The first landing in this valley is said to have been made in the eighth century, by Guru Rinpoche, on the back of a flying tigress, and the procedure has not become much easier. Paro holds Bhutan's only international airport, ringed by peaks as high as 5,500 metres, and only a small number of pilots are certified to use it, by daylight and only when they can see where they are going. When scheduled flights began in 1983 the terminal was a two-room control building with check-in on the ground floor, and the departure lounge was the lawn.
He came down, the story goes, on a cliff. Taktsang, the Tiger's Nest, is the cluster of white temples built around his cave from 1692, held to the rock about 900 metres above the valley floor, and it is why most people make the approach at all. On 19 April 1998 fire went through the main building, with its paintings and statues inside, from a short circuit or from butter lamps against the hangings. A monk died in it. What the walkers climb to now is the building put back by 2005.
The valley floor is more forgiving. Kyichu Lhakhang dates from 659, one of 108 temples a Tibetan emperor is said to have built in a single day to subdue a demoness, and the schedule showed: the first temple was small, and saints have been adding to it ever since. Most visitors give Paro two nights on the way to somewhere else. We would give it a week, sleeping in a side valley and coming down to the main one when it is wanted. Nothing may land here after sunset, which leaves the night to the tigress.
