The Women of Bhutan

This morning you're joined by a textile scholar who will accompany you through your days in Paro. She lectures in creative arts at one of Bhutan's teaching colleges and founded its textile education laboratory, built to carry Bhutanese weaving heritage forward through traditional technique, natural dyeing and research. She learned to weave at her mother's side as a young girl and has spent her working life making sure that knowledge isn't lost. You visit her laboratory with her, sitting at the backstrap looms and turning over the plants, barks and roots that give Bhutanese cloth its colour. Later, transfer to a heritage home set in gardens above the valley floor, where you cook your own lunch over the traditional stove and eat it slowly in the garden. Afterwards you press tsa-tsa, the small clay votive forms Bhutanese pilgrims shape and leave in sacred places, set aside to dry overnight because you'll carry them up to the Tiger's Nest in the morning.

An early breakfast, then transfer to the trailhead. The ascent through blue pine forest to the Tiger's Nest takes two to three hours, climbing past prayer wheels turned by mountain water and long lines of weathered flags. Your tsa-tsa travel with you, wrapped and carried by hand, to be left at the monastery as an offering. A picnic lunch is set up at a quiet point on the trail, the monastery held in view across the gorge, and the descent takes a little under two hours. This evening, a herbal hot stone bath is prepared for you, river stones heated in a fire until they glow, then lowered into a wooden trough of water and medicinal herbs, the same remedy Bhutanese families have used for generations after long days in the fields.

Depart after breakfast for the Haa Valley, crossing Chele La at 3,988 metres through rhododendron and hemlock forest. At the pass, hang prayer flags in the wind, an act of goodwill made for the wellbeing of all beings, your guide helping you tie them and read the aspiration printed along the cloth. From the pass, walk down through hemlock and fir to an ancient nunnery, a descent of about an hour, believed to be the oldest in Bhutan and built into the cliff face below the pass. A community of nuns lives here in quiet retreat, and this morning they receive you into their world: a cup of tea, a seat together before the shrine, and a place in their prayer, your voice folded into theirs as the chant moves through the hall. Continue down into Haa, one of Bhutan's least visited and most self-contained valleys, where you're welcomed into a family home and the woman of the house cooks with you rather than for you. Together you fold hoentay, the buckwheat dumplings particular to this valley, stuffed with turnip leaves, cottage cheese, butter and perilla seed. Depending on the season, you may follow the family out to their fields afterwards to help with whatever the month asks for.

Transfer to Thimphu after breakfast. On arrival, visit Buddha Dordenma, seated above the capital and looking south down the length of the valley. Lunch is at a local eatery run by a Bhutanese woman whose kitchen has built its own quiet following in the capital. The afternoon belongs to a family-run weaving studio founded by a master weaver who began at nine years old and today runs it alongside her daughter, working with home-based women weavers from across the country. You go out with them to gather dye material, madder root, walnut husk, indigo and rhododendron flower among them, learning to recognise each plant and what it gives up in the pot. What you collect today, you'll dye with later in the journey. Dinner is at the table of a celebrated local chef and storyteller, dishes built from seasonal and foraged ingredients gathered on her own travels through the country, each course arriving with the story of where it came from.

Transfer to Punakha after breakfast, stopping at Dochula at 3,100 metres, where 108 chortens rise in tiers above the road and the eastern Himalaya stand along the horizon on a clear morning. A short walk, if you wish, leads up through moss-hung forest to the temple above the pass. The road drops into the warm valley of Punakha, where rice, chilli and orange grow. Follow a farm track below Punakha Dzong to a farmhouse that has worked the same five acres for roughly two hundred years, and spend the afternoon with the woman who runs it, first in the kitchen garden picking what's ready, then at the stove learning her dishes, then over butter tea while she talks about balancing farming with hosting. Before you leave, a hot stone bath is heated for you beside the stream that runs below the house.

After breakfast, walk to Khamsum Yulley Namgyal Chorten, a hike of one to one and a half hours crossing the river on a suspension footbridge and climbing gently through terraced paddy. A picnic is set up on the descent. Lunch is served at a table looking directly across at Punakha Dzong, the fortress built at the confluence of two rivers and still the winter seat of the central monastic body, and afterwards you walk into the dzong itself. Transfer to Thimphu in the late afternoon.

Return this morning to the weaving studio to work with what you gathered in the hills, learning to prepare the dye bath, mordant your yarn or cloth, and judge colour by eye as it deepens. A private picnic lunch is laid out in a quiet garden away from town, where you're joined by one of Bhutan's most accomplished embroiderers, her needlework chosen for a royal wedding. She sits with you over the afternoon, shows you how the stitches are built up, and holds your hand through your first attempts. In the evening, you're received at a design studio founded to carry Bhutanese craftsmanship into contemporary use, where its founder introduces you to a rare thangka tradition very few practitioners in the country still hold, and explains what it takes to keep it alive.

After breakfast, transfer to the airport for your onward journey.