The staff at Air India in Heathrow Airport aren’t bemused by the idea of someone traveling with two mountain bikes — they’re utterly and completely dumbfounded. Two boxed full-suspension MTBs are stacked on my luggage trolley, and when I let go of the handle, the whole cart tips forward so that its rear wheels poke up in the air. They have no idea what I’m doing, and I’m not sure I do, either.
So why am I trying to haul luggage the size of a piano through the UK’s busiest airport at 6:30am? Because I’m going to the Kingdom of Bhutan to play a small part in the future of its mountain bike scene.
Mountain biking in Bhutan is in its infancy.
There are only 30 serious mountain bikers living in the Kingdom of Bhutan out of a population of 750,000 people, so it’s fair to say Bhutan’s MTB scene is in its very beginnings, but that’s why we’re here.
Where, exactly, is ‘here’?
The Kingdom of Bhutan is a landlocked country in South Asia, in the Eastern Himalayas, sandwiched between China in the north and India in the south. Dogs, cattle, and horses roam freely in the streets of its cities. Its devoted Buddhist citizens decorate their houses, public buildings, and temples with a dazzling array of colorful, intricate carvings and paintings. It’s like nowhere I’ve ever been in my life.
Our guide, host, and the man behind this whole circus is Pelden Dorji, and he wants Bhutan’s mountain bike scene to be different from the rest of the world. He doesn’t want it to suffer from the age-old obsessions with racing and performance. He doesn’t want it to be unfriendly to women. He wants the whole world to come and ride here and for women to guide them when they do. So he’s invited Julie Cornelius, founder of the charity World Ride; photographer Leslie Kehmeier; filmmaker Colleen Maes; and me.
We’re here to help train the first four women in the history of Bhutan to become qualified mountain bike guides.
The right tools for the job
Bhutan is remote, landlocked, and very hard to reach. The descent into its airport is so dangerous that only 50 pilots in the world are qualified to fly it. So importing even simple spares like tires and tubes takes time and costs a fortune.
That’s why we’ve brought two new Marin bikes, a bunch of Osprey packs, some Lazer helmets, Shimano clothing, and any other spares we could lay our hands on. It’s going to form a mountain bike library, so any Bhutanese woman who wants to can start learning to ride for free.
This was all Julie’s idea.
Let’s talk about Julie Cornelious and her World Ride organization for a minute. Julie’s a seasoned Moab mountain bike guide who’s been taking riders out to the White Rim, the Needles, and the other legendary backcountry locations near Moab for most of her professional mountain bike life.
But a little while ago, she started to think about the inherent imbalance in mountain biking travel.
Let’s say that you book a mountain bike trip to Tanzania. It’s the holiday of a lifetime. It costs you a fortune. But the chances are that the person who set up the tour company and the people on your tour probably look a bit like you.
World Ride tries to redress that imbalance. It resells places on high-end mountain bike trips all over the world — Guatemala, Chile, Peru, Tanzania, Botswana — and uses the money to train local women as mountain bike guides. So when, say, eight Swiss dentists land in Botswana, a young local woman can show them the best places to ride, show them that women can ride as well as they can, and she can earn a respectable wage, too.
It works. Julie’s been running World Ride for over six years, with established programs all over the world, but this is her first official visit to Bhutan and the beginning of a unique journey for four of their most adventurous women.
First day of the rest of their rides
We’re in Thimphu, the capital of Bhutan. It’s first thing in the morning in the town square, with stray dogs lazing in the sun and a handful of locals watching in genial bemusement. Of the 30 or so people in the whole country who ride mountain bikes, there are hardly any women. So we’re starting at the very beginning. Four women from Thimphu who have volunteered to be the first qualified mountain bike guides in the country’s history are all standing here. Time to get to work.
Dawa, Khusala, Tshering Dolkar, and Tshering Zam seem as nervous as we are, but as soon as we produce two boxes containing the bikes, it’s like someone’s thrown a switch. All shyness disappears, and they fall on the bikes like an F1 pit crew. With Julie’s help and a couple of multi-tools, they attach rotors and rear derailleurs, adjust brakes, and set the pedals, fumbling with Allen wrenches, skimming their knuckles, and laughing all the while.
