Tours to Chimi Lhakhang

It takes around 20 minutes uphill walk through the rice and mustard fields surrounding Sopsokha village to reach the famous Chimi Lhakhang monastery. Along the way, you can’t fail to notice the pink, red and blue ejaculating penises painted in formal Buddhist style over local housefronts – a legacy of this area’s veneration of the poet and Tantric luminary, Drukpa Kinley, who built a chorten on the round hillock above the settlement in the mid 1400s. A monastery was later added in his honour, and this is now the an object of great veneration in Bhutan, notably among women wishing to conceive. Female visitors are blessed by being tapped on the head with the original ten-inch wooden phallus brought by Kinely from Tibet, the greatest treasure in an ornately appointed altar room dominated by a statue of the “Divine Madman” himself.