees the Uma Paro here, also owned by Tashi Group: for this bigger, more business-oriented property, Taj was the obvious management choice, and GM
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Vijay Shrikent, who had visited Bhutan many years before, immediately opted to move from Mumbai to open it. Of his 115 staff today, 18 are also Indian (he sent 35 of the Bhutanese for extensive training at Taj properties throughout India). The aforementioned Yiki won a scholarship from her Bhutan school to hotel school in Osaka, after which she did a Disney training in Orlando, and then joined Taj.
Every evening newcomers are invited to a cultural ceremony in the hotel's rear courtyard. A blazing log fire is lit in a sunken firepit, flanked by two pairs of permanently-fixed wood sofa supports on to which masses of cushions are put. Lots of chairs are also brought. A full bar is set up. We were brought our choice of drinks, with nuts and nibbles and tomato bruschetta, and round discus-like hot water bottles covered in tartan fabric. The 40-minute show features local musicians and dancers and at the end we all got up and danced too. You look back up at the hotel, with the bright orange lampshades hanging inside each bedroom window.
Then it was dinner, tonight in the Bhutanese fine-dining, Chig-ja-gye, '108', apparently the number of temptations that the Buddhist faces. The room has all-black walls, a reminder that in traditional houses (note, visit the Thimpu Folk Museum to see what I mean), the upper-level kitchens become black, as there is no outlet for the wood fire's smoke. Here the walls have silver cloud outlines on them. Lampshades and candles on the tables, and table-runners and curtains are scarlet, the black show plates Luzerne, the Chianti Ruffino. The menu offers three set variations on price - all have variations, three courses, starter, soup, main course, say shamu ngo-ngou, chargrilled wild forest mushrooms and chicken breast on salad; then churu jaju, a seaweed soup; then a vegetarian dish of ema semchum datshi, green beans and local chili with cream cheese.
At home our meals are all the same, said Yeshi, waiting on us, of course: three meals a day of red rice, namely slightly pink, with a curry of whatever vegetables or sometimes meat we have, though no meat during festival months of February and May. At home, he takes rice in either hand, moulds it into a stick, dips into some curry, eats it as a patty. Here, of course, we used knives and forks. With the exception of fruit and vegetables from a Tashi Group farm, nearly everything the hotel needs has to be imported, either overland from India via Phuntsholing or by Druk Air cargo. Chef Balajee Srinivasan, who came from Pune, says the hotel will soon have its own hygiene laboratory, with onsite specialists - it is also a few minutes from the marvellous government-owned traditional medical facility where all treatments, and 98 herbal medicines, are free. That night, Balajee would be up at 2am supervising the preparation of four 30-litre 'dustbins' of Indian vegetarian food...
I was up at 6am, just before the sun - and blessed the bathroom's heated floor. It was pretty nippy out, but I followed the hotel's hand-coloured jogging map past the clock tower and archery ground, and then popped in to the spacious and Lifestyle-equipped gym, with individual televisions. I checked emails, which never stop, and then we joined dozens of tourists in the massive Thongsei main restaurant for buffet breakfast, eaten off stylish Vavró-for-RAK porcelain. An assortment of fruit juice is displayed but delicious fresh juice can be brought, coffee comes in plungers, and good-bread toast in linen-lined silver baskets. The buffet has kiwi-flavored and plain yogurt portions, diced fruits including papaya, and cold cuts and salads for the Japanese - though that morning the 80-odd other guests were stereotyped 'Silversea' types. There were about 12 chafing dishes but most preferred the well-groomed young lady chef to cook to order. Outside, through the two-floor high glass wall, a monk prayed, as he does every morning, chanting in front of the giant prayer wheel - as Yeshi says, this means he does not have to go specially to temple.
Then we headed out. It was one of the national clean-up days and school children had all been given a half-day to clear the streets and countryside of rubbish. In uniform that is miniature national costume, they worked in pairs meticulously picking up every scrap. (This incidentally is the world's only nation where even selling cigarettes is illegal, though you do see smokers - and far too many of them.)
After an hour driving up, up twisting, narrow but paved roads, we stopped and took out the 4 'dustbins', foods to be handed over to monks from Tango Goenpa (monastery) who had requested a change from local food. Someone else fortunately hauled these heavy containers up: for us, it was a good 45-minute hard climb up a forested mountain path to this amazing 200-monk monastery, which dates back to the 12th century, and the chance to be invited in, to all three floors of prayer rooms - in each one, you prostrate three times to the senior monk and then three times to the shrine and/or Buddha (rather than going completely horizontal, I found myself bending, head to floor, like the charming S-shape of the Thongsei's cutlery). After this, the monks, who are vegetarian, hosted us to lunch, with more red rice and sweet milky tea in delicate china mugs with matching lids.
Back down home, the Jiva Spa beckoned. Two exquisite young ladies from Bhutan, trained by Taj, took us through a 120-minute couples' ritual. We luxuriated in a stone bath filled with local Artemisia vulgaris (mugwort or traveller's herb). Through an adjacent flap, white-hot mineral-filled river stones were hurled into the water, on the other side of a stone grate, on a spade as if they were pizzas coming out of an oven. Next came a scrub of local ground nutmeg, then a massage to exact pressure. I left husband still sleeping as I headed out for a meeting, to extend an Away-night during which I had learned how to prostrate and, were I to meet the Fifth Druk Gyalpo, the new young king, bow, merely bow and lower my eyes (in fact when we did meet we had an amazing eye-to-eye conversation about how he loves England, but that is another story).
Taj Tashi Thimphu, Bhutan, Thimphu, Bhutan
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