Switchbacks Of The Thunder Dragon

Darkening clouds bulge earthwards threatening a mighty storm. The sky makes me cast my fellow mountain bikers a puzzled look.

This is November, Bhutan’s dry season, and our guide, Pelden, has promised us rain-free riding on some of the world’s best singletrack. These are boasts I’ve heard many times before from local guides I’ve met on trips afar, often delivered with more hope than factual accuracy. Certainly, rain would render the flowing, loamy trails we’ve been drifting down so far into slick mudbaths akin to the worst of the UK’s winter offerings. And adventure’s uncertainties aside, we didn’t travel all the way to Bhutan to slide face first through mud.

Standing on a 12,000 ft high Himalayan ridge, rice-beers in hand, we watch the gathering maelstrom twist clouds into foreboding shapes over the surrounding mountains. They swallow the spectacle of ice-plastered peaks that once glinted in the falling light. We wait expectedly for the thunder to clap and roll, but instead the air remains filled with the flapping of prayer flags — the incessant soundtrack of Bhutan. It’s an enigma, this place – and it draws you in.

Pelden was right about the storm: it fails to materialise, leaving us with just a swirling light-show. I am disappointed not to hear thunder — this is after all, a country whose moniker is Druk yul, or ‘Land of the Thunder Dragon’: a title entrenched in Tibetan Buddhist mythology that reveres thunder as an auspicious occurrence rather than its Western trope as the advent of trouble. An edgy title perhaps, but its overtones are unlikely to win awards at a tourism trade fare. But then perhaps it is apt for a country whose determination to preserve its cultural identity locked it in self-imposed isolation for centuries; Bhutan’s borders were completely closed to foreigners until 1974. But times change.

It’s an enigma, this place – and it draws you in

Which is why five mountain bikers — local bike guide Pelden Dorji, US rider Sam Seward, adventure entrepreneur Euan Wilson, videographer Douglas Tucker, and me — now find ourselves camped out alongside a Buddhist temple in the foothills of the Bhutanese Himalaya. The temple beside us is a stoic, hulking square-edged building, trimmed with carved beams — a 500-year old fort, or Dzong, whose roots lie in more fractious times. It has weathered many a storm. But whatever the past, at its feet lies the future: a thread of singletrack that has borrowed the temple’s name. It’s called the Jela trail.

Far below on the valley floor, at a point now obscured by the plunging void, we’ll emerge from this trail next morning, rolling out from between towering 15,000 foot ‘hills’ alongside the alarmingly short runway of Bhutan’s sole international airport. Through this same tiny airport pass about half of the country’s 150,000 annual tourists on a handful of flights per day, the rest coming overland from neighbouring India. Most are allured by cultural  or wildlife tours — treading the stone paths of ancient temples, hoping to spot a tiger, or to photograph the iconic black necked cranes— or to trek in the Himalaya landscape. Very few come to go mountain biking.

But if Pelden has his way, that will change and flowing descents like the Jela trail will help redraw Bhutan’s slowly expanding tourism map. During our nine day trip, we too realise that when word gets out, Pelden’s dream may well be realised. Our guide was not only right about the storm, but about Bhutan’s trail offerings too: they are indeed some of the best singletrack any of us had ever ridden, anywhere in the world, whether they come serenaded by thunder or not.