Sikkim & Bhutan

The flight north to Bagdogra, on the plains below the hills, then three hours of climbing to Darjeeling. The road winds up through forest and tea estates, and for the last stretch into town it runs beside the narrow-gauge line of the toy train, crossing and recrossing the rails.

The rest of the day is yours in the ‘Queen of the Hills’. Walk up to Chowrasta, the open square at the top of the Mall, for tea and the view, and take it easy: Darjeeling is a little over 2,000 metres up, and the first evening is for resting.

North-west into Sikkim, down to the river at the border and up again to Pelling, a small hill town at more than 6,000 feet that looks straight across the valley at Kanchenjunga. At dusk the snows hold the light long after the valley below has gone dark.

In the afternoon, Pemayangtse, one of the oldest and most important monasteries in Sikkim, of the Nyingma school: founded in the seventeenth century and enlarged in 1705, its three storeys are painted with murals and filled with images. On the top floor is its treasure, Zangdok Palri, the heavenly palace of Guru Rinpoche, carved and painted in wood, seven tiers high, by a single lama.

A morning in Gangtok, beginning at the Do Drul Chorten, the stupa built in 1945 by Trulshik Rinpoche, a lama of the Nyingma school. Its gilded spire rises above a ring of 108 prayer wheels, each carved with mantras, which pilgrims turn as they walk round it clockwise.

Then out to Rumtek, the Dharma Chakra Centre, built in the 1960s by the 16th Karmapa, head of the Karma Kagyu school, as his seat in exile, on the plan of his monastery at Tsurphu in Tibet. The four guardian kings of the directions are painted at the entrance; inside, below paintings of the Kagyu masters and the Eight Bodhisattvas, a ten-foot Buddha Shakyamuni sits between his two chief disciples, Shariputra and Maudgalyayana. The rest of the day is free.

Today you leave India by road: down out of the hills and east across the Dooars — the tea-garden plains below Bhutan, named for the ‘doors’ into the mountains — to Jaigaon, and through the Bhutan Gate into Phuentsholing, Bhutan’s border town, barely 300 metres above sea level.

At the border you stop to clear immigration; your visa or permit for Bhutan is arranged with us in advance. The change is immediate — national dress, Dzongkha lettering over the shops, a slower pace in the street — and the evening is yours to walk the town.

A full day in the capital. It begins at Buddha Point, Kuensel Phodrang, where the Buddha Dordenma, the largest statue of the Buddha in the country, looks down the valley, and you can offer a prayer and take in the whole of Thimphu. Then the National Memorial Chorten, raised in 1974 in memory of the Third King, where elders walk round all day murmuring mantras and turning the prayer wheels.

Next, Changangkha Lhakhang, one of the oldest temples in the valley, on its ridge above the town, where parents bring newborn children to be blessed and named. Its main image is Chenrezig, the bodhisattva of compassion, with eleven heads.

In the afternoon, the Textile Museum, for Bhutan’s weaving, old and new; the Folk Heritage Museum, a farmhouse of rammed earth and timber furnished as a family lived in it; and Tashichho Dzong, the fortress-monastery that holds the King’s throne room and offices of the government. The day ends at the Handicrafts Emporium and the crafts bazaar: thangkas, ceramics, slate, wood carving, jewellery and hand-woven cloth.

A walking morning: about two hours there and back, across the river and up through the rice fields to Khamsum Yulley Namgyal Chorten, a temple built in the shape of a chorten in the 1990s, to bring peace and keep evil away. Its shrines hold images of wrathful protector deities, and from the roof you look down the length of the valley.

In the afternoon, Sangchhen Dorji Lhuendrup Lhakhang, a nunnery on a pine ridge above the Punakha and Wangdue Phodrang valleys, where a fourteen-foot bronze of Avalokiteshvara stands with the Twenty-One Taras and Tsepamay, the Buddha of long life. Then out to Talo, a village on a plateau with the mountains all round, and its monastery, Talo Sangnacholing.

An early start for Taktsang, the Tiger’s Nest, built in 1692 around a cave in a cliff some 900 metres above the Paro valley. The legend is that Guru Rinpoche, the eighth-century Indian master revered in Bhutan as the second Buddha, flew here on the back of a tigress — a disciple who had taken that form — to meditate in the cave; Taktsang means ‘tigress’s lair’.

The path climbs steadily through pine forest hung with prayer flags, for about two hours, to the viewpoint facing the monastery. It is a real uphill walk, for the fit only, and the monastery itself lies beyond, down and up a long flight of steps beside a waterfall.

Or, if you would rather not climb, drive about an hour up to the Chele La, at 3,988 metres one of the highest road passes in Bhutan, strung with prayer flags, with Jomolhari and Jichu Drake in view on a clear day. In spring and early summer there are wild roses, primulas and deep blue iris in the forest, and rhododendrons from white to scarlet.