History, Culture and Wildlife Expedition to India & Bhutan
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CINCINNATI ZOO & BOTANICAL GARDEN History, Culture and Wildlife of India and Bhutan 15‐day expedition Departs October, 2011 Escorted by TBD TBD per person, double occupancy All‐inclusive from the New Delhi International Airport . History, Culture and Wildlife Expedition to India & Bhutan DESTINATION: India & Bhutan TRIP TO BE OPERATED: October, 2011 NUMBER OF DAYS: 15 MINIMUM NUMBER OF PASSENGERS: 10 MAXIMUM NUMBER OF PASSENGERS: 16 DEPARTURE CITY: Delhi, India COST: TBD per person, double occupancy The single supplement cost is $1050 if/ when available. WHAT IS INCLUDED: Services of World Discovery Safaris, all accommodations and meals as per this itinerary, all land and air transportation in India and Bhutan, mineral water in the vehicles, all airport transfers, hotel taxes as imposed by government agencies, entrance fees to parks & sites visited while in India & Bhutan. NOT INCLUDED: Costs of international air to and from the New Delhi International Airport, passport and visa fees, (visas for U.S. passport holders to enter India & Bhutan are currently required), immunizations, excess baggage charges, trip insurance and items of a personal nature, including drinks that are not included with meals, laundry, camera fees, telephone, fax or e‐mail charges and tips for drivers and / or guides. ABOUT THIS PROGRAM: The subcontinent of India is located in southern Asia, south of Pakistan, China and Nepal. To the north it is bordered by the Himalaya mountain chain, the foothills of which cover the northernmost of the country's 26 states. Further south, plateaus, tropical rain forests and sandy deserts are bordered by tropical, palm fringed beaches. Due to the melding of ancient civilizations, the coexistence of a number of religions and local tradition, the country's staggering topographical features are matched by its cultural diversity. Thus, the towering temples of southern India, easily identifiable by their ornately sculptured surface, are associated with the many crafts and performing arts of the region. At the other extreme are the deserts of Gujarat. Here a scattering of villages pit themselves against the awesome forces of nature, resulting in a Spartan lifestyles made vibrant by the profusion of jewelry and ornamental embroidery which is used to adorn apparel and household linen. In the far north is the high desert of Ladakh. Here local culture is visibly shaped by Buddhism as well as by the harsh terrain. Yet another facet of Indian culture is observed in the colorful tribal lifestyles of the north eastern states of Nagaland, Mizoram, Tripura and Manipur with their folk culture. In the central Indian states of Orissa and Madhya Pradesh tribal village life has resulted in a variety of artistically executed handicrafts. India's mountains provide heli skiing, river running, mountaineering and trekking. Its beaches provide lazy sun‐bathing as well as wind surfing and snorkeling and its jungles provide habitat for a magnificent array of unique wildlife. India's history dates back to 3,200 BC when Hinduism was first founded. Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism. Judaism. Zoroashtrianism, Christianity and Islam all exist within the country today. As a consequence of India's location, the history of the country has seldom remained static for an extended period and its great natural wealth has lured a succession of traders and foreign influences, each having left an imprint in the country, however faint or localized. Thus, Chinese fishing nets in Kerala are a throwback to that country's ancient maritime trade, while in the north, terra‐cotta figurines can be traced to a Greek influence. Modern India is home to both the tribal with its anachronistic lifestyle and to the sophisticated urban jetsetter. It is a land where temple elephants exist amicably with the microchip. Here ancient monuments provide a backdrop for the world's largest democracy; where atomic energy is generated and industrial development ranks the country amongst the world's top ten nations. Today, fishermen along the country's coastline fashion simple fishing boats in a centuries old tradition while, a few miles away automobiles glide off conveyor belts in state‐of‐the‐art factories. India has been likened to a male peacock, in full display, standing on a dung heap. It is an apt description for here, as in no other place, we find some of the world’s most beautiful expressions of art, literature and architecture in juxtaposition with some of the World’s most demanding environmental situations.. The final seven days of our program are in Bhutan, the last of the independent Himalayan mountain kingdoms. The country is a rough oval 200 miles wide by 100 miles deep. Its southern border, where its north‐south river valleys open on the Indian