''Buttertea at Sunrise'', Britta Das

Being on your own in a foreign country makes you think waaaay too much. And as someone who is already guilty of that in the extreme, it can be a bit ludicrous. Combined with my apparent inability to strike up a conversation with strangers (despite the fact this hotel is full of young Europeans in their 20s and 30s, clearly working for NGOs and the like) it does strange things to the head. One topic on which I have been frequently mulling for the past 2 days is how shockingly inelegant Northern Europeans (read: me) are, particularly on holiday. Right now I am in proper Brit-on-holiday-in-developing-country mode: i.e. I am scruffy, wearing ill-fitting clothes in various shades of khaki which I would never go anywhere near at home. What is it exactly that causes British women to throw all that Trinny-and-Susannah advice to the wind as soon as we’re out of the Schengen area? Anyhow, this effect is significantly exacerbated when in India, for the simple reason that even the most casual look of the average Indian woman is gorgeous elegance brought to life. Hence I have been plodding (an apposite verb in the situation) around the hotel looking like a monster (particularly with my uns-tyled hair, which friends will tell you is definitely not a good look), brushing past legions of beautiful Indian women in wonderful saris and perfect hair. In addition, the world played a cruel joke of dealing me some pretty, tiny, Thai women for my spa treatments, which meant a constant battle to suppress the thought that they must be horrified by this big white fleshy short-haired creature. But enough! The great thing is, it’s liberating not to have to care about what you wear or look like, and within a few days I will have got everything back under perspective (and hence a collective sigh is heard around the world).

It’s not the first time I’ve been the odd one out however – in Malawi it was bizarre to realize one’s fame in the entire neighbourhood, and oddly disconcerting to know that it was impossible to be anonymous in a crowd. The same held true for Britta Das, the author of the latest book I read, ‘’Buttertea at Sunrise’’. As part of my traditional pre-trip Amazon splurge I bought this as it one of the few books available on Bhutan (I did also attempt to buy a Bhutan guidebook but after promising it would come within 10 days Amazon seems to have lost the ability to locate it….). It’s the story of a German-born Canadian woman who goes to work as a VSO volunteer in remote Bhutan for a year. As a tall blonde she too became the tourist attraction of the area, although she had no intention of letting this get in the way of her integration with the community, working as a physiotherapist in the local hospital. The memoir doesn’t particularly attempt to cover the more general culture of Bhutan, its history or suchlike, but it is a nice portrait of a small community and it is Britta’s relationships with her workmates which is the most interesting part of the book. Particularly when you come to realize that ‘Das’ is an Indian surname and she’s not married at the start of the book…. So I am now armed with a few facts which may or may not be helpful when I head up north on Friday: a popular dish is chillies inside soft cheese; it gets so foggy you can’t dry your underwear overnight; there are white monuments called Chortens which mark out trails and also perform religious function (quite what, I didn’t catch). Sadly my lack of a guidebook means I’m none the wiser about anything else, but perhaps that’s a good way to travel.