A Passage to Bhutan’s Timeless Heritage

Seven days lets Bhutan open at its own pace. This route runs from Paro through the capital to the glacial bowl of Phobjikha, then down into the warm rice valleys of Punakha before returning west for the Tiger’s Nest.

In Thimphu you spend time with the people who keep the thirteen traditional arts alive: painters, weavers and silversmiths at work, not on display. Phobjikha is something else entirely, a wide treeless valley at three thousand metres where black-necked cranes winter, best understood on foot along the Gangtey Nature Trail.

Punakha brings the warmest days and the grandest architecture. Punakha Dzong rises at the meeting of two rivers, and the communities along the Mo Chhu still farm the way their grandparents did. The journey closes with the Taktsang hike and a farewell Bhutanese meal in a Paro farmhouse.