The climb to Taktsang is not long by the standards of the young. It is 900 metres of ascent, and everyone who has ever done it will tell you about the last set of steps down and then up again across the gorge.
We started at seven. Two of us took ponies for the first stretch. One turned back at the cafeteria and had, by her own account, the best morning of the trip sitting there with a flask of tea and that view. Nobody thought less of her, least of all her.
The rest of us got there at half past eleven. Somebody produced a packet of biscuits. Our tour manager, who had climbed it forty times, looked as pleased as if it were his first.
Bhutan measures itself in happiness, which sounds like a slogan until you have spent a week there and realise that nobody is in a hurry. Not the driver, not the monk, not the woman selling chillies by the road. It is contagious.
