First and last days in Bhutan

OK, these are going to be the last photos of Bhutan. I really could go on forever, but no one needs to see all 600 photos.

Really, I need to just stop taking photos.

The photo with the airplane wasn’t really my first day in Bhutan, but on the tail end of the second flight into that airport, which was incredible.

Essentially, you’re landing in a valley, and it’s very narrow. The runway is also very short. Here’s what Wiki has to say about it:

“The airport is located … in a deep valley on the bank of the river Paro Chhu With surrounding peaks as high as 18,000 ft it is considered one of the world's most challenging airports. As of October 2009, only eight pilots in the world were certified to land at the airport. Flights at Paro are allowed under visual meteorological conditions only and are restricted to daylight hours from sunrise to sunset.”

Essentially, it is one scary airport, but you don’t really notice it as you’re coming down. You see mountains close on either side, but it just doesn’t strike you how difficult it must be to land a plane there. Or it doesn’t strike most people, anyway. I was seated next to a pilot (one of the people in my group) and she was explaining it to me, not that I really wanted to hear it.

It was a long way away

But once we landed, we just got out and gaped. It’s absolutely fantastic, and then you look up and down and see exactly how narrow the place was that the jet came through .

So that was the first cool thing – the arrival.

One of the last cool things (can’t say the last one because the final takeoff would be that) was climbing Tiger’s Nest. It’s a monastery on a cliff – 900 meters up on a cliff.

The legend is that Guru Rimpashay (that’s phoenetic; I don’t care to look it up) flew up on a tigeress’ back there and meditated, or something like that. Again, I wasn’t at all into the Buddhism.

The climb was fantastic, though. I was sick as a dog but somehow wound up in the lead of the 14 of us, along with one of the other travelers. She was 68 and a total badass. I mean, she’d broken her ankle something like two months before and had done therapy on fast-forward so that she could still go. She was awesome.

To me, the trek there was better than the site itself; to me, it was just another monastery. But to say you made it was incredible – it took about two hours to get there, and that was at a fairly rapid pace.

Here’s Wiki again:

Closer shot

“The rock slopes are very steep (almost vertical) and the monastery buildings are built into the rock face. Though it looks formidable, the monastery complex has access from several directions, such as the northwest path through the forest, from the south along the path used by devotees, and from the north (access over the rocky plateau, which is called the “Hundred Thousand Fairies” known as Bumda (hBum-brag). A mule track leading to it passes through pine forest that is colorfully festooned with moss and prayer flags.”

After hiking for about an hour and a half of switchbacks going up the mountain, you get to a point where it’s across from you, but there are hundreds of stairs between you and it. About 800, that is. First you go down, cross below hundreds of prayer flags and one waterfall, and then you have to go back up to it.

It was nice to see, but even better to be able to say I did it.