High on happiness
CHARLOTTE THOMPSON and her teenage children went trekking in the kingdom of Bhutan
MY SON was given a book of flags when he was ten years old and was entranced by one in particular. He told me it was Bhutan’s. I had never heard of the place. But the bold orange and yellow flag with a dragon emblazoned on it had him hooked. He spent the next decade recounting ever more fantastical details about the tiny landlocked nation in the Himalayas between China and India. Surely it was a mythical kingdom, he said, that bases its economy on gross national happiness, had a king who married four sisters and counts archery as the national sport.
Most boyhood obsessions come and go but this one stuck. So for his 18th birthday, my fifteen-year-old daughter and I left the flatlands of west London to fly with him past the extraordinary sight of Everest and K2 peeking out of the clouds and into the tiny airport of Paro.
We were met by Tashi, who, like every Bhutanese, wore a traditional gho, an embroidered skirt-suit, with knee-high socks and long white cuffs. He had studied world history and Shakespeare at school, but also knew all about football, films and trashy TV, as well as every conceivable game of cards – a shared obsession. His respect and deep love for his country, its myths and legends, monarchy and Buddhism added hugely to our fun.
The first day was described as a gentle acclimatisation stroll, but in fact meant clambering vertically up a well-trodden track to the Taktsang Goemba (Tiger’s Nest) monastery. This, the most famous and most visited landmark in the country, is carved out of a vertiginous granite cliff, 900m above Paro valley. The white-washed temples seemed impossible to reach as they appeared and disappeared in and out of the clouds round every bend of the path. The interiors were dark, lit only by guttering butter lamps, and decorated with Buddhist symbols. Tashi told us that Guru Rinpoche, its founder, flew there on the back of his consort, a tigress, which seemed a fitting myth for such an otherworldly place.
The following day we began our trek proper, up to the ridgeline far above to trace the old drovers’ routes to the capital, Thimphu. We set off through apple orchards and then climbed up through pine, birch and rhododendron forests towards the fluttering prayer flags at our first campsite, with Paro a remote 1,000m below.
The trek was no five-star luxury, despite the fact that it took eight ponies