THE Bhutan CURE
BHUTAN IS A MAGICAL HIMALAYAN KINGDOM THAT FOR CENTURIES WAS CLOSED TO OUTSIDERS. SOPHY ROBERTS TAKES HER FAMILY TO EXPLORE THE BACKCOUNTRY, IN THE BELIEF THERE’S NOTHING LIKE THE BHUTAN CURE TO WEAN EVERYONE OFF DIGITAL
Left: The view from COMO Uma Punakha. Right: The author's son, Danny, on his first visit to Bhutan in 2011
the first time I travelled to Bhutan, I took my six-year-old son, Danny. Detractors told me I was crazy. The altitude was dangerous; in this landlocked Himalayan country, you land at 2,200m, while the mountain passes between valleys top a breathless 3,800m. My nervous mother-in-law had Googled the local roads and declared the hairpin turns lethal. As for Buddhism, with its complicated belief system, it would go straight over a child’s head. Wait until he is older, said my friends, when he can understand the philosophy. I quietly countered that it was better to expose Danny to the idea of saints riding on the backs of flying tigers while he still believed in tooth fairies. And I was right: that trip has never left him. Now aged 13, my son is far more interested in Buddhism than the Church of England doctrine he was Christened into. Bhutan was where his passion for photography began, with a cheap oneuse Kodak film camera; the pictures are part of a journal of drawings he made, which I treasure. Nor will he easily forget the remark a local Bhutanese kid made when we came face-to-face with a takin – Bhutan’s national animal, about the size of a fat cow, with two-toed hooves, a blubbery backside and a grotesque Roman nose. Danny said the animal looked odd. The kid standing close to him said not as strange as an octopus. Later, when we talked it through, the remark made perfect sense, underlining the extent, and exoticism, of our differences: in Bhutan, there is no sea, just as in Europe, the yeti isn’t a protected species. Bhutan is the only government in the world that has a takin sanctuary; and the only one that has put the mythical yeti under national park protection.
So that’s why we’ve come back, this time with my whole family, including my husband and my second child, Jack, who is 10 – to be inspired by a world other than our own. A place where the main highways are spic-and-span, and the altitude is no bother if you don’t try to tackle it at the same pace as Manhattan. My husband and I have hit the end of the year exhausted. We need time out, and a little bit of magic, to feel transported from our everyday reality dominated by deadlines, social media and our children’s gaming habits. We need The Bhutan Cure, which is much more than the sum of the country’s luxury hotel experiences. It is about immersion without stress, sinking into the Himalayas’ rhythms while thinking about nothing but finding the space to absorb it. So we book COMO’s new seven-night ‘Family Himalayan Explorer’ itinerary, giving us two nights at COMO Uma Punakha and five at COMO Uma Paro. Our trip includes a private guide and driver to take care of every hike, temple visit and archery lesson. COMO even book our visas, to a place that as recently as 1974 forbade outsiders.
Bhutan’s capital, Thimphu, has no traffic lights and no space for an airport. Paro, a modest settlement nearby, is therefore where all international flights come in, being one of few valleys in Bhutan with the length and breadth to accommodate large planes. Mountains hem in the runway. Pretty farmhouses prick the hillsides – two-, three-storey wood-and-brick homes, with roofs carefully pitched for drying chillies in summer, and shedding snow in winter. This traditional architectural vernacular is controlled by the Bhutanese government. It is the same for the country’s forests. More than 70 per cent of the country is covered in woodland, with over 50 per cent under some kind of environmental protection – the highest percentage in Asia – which means much of the blue pine and rhododendron is just as pristine as it was in the seventeenth century, when Tibetans invaded this geopolitical buffer zone, with China to the north, and India to the south. But ecological heritage is not the only thing this country preserves: the Bhutanese wear national dress – men in gho, like short tunics, worn with long socks pulled up to the knee, and women in kira, which are elegant full-length dresses. Thus attired, our guide and driver meet us and whisk
us up over Dochula – an iconic road pass, at 3,100 metres – passing white peaks and 108 holy chortens that waft with the smell of burning juniper. Four hours later, we descend through cedars shrouded in mist into the Punakha Valley. Punakha is 1,000 metres lower than Paro – low enough for orange trees to grow – and thus the perfect place to acclimatise, not only to the thin air, but to being in an entirely otherworldly place which air travel confuses with compressions of space and time.