plains like doors, has an average elevation of 2,000'. The northern border elevations, on the crest of the Himalayas, average upwards of 15,000' (that is, the average is higher than the tallest peaks in the Rockies, with peaks on up to 25,000'). Bhutan’s population is something less than a million; its capital Thimphu is its largest city with 60,000 people. The southern 3/4ths of country is heavily forested – Bhutan claims the greatest percentage of forested land in the world – though red rice is grown in valleys as high as they can be terraced. It was over this rugged northern border that the basic culture came in from Tibet, beginning at least 1200 years ago. The dominant religion is Tantric Buddhism, and the tantras – written treatises sacred to the religion – needed a literate class of priests for their preservation and teaching. Scattered over the country are Bhutan’s spectacular "dzongs," fortress‐monasteries where the keepers of the tradition lived and worked, and which slowly became the governing framework of the country. Bhutan has many languages, but the Dzongkha associated with the monasteries is what passes for the national language. It was from Tibet that the most‐talked‐about‐by‐tourists feature of the country originated, the giant phallus painted or carved on most houses. This began about 1500 when a Tibetan Buddhist monk named Drukpa Kunley came into the country preaching a kind of Buddhism that looked for the sacred in the everyday, and that with an outrageous sense of humor ridiculed the rule‐ bound current monastic rule with a celebration of sex. Ironically, given the unofficial national symbol, most property in Bhutan is still handed down in the female line. The most common divorce is when a wife kicks a husband out of her house and he has to go back and live with his family. There are no family names as yet, certainly not the male‐lineage ones common in the west. Babies are taken to monasteries to be auspiciously named by the monks. There seems to be a shortage of auspicious names, so there are more "Dorjis" and "Karmas" and "Jigmes" than most westerners can keep track of. Bhutan was a hermit kingdom, off‐limits to all outsiders, until the 1950s. It had a nobility and a peasantry – and even serfdom – similar to that of medieval Europe. The real wake‐up call for the kingdom was China’s seizure of Tibet in 1950: obviously in the modern world of newly‐nationalistic super‐states mountain isolation was no longer much protection against the outside world. And so the monarch (the Wangchuk kings have ruled since 1917) initiated a program of controlled modernization – the aim being to create a class of people who understood outside power and determine how Bhutan might best resist it. In Bhutan they still talk about "the class of ‘56." Bright first‐grade aged boys from all over the country were recruited to go get an outside, western education. It was really more like a draft; their parents didn’t want them to go – who would herd the cows and yaks?, and the boys generally didn’t want to leave home and friends. But drafted they were, and they walked and camped nine days west, over country considerably more rugged than the Appalachians, to Darjeeling, India, for the first level of their education, studying away from home two and four years at a stretch. The best and brightest went on to graduate degrees from Oxbridge colleges, or the likes of Stanford and Princeton and the University of Paris. Now, bearing medieval titles of nobility such as dasho (used the way milord might have been in Elizabethan England) they are the most modern of administrators, trying to manage the interface between modernity and tradition to the extent that anyone can. Tourism was only allowed in 1973, and is still carefully controlled. TV and internet were only legalized ten years ago. Literacy, even by generous governmental estimates, is still less than 50%. But there is a corresponding richness of the pre‐literate oral world, with traditional storytellers of prodigious memory – long since killed off in the west by public schools, newspapers and books. And then there is the biological richness of the country. Even the Appalachians pale in botanical variety compared with the slopes of the Himalayas – 40 different species of rhododendron (most in bloom during our visit, incidentally); a magnolia tree obviously kin to the southern tree in the U.S., but with blooms the shape and size of softballs; local variations on dogwoods with yellow blooms; temperate rain forests and cloud forests with local mosses, blowing in the wind, up in the mountain passes. An old Indian name for Bhutan means the source of medicinal herbs. Wildlife ranges from tigers and leopards in the lower elevations to snow leopards in the highlands, and includes the unique takin, which local legend attributes to that same Drukpa Kunley who pieced a goat and a cow together .