At Damchen Lhakhang, a small 14th-century monastery in Bhutan’s Gangtey Valley, a dozen monks sit cross-legged, swaying slightly as they chant. A hundred butter lamps flicker, and through glassless windows, the alpine glow settles on the foothills of the eastern Himalayas.
The monks, mostly young, have come from a distant valley to practice their devotions for a week; I had seen them the day before getting off the bus. They sit at the chorten and leaf through sheets of sacred text written in a calligraphy that looks like barbed wire on paper made from the boiled bark of the Himalayan firethorn.
Tucked into the mountain belt between China and India, Bhutan, a landlocked country roughly the size of Switzerland, is carved into a sequence of valleys, isolated from one another for most of the region’s history, let alone the world.
Bhutan did not have an airport until 1983. Much of the less developed east still functions as a cashless barter economy: taxes are paid in hand-woven textiles.
Wellness retreats can be pretty counter-intuitive, no matter how good the massages and how completely secluded they are, as they tend to disappear as soon as you come back into sight of the shoulder of the M1. But the Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan is a haven for restorative rest. To a certain extent, the whole country, known to its inhabitants as Druk Yul, is a spa.
Splendour: Sara Wheeler travels through the Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan. Above, the sunset bathes the “magnificent” Punakha Dzong fortress and the Mo Chhu River
After Damchen Lhakhang, I hike up to the 12,300-foot Kayche La Pass through forests of rhododendrons, hemlocks and poinsettias taller than me.
In the valley far below, black-necked cranes peck at potato fields. Potatoes are the main cash crop, as the Gangtey is too high even for red rice to grow. Sacred cranes, considered reincarnated beings, migrate to these wetlands to spend the winter.
King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuk, head of government and the nation, rules as a benign Buddhist despot. It was his father, the fourth king, who devised the Gross National Happiness Index to replace Gross National Product as an indicator of well-being.
People seem very happy. There are 800,000 Bhutanese, but there is not a single traffic light in the whole country.
Sara stays at several Six Senses hostels during her visit. Above: Poolside seating offers a serene view of the mountains surrounding the Six Senses hostel in Thimphu, the capital.
Most impressively, Bhutan is carbon neutral, meaning its emissions are zero. Broad-leaved and coniferous forests cover most of the lowlands.
Tibetan culture has permeated every aspect of Bhutanese life, from architecture (houses built from interlocking, nail-free wooden panels, often with ornate eaves and trefoil arches) to cuisine.
The surprisingly fabulous Bhutanese food makes abundant use of Himalayan herbs, spicy honeys, shrubs such as wild sea buckthorn, steamed dumplings (momo) and mountains of chillies. Paro, in the west, lies on the ancient trade route to Tibet.
A young man tells me that his grandfather had travelled these roads. “Gold traders used to come to my grandmother’s house when they went to India and stay there. When they left the next morning, they would offer her pieces of gold, but she didn’t know what gold was, so she didn’t accept them.”
Gloria: Above is the statue of Buddha Dordenma in Thimphu, which stands 52 metres high. On the hillsides outside Thimphu, Sara has a one-on-one guided meditation with a Buddhist teacher.
In every valley, at least one gung chim (cottage) has a wooden tub into which people can place river stones and heat them, allowing the entire village to enjoy a famous Bhutanese hot stone massage. And this extraordinarily relaxing therapy is available at Six Senses lodges in Thimphu and Bumthang.
I devote myself to the full Bhutanese exercises. In Gangtey I undergo a steam box treatment (the head is kept outside the box) and, as my knees are shot like everyone else my age, I also try my hand at Sukshma vyayam, a yogic practice that is supposed to relax the joints and release energy. And it did!
To treat my equally exhausted mind, on the hillsides outside Thimphu, the capital, I do a one-on-one guided meditation with a rinpoche, or Buddhist teacher.
Every Bhutanese is obliged to make a pilgrimage once in their lifetime to Taktsang, the nine-temple Tiger’s Nest monastery in the Paro Valley (see above), reveals Sara
We sit there in silence as griffon vultures circle in the thermals outside. My rinpoche tells me to meditate for a minute, twenty times a day. There is something holistic about everything in Bhutan.
In each valley I stay in a Six Senses lodge: luxurious low wooden buildings that seem to rise out of the ground like black pines. There are five in the country, arranged like a necklace, and I travel between them in a car with a driver and guide, who stay with me for eight days. No journey takes more than five hours.
Each of Bhutan’s 20 dzongs or regions has its own fortress, most of them built in the 17th century.
The Punakha Dzong, at the confluence of the Pho Chhu and Mo Chhu rivers, is the most magnificent. In its innermost sanctuary, schoolgirls sing the kora, walking clockwise around the walls of prayer wheels.
Every Bhutanese is obliged to make the pilgrimage at least once in their life to Taktsang, the nine-temple Tiger’s Nest monastery in the Paro Valley. Taktsang is Bhutan’s top tourist attraction (it’s worth using walking sticks – my guide gave me a pair for myself) for the five-kilometre climb.
In Bhutan, religion is taken seriously, and not just in the monasteries. People prostrate themselves in the street on their way to work. Even the black-necked cranes circle Gangtey Monastery three times clockwise when they fly in from Tibet.
Around Gangtey and Punakha, semi-nomadic yak herders have just arrived for the summer and are wandering the trails with their pack ponies. A select group of Bhutanese herders are collecting cordyceps sinensis, also known as caterpillar fungus, which grows only above 3,500 metres and is highly prized in China for its immune-boosting properties.
Culture: Sara says she “loves everything about Bhutan.” Above, a masked dancer performs
Bhutan has only one helicopter, but occasionally you can hear the whirring of its blades in the valleys, landing to collect baskets of cordyceps from wealthy shepherds. This rare fungus lives as a parasite on certain moths and is dangerous to collect.
Bhutan is not a paradise. Thimphu already has a Starbucks. There is a brain drain (especially to Western Australia). A klaxon of doom sounds from the new town of Gelephu, which His Majesty announced last year.
This “special administrative region” will have a rail link to India, the first to connect Bhutan to the rest of the world. And despotism always has a dark side. The gross national happiness of the persecuted ethnic Nepalese community is not factored into the overall equation.
Still, the Bhutanese cling to their cultural identity. Since opening up to the outside world in the 1970s, the country has encouraged high-income, low-impact tourism, charging $100 per person per day as a sustainable development fee (effectively a tourist tax). It seems to be working.
In many ways, Druk Yul, the land of the Thunder Dragon, is a model of what tourism can be. I love everything about it.
