At Damchen Lhakhang, a tiny 14th century monastery in Bhutan’s Gangtey valley, a dozen monks sit cross-legged, faintly swaying as they chant. A hundred butterlamps flicker, and through the glassless windows alpenglow settles over the foothills of the eastern Himalayas.
The monks, mostly young, have come for a week from a far-off valley to practise their devotions; I had seen them the previous day disgorging from the bus. They sit in the chorten turning over leaves of sacred text written in a script like barbed wire on paper made from the boiled bark of the Himalayan firethorn.
Enveloped in the mountainous belt between China and India, landlocked Bhutan, approximately the size of Switzerland, is carved into a sequence of valleys, cut off from one another for most of the region’s history, let alone from the world.
Bhutan didn’t have an airport until 1983. Much of the less developed east still functions as a non-cash barter economy – you can pay taxes in hand-woven textiles.
‘Wellness retreats’ can be rather counterproductive – no matter how fine the massages and total the seclusion – as they tend to melt away as soon as the hard shoulder of the M1 rushes back into view. The Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, though, is the real deal when it comes to refresher breaks. To a certain extent, the whole country, known by its people as Druk Yul, is a spa.
Splendour: Sara Wheeler journeys through the Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan. Above, sunset bathes the ‘magnificent’ Punakha Dzong fortress and the Mo Chhu river
After Damchen Lhakhang, I hike to the 12,300ft Kayche La pass through forests of rhododendron, hemlock and poinsettia taller than me.
In the valley far below, black-necked cranes are picking at the potato fields. Spuds are the main cash crop, since Gangtey is too high even for red rice to grow. The sacred cranes, considered reincarnated beings, migrate to these wetlands for the winter.
King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuk, head of government as well as 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 wellbeing.
People do seem pretty happy. There are 800,000 Bhutanese but not a single set of traffic lights in the whole country.
Sara stays in several Six Senses lodges during her visit. Above – poolside seats offer a serene view of the mountains that surround the Six Senses lodge at Thimphu, the capital
Most impressively, Bhutan is carbon neutral, which means its emissions are net zero. Broadleaf and conifer forest covers most of the lowlands.
Tibetan culture has permeated every aspect of Bhutanese life from architecture (houses built from interlocking wood panels, without nails, often with ornately embellished overhangs and trefoil arches) to cuisine.
The unexpectedly fabulous Bhutanese food makes heavy use of Himalayan herbs, pungent honeys, shrubs such as wild sea buckthorn, steamed dumplings (momo) and mountains of chillies. Paro in the west lies on the old trading route to Tibet.
A young man tells me his grandfather had walked those paths. ‘Gold traders would come down and stay at my grandmother’s on their way to India. They offered her shards of gold when they left the next morning, but she didn’t know what gold was, so she didn’t take any.’
Glory: Above is the Dordenma Buddha statue in Thimphu, which stands 169ft tall. On the slopes outside Thimphu Sara has a one-to-one guided meditation with a Buddhist master
In each valley, at least one gung chim (farmhouse) has a wooden bathtub in which people can place stones from the river and heat them, enabling the whole 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 go for the full Bhutanese works. In Gangtey I have a steam-box treatment – your head stays out of the box – and, since I have knackered knees like everyone my age, I also have my first go at Sukshma vyayam, a yogic practice that supposedly loosens joints and releases energy. And, do you know, it did!
To treat my equally knackered mind, on the slopes outside Thimphu, the capital, I take a one-to-one guided meditation with a rinpoche, or Buddhist master.
Every Bhutanese is obliged to make a pilgrimage once in their life to Taktsang, the nine-temple Tiger’s Nest monastery in Paro Valley (seen above), reveals Sara
We sit there quietly while griffin vultures wheel in the thermals outside. My rinpoche tells me to meditate for one minute, 20 times a day. There is something holistic about everything in Bhutan.
In each valley, I stay in a Six Senses lodge – luxurious timber low-rises that seem to emerge from the ground like the black pines. There are five in the country, strung out in a necklace, and I travel between them in a car with a driver and guide, both of whom stay with me for eight days. No drive is longer than five hours.
Each of Bhutan’s 20 dzongs, or regions, has its own fortress, most of them built in the 17th century.
Punakha Dzong on the confluence of the Pho Chhu and the Mo Chhu is the most magnificent. In its innermost sanctum, schoolgirls are performing the kora, walking clockwise round walls of prayer wheels.
Every Bhutanese is obliged to make a pilgrimage once in their life to Taktsang, the nine-temple Tiger’s Nest monastery in Paro Valley. Taktsang is Bhutan’s main tourist attraction. (It’s worth using walking poles – my guide has a pair for me – for the three-mile hike up.)
People take religion seriously in Bhutan, and not just at the monasteries. They prostrate themselves on the street on the way to work. Even the black-necked cranes circle the Gangtey monastery three times in a clockwise direction when they fly in from Tibet.
Around Gangtey and Punakha, semi-nomadic yak herders have just come down for the summer and are milling in the lanes with their pack-ponies. An elite group of Bhutanese herders harvest cordyceps sinensis, also known as the caterpillar fungus, which grows only above 11,500ft and is hugely prized in China for its immunity-boosting properties.
Culture: Sara says she ‘loves everything about’ Bhutan. Above, a masked dancer performs
Bhutan only has one helicopter, but you occasionally hear its whirring blades in the valleys, landing to collect baskets of cordyceps from herders who have grown rich. This rare fungus lives as a parasite on particular moths, and is dangerous to collect.
Bhutan is not a paradise. Thimphu already has a Starbucks. There is a brain drain (to western Australia, mostly). A klaxon of doom sounds from the new city of Gelephu, which His Majesty announced last year.
This ‘special administrative region’ will have a rail link to India – the first ever connecting Bhutan with the world beyond. 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 are hanging on to their cultural identity. Since opening up to the outside world in the 1970s, the country has fostered high-income, low-impact tourism, charging $100 per day per person as a sustainable development fee – effectively a tourist tax. It seems to be working.
In many ways, Druk Yul, Land of the Thunder Dragon, is a model of what tourism can be. I love everything about it.