Bhutan Highlights

One of our favourite places to get accustomed to the city’s distinctive ambience is the College Street Coffee House on Bankim Chatterjee Street– a favourite hangout for Bengali intellectuals and artists. Grab a table under one of the paddle fans, order a dosa and masala chai from one of the turbaned waiters and you’ll soon be drawn in to the local ‘adda’, or chit-chat.

Approached by spectacular flight path, the town’s airport at Paro is the principal arrival point for foreign travellers. A couple of hours’ drive away, Thimpu became the capital of Bhutan in 1961, since when it’s swollen to a town of around 80,000 people – the perfect place to get to grips with life in modern Bhutan.

During the fifth day of your trip, you’ll tour the Bhutanese capital’s impressive dzongs (fortress-monasteries), the King’s Memorial Chorten, Buddhist painting school and national folk museum, made of rammed earth to resemble a traditional farmstead. In the city’s market, your guide will point out local delicacies such as jellied cow skin and fried fern and don’t miss the chance to touch a takin, Bhutan’s national animal, which looks like a cross between a cow and a goat and survives in the nearby Mothitang Reserve.

The 17th century dzong at Gangtey is this awesome valley’s prime religious monument, although most visitors come in search of black-necked cranes. A festival in which local children wear specially made crane masks is held in the monastery each November to welcome their arrival. The other major event here is tsechu, which usually falls in October, when monks perform traditional Cham dances in the monastery courtyard. Preserved in one of Gangteng’s inner shrines is one of the country’s more gruesome relics: the hands of a British army officer killed in a battle with Bhutanese forces in 1864.

Surrounded by snow peaks and old-growth forest, the beautiful Phobjikha Valley is home to a unique conservation initiative, where migratory black-neck cranes, which pass through here in the winter months between October and March, are protected by local wardens and volunteers. The centre provides information about the birds and their migration, and if your visit coincides with their stay in the village you’ll be able to observe them grazing on the valley floor through telescopes.

Around 25km east of Thimphu, Punakha is the home of one of the country’s most beautiful monasteries, built around 1638 at the confluence of two rivers. The complex is a showcase of Bhutanese craftsmanship, with a particularly impressive assembly hall featuring fine clay statues and intricate murals. The dzong also hosts a well-known festival, during which an enormous thondrol ‒ an extraordinary appliquéd sacred banner ‒ is unfurled, conferring merit on all who see it.

Shops, restaurants and offices in richly carved traditional buildings line the main street of Paro, where two of eastern Bhutan’s main rivers meet. The town is best known locally for the splendid Rinpung Dzong, overlooking the river, whose most valuable possession is a giant embroidered tapestry, or thondrol (thangka), depicting the dzong’s founding father, Guru Rincpoche; the treasure is unrolled only once a year on the morning of the annual tsechu (festival). On the hill behind rests the National Museum in a beautifully restored watchtower, the Ta Dzong, built in the 1650s to guard Paro’s dzong.

Bhutan’s most photographed monument, the Taktshang Monastery, commonly known as the ‘Tiger’s Nest’, is wedged into a lofty cliff nearly a vertical kilometre above a forested valley. Rock-cut steps and rickety bridges connect its four wings, whose golden pagoda roofs, fluttering prayer flags and distempered walls are dwarfed by the vista of forested hills and snow-capped mountains unfolding on all sides – a spectacle worth the journey to Bhutan alone!

Traditional bows and arrows made of bamboo are used in Bhutan to play our National sport, archery. It was designated as the National Sport of Bhutan in 1971, befitting its historical and socio-cultural significance; however, archery has been practised in the country long before then and is considered a way of socialization, communication, and development of relations between people. Emotions run high during competitions.