The crossing is the strangest part. You are in Jaigaon, which is as loud and cheerfully chaotic as any border town in West Bengal, and then you walk through a gate and you are in Phuentsholing, and somebody is queuing patiently. That is the whole country in one step.
We drove up to Thimphu the next morning. The road climbs out of the plains through cloud forest for the better part of a day, and you spend it watching the temperature drop and the architecture change. Bhutan has rules about how buildings must look. It sounds fussy until you have driven for six hours and not seen one ugly thing.
Dochu La, and the value of a clear morning
The pass at Dochu La has 108 chortens built in concentric rings on a hillock, and prayer flags strung between the trees in every direction. On a clear day the eastern Himalaya lines up behind them. We were lucky - we got about twenty minutes of visibility before the cloud came back over, and in those twenty minutes nobody in our group said anything at all.
Punakha is a long descent away, warmer and greener, and the dzong there sits at the meeting of two rivers like something out of a painting that has decided to be a building instead. We arrived in the late afternoon when the light was going orange on the whitewash.
The climb everybody comes for
Tiger's Nest is the photograph you have already seen. What the photograph does not tell you is that it is a proper two to three hour climb, mostly uphill, at altitude, and that the monastery stays hidden until quite late in the walk and then simply appears, stuck to a cliff nine hundred metres above the valley floor.
You go the last stretch down a staircase and back up another, past a waterfall, and then you are inside, in the dark and the butter-lamp smell, with monks going about their afternoon as though there is nothing remarkable about the address.
What I took away
- Go in October or November. The air is clear and the passes deliver.
- Nothing is rushed. If you need an itinerary that ticks off sights hourly, this is the wrong country.
- Carry layers - Phuentsholing is subtropical and Dochu La is cold, on the same trip.
- The Tiger's Nest climb is achievable for most reasonably fit people. Start early, go slowly.
- Talk to the guides. The stories are better than anything you will read beforehand.
I came back with fewer photographs than I expected and a much longer list of things I want to go back for. That is usually the sign of a good trip.
Photographs: Taktsang Monastery by Dorjiphotos; Punakha Dzong by Kheng Singye Dorji (KSD); Druk Wangyal Chortens by Bernard Gagnon. All licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
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