Pelden leans and whispers in my ear as we watch. “This is the beginning of female mountain biking in Bhutan, right here, right now.”
Leaps and bounds
Only Khusala rode a bike as a kid. The other three only started riding a bike at all less than a month ago, and the younger Tshering got on a bike just three days before we arrived. So once the bikes are up and built, Julie’s seasoned guiding experience really comes into its own.
She is gentle, kind, and patient as our candidates take their first tentative steps — it’s truly heartwarming to see. Our candidates struggle to balance and to manage the power of the brakes, but the progress is incredibly fast. Julie is on standby the whole time, but their support for each other speaks volumes about how positive the future of mountain biking here could be. They run alongside each other with hands on the saddle, urging one more pedal stroke, a lean into the turns… it couldn’t be a more positive start if we’d scripted it.
Dirt and determination
Later that afternoon, all four volunteers decamp to a nearby trailhead, about half an hour’s drive outside of Thimphu. Against a stunning backdrop of a giant golden Budhha and the Eastern Himalayas receding into the horizon, all four women ride an off-road bike off road for the very first time in their lives.
The terrain’s nothing crazy — just a dirt plateau without too many bumps or slopes — but it takes me and everyone else watching right back to the very beginnings of our mountain bike journeys. It’s no easy thing to ride a bike on something that isn’t tarmac, but within minutes, all of them are standing in the saddle, adopting attack positions, and lowering their torsos to the bars. Some progress faster than others — it’s all still pretty wobbly — but they’re doing a hell of a lot better than I would if I’d been riding for a week at the age of, say, 35. When the older of the two Tsherings gets the spirit in her and just rides off down the trail unprompted, the collective cheer rings off the mountainside loud enough for the whole valley to hear it.
A steep learning curve
Because they’re just starting out, our volunteers aren’t experienced enough to join us in riding Bhutan’s huge network of natural trails. We’re all sorry they’re not with us, but as soon as the riding starts, we’re grateful, too — this is some seriously wild terrain.
With so few riders and such a huge network of natural trails, there’s no way to build features or even do much trail maintenance. So the riding’s about as far from the sculpted lines of an established bike park as you can imagine.
After shuttling over an hour up a rutted, seemingly impassable mountain road pitted with holes, stray rocks, and curious gray Langur monkeys, we begin the first serious ride of the day. It starts with a long, steep hike-a-bike at an altitude that makes my sea-level lungs heave in protest on a path that takes us to Lungchutse Monastery, built in devotion to Tara, the goddess of compassion. That compassion takes the form of a cup of hot milky tea from the resident monk so our wheezing crew can rest, contemplate the majesty of the Himalayas, and scratch a couple of dogs behind the ears. We’ve not even ridden a yard, and we’re already transported — the sun glints from the snow-capped peaks across the valley, the air is as cool and crisp as a glacial stream, and we’re about to begin our first descent from 11,700ft.
Wet and wild
It’s snowed recently, and now it’s melted, leaving a slick layer of mud on the trail and its many, many rocks. My desert-dwelling companions are aghast at the lack of traction, and I’d like to say I wasn’t gleeful about my many years riding in the slime and slop of UK trails, but I was. It’s a hair-raising slither down rocky chutes for the first few hundred feet, but what a rush. We duck under spider webs stretched across the dark forest canopy, slide around fallen trunks of 600-year-old trees, and periodically burst out onto open hillsides with millions of dense, forested acres spread beneath us. It seems like just minutes, but we’re descending so steep and fast that hundreds of feet fly by in the blink of an eye. We roll up the sides of the forest floor, hop from rut to rock and back again, sliding around on leaves and loam in all directions, and it’s truly wild — hardly anyone has ridden here, ever, and it feels like magic.
Lunch is pretty special, too. Forget the usual squashed ham and cheese made on a truck tailgate — this is a proper meal. The bike transport truck is parked halfway down the trail, and its bed is groaning with a hot buffet of rice, dhal, greens, cooked beef, and chili relish, all served from hot bowls on real plates.
