Bill Reynolds - Life Real Loud - John Lefebvre, Neteller and the Revolution in Online Gambling

The Four Rivers Project is astonishingly huge, the biggest conservation of biodiversity on the planet. Taylor went to the Chinese, and I gave him $400,000 to do it, to propose the Green Long March. Mao Zedong went on the Long March in 1933, and Daniel came up with the idea of the Green Long March for 2008. Now, every year, people all over China go on one-week or ten-day walks. It gives the biggest single population on the planet — ethnic or national or however you want to measure it — this opportunity to express their feelings about conservation. That’s huge, because if we don’t take China down that road it doesn’t matter what the rest of us do.

At the border of India and Bhutan, Lefebvre and Taylor and company were confronted with a stark contrast in realities. On the Indian side of the street, at a slightly higher elevation, say about five feet higher, the buildings looked like they’d suffered through the Blitz. Some parts of wall looked to have tumbled into the street, exposing rooms to the elements. Rebar stuck out from the sides of apartment blocks. Stones and bricks jutted from a lumpy, bumpy road. Junk and weeds fell off the cement retaining wall into the narrow canal, about half a dozen feet wide, between the two towns and countries. Various bits of detritus, anything from a pillow to leaves, reposed there. On the Bhutan side, a tidy two-foot cement barrier ran along the canal. The street was paved and smooth. People walked up and down the street. A fence, stylized in a crosshatched pattern and with occasional crowns, ran along the other side of the street. Well-kept houses and mature trees and other foliage were visible above the fence. “These Indian people looked across the border as if they were looking at some magical land where everyone was clean and happy,” says Lefebvre. “They gazed and continued to throw garbage. It was heart-rending.”

That wasn’t the end of the adventure, though — only the prelude. One of the Future Generations guys was a former priest in India and a mucky-muck, so this was going to be a VIP tour all the way. The entourage, which included ornithologist Bob Fleming, traveled in three Toyota Land Cruisers. Lefebvre says, “We drove for a week at breakneck speeds and then crossed the border from Bhutan to Arunachal Pradesh [the ‘Land of the Dawn Lit Mountains’ in Sanskrit]. It was the first time they were going to let people cross that border in fifty years of dispute between India and China about who controls Bhutan and who controls Arunachal Pradesh. We were going to the official opening.”

As they traveled along, Lefebvre began to feel uneasy. Their hosts, in senior posts in the Bhutanese civil government, seemed manipulative. From one town to the next they were being feted and then forced to get up early to catch yet another official meeting, the opening of a dam, perhaps, in the next town. India sent its protectorate a lot of money every year in exchange for hydroelectric energy. While allowing cultural independence, it wasn’t letting go of this resource access. There had been many tussles between Indian-supported people and Chinese-supported people over control of natural resources. Lefebvre says, “We were just a show for people who have aspirations for Bhutan. There was a movement afoot for it to be independent of India. There was also a movement for Bhutan, Arunachal Pradesh to the east of Bhutan, Sikkim to the west of Bhutan, and a whole bunch of the different Himalayan nations to join in one ethnic nation. They were a separate people — very different from Indians and Chinese.”

Hurtling through the lower Himalayas, the roads were steep and narrow, like driving along a shelf. Drops were sheer and abrupt, like a glacial crevasse, and there weren’t that many barriers. At one vantage point they saw, about eight miles ahead, a valley with a waterfall pouring out of the mountainside. Lefebvre recalls,

It was dropping two to three thousand feet. The waterfall went under a bridge right before it started to drop, so you could stop and look down and over. There were these concrete posts two and a half feet high — as if that would stop you. About five posts were missing because a bus had gone over. It would have been about ninety seconds before the first bounce. Then we came to this one corner where it was an inside turn. When you looked up, water was coming out of the mist. Higher than that mist was another overhang of mist, just coming out of the clouds. It was really psychedelic. Everywhere we went was unspeakably beautiful.

Up one side of a mountain they went, and down the next, twelve to fourteen thousand feet above sea level, to reach the next glad-handing meeting. Lefebvre was fed up: “I had a bit of a rebellion. I said, ‘Daniel, this is complete bullshit. We’re putting our lives in peril so these guys can do a dog-and-pony show to show how important they are, for whatever their aspirations are. That’s not what we signed on for.’ He got the picture and started to slow down things.”

Lefebvre and friends, sucked into the political games of a few hosts with separatist aspirations, finally reached the capital. He says, “We were at a party in Thimphu and they introduced us to the minister of culture from India. He was also head of secret service and was trying to find out what we were there for, asking questions in a nice way. Daniel came around and warned us, saying, ‘That guy is secret police. There are probably others, too, so don’t admit you know anything about separatism. If they ask, tell them we’re here for the opening of the border international development to help build the Four Great Rivers Conservation Park in Tibet.’”

Then they visited one of the queens of Bhutan. She had planned a big party for the foreigners. “The king was about ready to retire,” says Lefebvre of His Majesty Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who would abdicate in 2006 to make way for his eldest son, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck. “He was about fifty when we were there, and he had married four sisters. They each had their own palace and he would move between them.”

The second-eldest queen, Her Majesty Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangcuck, hosted the special occasion. Lefebvre says, “We sat in a big room, and they passed around this skanky rice wine that tasted like tapioca with rum in it. We had to drink it and like it. Then they offered more and we all said, ‘I don’t usually drink.’ Yeah, right. The queen was very gracious.”

So were the tour drivers. They didn’t want to say anything directly, but they couldn’t stop looking at Lefebvre and wondering about him. When WWF television programming became available in their country, the Bhutanese became enraptured. So much so that the king of Bhutan decided to ban it, which didn’t do wonders for his popularity. The tour drivers had been giving Lefebvre surreptitious double takes and couldn’t help put two and two together. It did make a bit of sense: he’s a big guy, and he’s got long hair. But they were too polite to ask, and so they went to Jim Hoggan instead. “We don’t want to cause any trouble,” said one driver, “but is your traveling partner a WWF wrestler?”

The Bhutan trip lasted six days, but its effect lingered. Lefebvre later met with the Tarayana Foundation, a partner of Future Generations. The two organizations joined forces to establish income generating activities, develop artisan training centers, and assist in educating the country’s rural poor.

Bhutan wouldn’t leave Lefebvre’s mind for long, but for now, at the Indian border, they needed to get their passports stamped and get back. He recalls,

We went up to the top of this mountain on the Arunachal Pradesh part of Bhutan. There was an army base there, and they told us we had to go to the air force base within the army base. We were walking through the guard station past all these Bhutanese and Indian soldiers. Everywhere you went in Bhutan there were these Indian soldiers carrying cannons. It was all just a big security thing to make sure people knew this was India. We were all white, nicely dressed, and just walked through the gate across this army base. They stood back and looked at us, and we just said, “Carry on.” They treated us like sahibs. White guys didn’t get to go to Bhutan much.