Paro
A monastery on the cliff. A valley you won't want to leave.
You arrive in Paro by one of the most beautiful — and most respected — landings in commercial aviation: a slow descent between Himalayan peaks into a valley so green and so quiet it doesn't quite feel real. Step off the plane and the air smells of pine and woodsmoke. You are, almost immediately, somewhere else entirely.
Everyone comes to Paro for the climb to Taktsang, the Tiger's Nest monastery, glued impossibly to a cliff 900 metres above the valley floor. It is exactly as extraordinary as the photographs suggest. What the photographs can't tell you is how the climb itself rearranges you — slow switchbacks through old-growth forest, prayer flags, the bell of a single grazing yak.
Your Charlii representative is a Bhutanese guide trained at the Royal Institute. After the climb she'll bring you to a farmhouse her aunt runs in the lower valley, draw you a steaming hot stone bath flavoured with artemisia, and pour you ara — the local rice spirit — until you've forgotten how tired your legs were supposed to be.
"Don't rush down from Tiger's Nest. The cafeteria halfway up serves the best ema datshi in the valley and the views are arguably better than from the monastery itself."