We complete the day with a beautiful, challenging afternoon of singletrack perfection. The forest grows denser, greener, and wetter as we descend, with slippery muddy sections, loose dirt, stinging nettles, and punchy climbs, all broken up by periodically breathtaking snapshots down the valley toward Punakha. We roll across rope bridges and down steep steps, with the river twinkling on the valley floor. The valley sides are stepped for rice growing, and smoke drifts lazily across hillsides. Pheasants and ravens and curious dogs abound.
Our hardy group survives a wire in the derailleur; a bent rotor; several wet, muddy washouts; minor altitude sickness; and some slightly questionable line choices; and the day ends with a dramatic plunge down the last few hundred feet of fast, flowing trail in fading light, to be greeted by the most spectacular building I’ve ever seen — the fortress at Punakha.
Not enough words
I want to tell you about every inch of every trail we rode. About the natural drops from moss-covered rocks and the wild moguls of red mud. About the steepest roots I’ve ever tried to descend on. About hiking a bike through fronds of sunlit moss, dangling like beads after Mardi Gras from the trunks of Cypress trees, and of pouring water onto hissing rotors to try and squeeze ten more minutes of grip on 13-kilometer descents.
But there’s just not enough room in this article, or enough skill in this writer, to completely do it justice. And, as I kept reminding myself, the fact we’re riding at all was a bonus — our real job was to help Khushala, Dawa, Tshering, and Tshering begin their mountain bike journeys as best we could.
Leaps and bounds
Although they may not need anything except the bikes and each other. By the time we meet up with our intrepid four in Paro, just nine days after they built the bikes, it looks like they’ve been riding for months. The younger Tshering, who was struggling to stay upright on the first day, is now riding unaided with confidence, turning in tight spaces and grinning like a Cheshire cat. All four women follow Julie’s lead and start riding together in single file around a giant prayer wheel, and casually drop off a high curb, standing on their pedals, without a hint of nerves. We get word that they’ve been practicing together every day for two hours, refusing to let each other give up until real progress has been made.
After a couple hours of coaching from Julie, we repair upstairs to a nearby coffee shop to hear how they’ve been doing, and it’s hard to stop them all talking at once — the excitement and enthusiasm pour out in an unstoppable stream, and ratchets up several notches when we show them some footage of women riding this year’s Rampage.
It’s a cliche to say a journey like this is a privilege, but there’s no better way to describe our time in the Kingdom of Bhutan. We’re all overwhelmed with the beauty of the mountains, with the welcome we’ve received, and the nerve-shredding steep natural trails we’ve been able to ride. Most of all, though, we’re privileged to have been given the chance to meet four women who — despite having little or no experience, few role models, and precious little free time after working and raising their families — are determined to play their part in the future of Bhutan’s mountain bike culture.
So if you believe — as they, and Julie, and millions of riders around the world do — that the future of MTB has to be more female, bear that in mind when planning your next trip. If you’re lucky, a Bhutanese woman might just be there to show you the way.
Tips for traveling to Bhutan
- You can’t just show up — all visitors are required to be accompanied by local guides. Every MTB trip needs to be booked with a local tour operator, such as Bhutan Rides.
- You’ll need a tourist visa, and to pay a tourist tax of $100 USD for every day you’re in the country (which is half of what it used to be).
- If flying from the USA, you’ll first need to catch a flight to Dubai, Bangkok, Singapore, Kathmandu, or New Delhi before catching a connecting flight to Bhutan with Drukair. Those transit stops may require visas of their own, too.
- Bike shops and spares are few and far between, so take more than you might otherwise — derailleur hanger, brake pads, tires, tubes, etc. — and anything special your bike needs.
- Pack your tools in your hold luggage — between us, our group lost Allen wrenches, multi-tools, tubeless tire spikes, and numerous other bits to zealous airport security.
- Take a wide variety of clothing — we were in multiple layers with buffs over our faces at the start of rides and sweating in short sleeves by the end. You’ll also need to wear long pants and long sleeves when you visit any religious sites.
- Be prepared for the altitude. For example, our highest ride started at 11,200ft after a two-hour hike-a-bike. Lots of fluid, lots of food — and two Ibuprofen before riding, in my case — seemed to help.
0 Comments