Under the Holy Lake: A Memoir of Eastern Bhutan

The author spent two years teaching English composition at a mission school in eastern Bhutan in the 1980s. Bhutan is a primitive place now; it was even less developed back then. The school was dilapidated, the bureaucracy cumbersome, the principal a tyrant, and the standards of instruction antiquated, mostly rote memorization. Haigh's residence was besieged by rats and other vermin, he came down with dysentery, and he was nearly killed in a bus accident on the mountain roads. But he fell in love with Bhutan and its people nonetheless.

Haigh does not romanticize Bhutan and he notes the poverty, unemployment, alcoholism, disease and other problems he observed there. But his great affection for the country is evident in his delightful show more descriptions of the polite, kind, generous people he encountered everywhere and the beautiful landscape and the "villages strung along the river like pearls on a thread of silver."

Illustrated with black-and-white photographs, this book is sure to please anyone interested in Bhutan or travel narratives in general. show less