The sun will take some time to penetrate this steeply enclosed ravine, so breakfast is eaten with gloves, hats and scarves on. Our horse drivers are tucking into mounds of red rice and chillies.
‘They can’t move without rice and chilli,’ says Doje. ‘Each man eats a kilo of rice a day.’
I ask him what they eat on special occasions.
‘Rice,’ he says, predictably. ‘Rice with green chilli. Pork slices, dried spinach.’
The horses, meanwhile, nuzzle dried corn from what I’ve come to call Himalayan nose-bags: plastic footballs sliced in half.
The business of reducing our travelling village to whatever fits on a horse’s back is elaborate and time-consuming. Homes are demolished, restaurants closed and packed into boxes, kitchens disappear into bamboo baskets. This morning the horses haul their loads up and over a series of switchbacks, some steep and slippery, before the path begins to flatten out. Very occasionally, we meet people coming the other way. Locals carrying supplies up to the nomads in the higher valleys and, at one point, out of the woods ahead, a party of immaculately dressed Japanese. We descend from the conifer forests and into richer temperate woodlands with flowering laurel and luxuriant rhododendron swelling on either side, and strips of meadow thick with edelweiss and gentian.
But it is a long way and by the time we reach the patch of grassy riverbank near the bridge of Sharma Zampa we’ve covered another 12 miles (19 km). Nigel is limping from a blistered toe and Basil is appalled at what he’s just done.
‘No Pao has ever walked as far as this.’ He shakes his head in dis-belief. ‘Never in the entire history of Paos has anyone walked 23 miles!’ And there’s more to go.
But we’re down below 10,000 feet (3050 m). The valley is wider and more inviting, the river has broadened to 100 yards wide, and there are some substantial farmhouses on the far bank, where the forest has been cleared and the land terraced for cultivation. Though there is a bridge a mile upstream, most of the traffic from the other bank comes through the river. We watch a packhorse, fully loaded, followed by two women and half a dozen children, pick its way through the shallow but fast-flowing waters, and later two cows and a calf, almost submerged as it struggles desperately to get a grip on the wet rocks, make their way across.
Day One Hundred and Eleven : Sharma Zampa to Paro
I must really have been walked out yesterday, the result being a long, deep, wonderfully restorative night’s sleep. Trekking beats any sleeping pill. Doje is tall, good-looking and, until he’s had a drop of Special Courier in the evening, quite a serious young man. His mother was the Queen Mother’s equerry and maybe that’s where his rather dignified correctness comes from. So it’s all the more gratifying to hear him getting quite worked up at the breakfast table. Admittedly, it’s only about Bhutanese history, but there’s a yelp of unalloyed chauvinism as he talks of the Tibetan invaders who used to come down trails like this.
‘16th century, 17th century. I think there were nine invasions. And we trashed them!’
Doje shakes his head with relish, as if it had all happened yesterday.
‘We sent them back. We sent them back!’
A herd of cows is crossing the river towards us. I think this verdant bank where we camped must be their grazing ground, for, once here, they tuck into whatever doesn’t have a tent on top of it, including my jacket. The women who keep an eye on them are a feisty pair. While one looks through Nigel’s camera in wonderment, another attacks one of our horsemen after he’s made a joke about her, grabbing at his crutch, shrieking with laughter and revealing a perfect set of totally black teeth.
Doje keeps well out of it. He says the ladies up here are tough and can out-wrestle any of the men.
We move on. A magnificent landscape of interlocking, conifer-clad spurs stretches way above us to a mountain with a little tongue of snow and ice still clinging to its north-facing summit. On either side of us are meadows and the widening waters of the River Paro.
Civilization is gradually stretching its fingers up the valley. We pass a large army camp, more and more farms, emerald-green paddy fields, orchards ripe with plum blossom. Pigs scuttling about. After five hours of walking, we cross the river on a steel-slung suspension bridge (financed by the Swiss, I notice) and at last onto a paved road. An hour and a half later, we reach the famous Drukyel dzong. This fortress, raised around the time that England was fighting its only Civil War, commemorated one of Bhutan’s rousing victories over the Tibetans. Reduced now to little more than a circular keep after a fire started by a butter-lamp in 1951, Drukyel dzong must once have seemed impregnable, standing as it does on a strategically commanding crag overlooking the valley, with Paro on one side and Jomolhari and the Tibetan border, 35 miles (56 km) away, on the other. Now it’s a little forlorn.
At its foot is a small, picturesque, alpine village, with two huge cypresses looming above it. The very first house we come to has a fine selection of wall paintings, including a chubby pink penis with wings attached. But best of all, the village contains a bus that will take us the rest of the way into Paro, and the bus contains cold beers.
I pull off my boots and peel down the socks with wondrous relief. One of my toes is bloody but otherwise no ill-effects of the longest, if not quite the most arduous, of our treks so far.
Day One Hundred and Twelve : Paro
The great religious festivals of Bhutan are known as tsechus and commemorate the deeds of Padmasambhava, aka Guru Rinpoche, the saint whose rocky perch in Takstang I climbed up to a few days ago. Tsechu means ‘tenth’, which was the day of the month when, by tradition, these deeds took place. Today is the start of the annual five-day tsechu in Paro. Primarily a religious event, it’s also a big social occasion, with people taking time off from work to dress up in their best outfits and watch dancing, have picnics, attend archery contests, and generally let their hair down. Opening and closing days are the most important and the crowds will be the biggest, so we’re up at 5.30 to make sure of a good position. This is also a big draw for tourists and, though only a few thousand come in every year, the hotel accommodation is easily overrun and we’re staying in a rented bungalow a half-hour out of town.
We drive in past the airport, so neat, tidy and largely uncontaminated by aircraft that it looks like a toy lay-out. Northeast of the airport and commanding the valley are the imposing white walls of the Paro dzong. Like the fortress at Drukyel, where we ended our trek from Jomolhari, it was built in the 1640s, in the flush of national victory over the Tibetans. By coincidence, it also suffered a serious fire, being virtually razed to the ground in 1915. Unlike the Drukyel dzong, it was restored to its former glory after a special tax was levied throughout the country. Its two longest walls extend for some 500 feet (150 m) and taper gracefully upwards in the Tibetan style. The uppermost of its five storeys have long windows, the main ones projecting out from the wall, and all surrounded by finely carved frames and lintels. A band of ochre paint connects them all up and marks it out as a religious as well as administrative building.
At the main gate stalls are already set up and at one of them a bearded old lay monk, or gomchen, stands beside a small table, on which is a brass and silver miniature temple, with drawers that open to reveal various gilt figures of the gods. As people go by, they tuck the odd ngultrum note into his temple. He makes no acknowledgement of the contribution, but stares ahead, keeping up a low, monotonous, gurgling chant. He’s not the slightest bit fazed when a sudden yowling and barking breaks out beside him, as two packs of Bhutan’s ubiquitous stray dogs (which, of course, no-one is allowed to cull) fight for territory at the bottom of the entrance steps. After some vicious teeth baring, they’re seen off and we climb up to the grand, carved doorway. The dzong is as impressive inside as out. There are two main stone-flagged courtyards on either side of a massive central tower. Timber-frame galleries run above the squares, connecting up the accommodation.