Bliss in the Magic Kingdom: Why now is the perfect time to visit Bhutan | London Evening Standard

As I waited, I watched how sunlight streamed through the beautifully carved wooden windows, illuminating the room’s rich yellow and crimson silks. The clock on the wall was slightly askew, ticking silently, five hours ahead of the actual time. It’s just one of the memories I bring back to the real world as I cross an invisible but very real divide, because Bhutan is definitely another world I’ve seen.

The last time I was in Bhutan was in 2006; few people have heard of it, and even fewer have been there. As it slowly opens up to the world with its high-end, low-impact tourism model, which aims to protect the country by limiting the number of incoming tourists, it has gained column. These articles describe how Bhutan became a country the size of Switzerland on the eastern edge of the Himalayas. It is the last Buddhist kingdom in the world. It is the only carbon-negative country in the world, pledging to protect 60% of the country’s forests. The fourth king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, firmly believed that Gross National Happiness was more important than Gross National Product, guiding the government’s 2008 constitution. But even with these facts, you will be amazed within minutes of arrival, if not before you tightly cork the corkscrew before flying over the Himalayas into Paro Airport; its short runway becomes the longest straight road in the country The focus of national jokes.

Male passport officers, dressed in gho national dress, striped or plaid woven cloth, long black socks and shiny black leather shoes up to the knees, greet you before you are greeted by a landscape of whitewashed stone Dzongs, or monastic forts, Chortens or Stupas, fluttering prayer flags and spinning prayer wheels, ancient temples with flickering butter lamps and women in colorful long skirts, or kira, harvesting hay fields. The houses are all whitewashed, with sloping roofs and overlapping shingles held down by stones, often strewn with red peppers dried in the sun.

But in 2006, I was taken to a humble house for a lunch of Ema Datshi, the national dish, a mixture of cheese and chilli, and a cup of butter tea that I managed to get my son to drink, but this time I was transported To Six Senses Paro. It is one of four hotels the group opened in the kingdom last year, with a fifth due to open in the eastern Bumthang forest this spring.

The lunch I had there was an elegant circle of quinoa topped with avocado and a bouquet of flowers, prompting me to ask my guide what else had changed since I was last there. “Now we have mail vans instead of couriers,” he told me, “and the Internet and Facebook.” And, I added, looking at a map “there are passable roads that can take me from Thimphu to Punakha and Gangtee, that’s something I couldn’t do before.”

After acclimatizing for two days in Paro, we started our tour. Once again I succumbed to the magic of Bhutan. At Six Senses in Paro, the care and tenderness of the staff is everywhere, from the warming of my dressing gown before being helped into it after a spa treatment, to the hot water bottle and wood-burning bukhari stuffed into my bed at turndown The stove was lit in my bedroom until the wee hours of the morning.

We drove to Thimphu, the only capital in the world without traffic lights, just a policeman standing on a carved and painted wooden podium. Soaring 2,650 meters above town, Six Senses was designed to reflect a palace in the sky, a prayer pavilion surrounded by water that mirrors the blue pine forests of the surrounding mountains. From there to Punakha, a deep and fertile valley, where I tasted the potent Ara, a national drink of fermented or distilled high-altitude grains, and visited a 17th-century dzong by the river . In Gangtey, the endangered black-necked cranes migrate from Tibet to the wetlands every year, and on their arrival they apparently circled the Gangtey Monastery three times for the Himalayan red panda.

I saw no pandas and no dragons, and Bhutan is named after the local Dzongkha dialect as Druk Yul, or “Land of the Thunder Dragon”. The name is said to have originated from the belief that thunder was the voice of a dragon. However, anything seems possible in Bhutan.