Our base is COMO Uma Punakha – just eight rooms and two villas, sitting on a small promontory above the Mo Chuu River at the head of the valley. Hand-painted murals on room walls, woodburning stoves and Bhutanese greens, spices and butters sourced from local farmers lend a distinct sense of place. Views take in the thread of silver river, snow-covered peaks at the back of the valley, and in the far distance, Khamsum Yulley Namgyal Chorten, a temple we hike to the next day. COMO Uma Punakha isn’t trying to keep guests confined to a pool lounger; it intends to share its place in the world with those who have ventured this far to discover it.
Which is what we do, hitting a slipstream through the Mo Chuu river on a relaxed river rafting trip. We float past local children diving into the clear Himalayan water, past fields being ploughed by oxen. We wave at monks in their maroon robes, and even watch Bhutan’s King pass by in a modest cavalcade of cars. Sometimes the water froths with gentle rage; the rest of the time, it’s as peaceful as the sound of birds, or the call to prayer as monks are summoned into the heart of Punakha Dzong. In 2011, this fortress-monastery was where the current King, affectionately known as K5, was married to Queen Jetsun Pema. The couple’s faces adorn badges pinned to nearly every local’s breast.
Just as the King makes a point of being among his people, so too does COMO Uma Punakha ensure its guests make close contact with the country they are visiting. We stop at a Bhutanese farmhouse and share their bread – a deep-fried khabzay. The food is wholesome – better than any health food shop in New York City. The staple is a nutty red rice. The chillies are fiery. The green beans taste just as they should, grown in a pesticide-free earth. All of those ingredients find their way on to our plates back at the lodge, as well as into wholesome COMO picnics. In the evenings, when we have worked up hearty appetites, the local Matsutake mushroom is served in warming broths. Freshly-made dumplings come with a side of sun-dried chilli sauce.
The route is never easy, but the rewards are transcendental
But it is not until we get to Paro Valley, staying at COMO Uma Paro, that my children stop noticing the absence of their iPhones which we confiscated on the plane in. They think that playing archery, Bhutan’s national sport, is the most exciting activity yet – that and roasting marshmallows around the lodge’s courtyard bonfire. My husband disappears to enjoy a Bhutanese hot stone bath, losing an afternoon to a long soak in natural herbs before an hour with a masseur. But while the lodge luxuries are many, it’s the moments we're alone in the mountains that we savour most of all. On a full-day hike to the Temple of the Floating Goddess, we see nobody, except for monks and temple dogs. Where else in the world can that happen on the busy New Year holiday? But then where else in the world do monasteries cling to hillsides like limpets to a rock.
On our penultimate day, we make the four-hour early morning climb to Taktsang ‘Tiger’s Nest’ Monastery, perched 3,100 metres above the Paro Valley. It was here that Guru Rinpoche is said to have brought Buddhism to Bhutan from Tibet, flying on the back of a tigress. The sensations are all-enveloping. The smell of hot dust and butter lamps. The jangle of bells on a horse, the animal carrying a Buddhist lama. The deep rumble of tightly-skinned drums and cymbals. Everything in Bhutan touches your senses: the early morning fog in the forest, the fluttering prayer flags atop white crested mountains, the time a stranger gives to talk when you encounter each other on a narrow mountain pathway. But this journey to Tiger’s Nest is different, not least because it’s the most challenging hike yet – a steep, precipitous route, shared with strings of ponies carrying supplies up to the monastery. The higher we go, the more lichens hang from pines. The air gets thinner, purer. The rhododendrons bloom in bright reds, like spots of blood in a thick, green forest. The children are tired, but also full of ambition to get a bigger glimpse of the prize. And then the view opens up – to a gravity-defying monastery built against a vertical slab of granite. The view has its metaphor in Buddhism, of course: the route is never easy, but the rewards are transcendental. That gets to the heart of what Bhutan is about – and why I’m glad my children are with me, and why this journey will never leave them. It’s a place that sits outside the usual boundaries we put around what's possible, or even real, be it mythical beasts or physical challenges. It’s a place that in pushing you to explore, brings a family closer together in a digitally distracting world.
For more information on stays at COMO Uma Paro and COMO Uma Punakha, please contact res.uma.bhutan@comohotels.com.
Hiking in the Punakha and Paro Valleys, visiting temples, village homes and meeting locals