First morning in Bhutan. Before anything else your guide spends a few minutes with you – phone or camera, it doesn’t matter – just enough so that by the time you walk into your first experience, using it feels natural rather than something you’re thinking about.

Then Paro. Small, unhurried, and immediately unlike anywhere you’ve been before. We head to Rinpung Dzong as the evening light comes in across the valley. Young monks playing in the courtyard. Architecture that stops you mid-sentence. A traditional cantilever bridge crossing the river below the fort walls. With a word from our guide the monks are usually happy to be photographed. Some will want to talk. Curiosity goes both ways here.

Early start and a drive west through Thimphu towards Punakha. The road climbs to Dochula Pass at 3,150 metres where 108 white chortens stand in a row against the sky. On a clear morning the high Himalayas are laid out in front of you, uninterrupted, all the way to the horizon.

There is an optional guided meditation here with a monk from the central body, in a small cave in the forest. You don’t have to do it. Some people find it changes the rest of the day.

Then down into a completely different Bhutan. The valley is subtropical, warm, thick with rice terraces and mango trees. We visit Chimi Lhakhang, the Temple of Fertility, built in honour of a monk so unconventional he is known as the Divine Madman. The hike down through the village takes you past people working the fields in the late afternoon light. Slow down here. This is the first day you realise nobody is rushing anywhere.

After a final morning at the festival we drive back to Paro. The afternoon is spent at a farmhouse making tsa tsa, small clay stupas that Bhutanese Buddhists have been crafting for centuries. You make your own, document the process, shoot portraits of the family. Then prayer flag printing, the same flags you will carry up Tiger’s Nest the following morning. Go to bed early. The alarm is at six.

The hike to Taktsang begins before sunrise. The monastery has clung to its cliff face at 3,000 metres since the 8th century and nothing quite prepares you for the first time it appears through the trees above you. The trail takes two to three hours and gives you different things at every level: mist in the pines, prayer flags strung between rocks, the valley falling away below. If the full hike isn’t for you there is a viewpoint partway up that most people consider spectacular enough, and a pony if you’d rather arrive than walk. At the top you leave your tsa tsa in the cave and hoist your flags. What you made yesterday is now part of the place.

Afterwards, a traditional hot stone bath at a local farmhouse. The minerals are said to be good for joint pain and tired legs. After that hike, no further persuasion is needed.

The final full day in Bhutan starts with a drive up to Chelela Pass and a one-hour hike to Kila Gompa Nunnery, founded in the 9th century and home to sixty nuns who have largely been left alone to get on with it. We eat a picnic lunch up here in the pine forest. It is a very still place. The kind that makes you want to stay longer than the schedule allows.

The afternoon is considerably livelier. Back down in Paro you are invited to pull on national dress if you fancy it, then play archery against the guide, the driver and any locals who fancy their chances. Bhutanese archery involves targets set at distances that seem optimistic. The traditional tactic for unsettling your opponent is singing and dancing at them while they shoot. A shot of ara, the locally brewed wine, is said to improve hand-eye coordination. Nobody has ever disproved this.

The flight out leaves early. Everest is on the right this time. Same mountain, different direction, different person looking at it.
There is time in Kathmandu before the international flight home. Your guide sits with you and goes through the week’s pictures. Not a critique. Just the two of you, looking at what came back. Most people come home from a holiday with one or two stories. You have ten. And the pictures to prove it.