Bhutan: Thimphu, Punakha, and the drive between

Almost everything written about the cost of Bhutan is written for a passport that is not mine. The figure that dominates every search result — USD 100 per person per night — is the international Sustainable Development Fee. On an Indian passport the same fee is Nu 1,200 a night, payable in rupees.

Same country, same fee, roughly a seventh of the price.

That one fact decides what kind of trip Bhutan can be. At a hundred dollars a night you count days and you build a checklist to justify them. At twelve hundred rupees you can afford to stay a week and do very little, which is the only way I still enjoy travelling.

Check it before you budget rather than trusting this page: the reduced rate is currently set to run to 31 August 2027, and Bhutan has revised the fee more than once already.

The paperwork nobody warned me about

I did not drive into Bhutan. I flew — Delhi to Kathmandu, a few days in the valley, then Kathmandu to Paro — and I very nearly did not make the second flight.

I had no idea that an Indian passport by itself was not going to get me on that aircraft, and that I also needed a certificate from the Indian Embassy in Kathmandu. I found this out at the airport, on the morning of the flight. What followed was a sprint across the city to the embassy, where the staff were fast and genuinely helpful about a problem entirely of my own making, and then a sprint back. I made the flight.

So: the rules for an Indian travelling to Nepal are not the rules for an Indian travelling onward from Nepal to Bhutan, even though the two get talked about interchangeably. Flying in from a third country is its own case. Work out what your exact route needs, and work it out before the day.

The flight in is part of the trip

The Kathmandu–Paro leg tracks east along the Himalaya. On a clear morning the big peaks sit out of the left-hand windows for most of the first half, close enough that people stop pretending to be casual about it.

It is the only flight I have been on where the view was the reason to be awake.

Thimphu, Punakha, and the drive between

The two towns are a few hours apart and the road between them climbs over a pass to get there. That drive is the part I would keep if I had to throw the rest of the itinerary away.

Punakha deserves nights either side of it rather than an afternoon on the way past. The drop out of the hills into the valley is the kind of thing you want to arrive at tired and leave from rested.

Tiger's Nest, and the thing it is not

I climbed to Taktsang, and I would climb it again. It earns every photograph taken of it, and the walk up is better than the arrival.

It is also the one part of the week that felt like visiting a famous place rather than being in a country. Everybody is on the same path, for the same reason, at the same hours.

So do it — start early, and let it be one morning of the trip rather than the reason for the trip. If you have three days in Bhutan and you spend one of them here, you have not really been to Bhutan; you have been to its most photographed staircase.

The mornings are the reason

What I wrote at the time, and still agree with:

Bhutan is beautiful. People here are caring and happy. It's really cold. I love waking up early here, brewing coffee and working on what I love to.

That is the entire review. It was properly cold, I was awake before anything opened, and the best two hours of every day were finished before the first item on anyone's itinerary began.

If you plan a day around sights, Bhutan will feel thin — there are not many, and the ones there are close early. If what you actually want is a cold morning, a window, and two uninterrupted hours, it is close to the best place I have been.

Carbon negative, seen up close

Bhutan is the most famous of the handful of countries that absorb more carbon than they emit, and it is not a claim you have to take on trust. You can see it in how little of the country has ever been cleared — forest to the ridgeline, in every direction, for hours at a time.

It is a rare place where the thing on the brochure turns out to be the thing in front of you.