Bumthang

The story of Bumthang begins with a dying king. Tradition holds that in the eighth century Sindhu Raja offended a local deity and lay close to death until Guru Rinpoche came from India, subdued the spirit and restored the king's life. The Guru meditated in a cave at Kurjey, the place of the body print, and the rock still bears the shape of his body. Three temples now stand there within a wall of 108 chortens, and the first three kings of Bhutan were cremated nearby.

Further down the valley, Jambay Lhakhang is said to have been built in 659 by the Tibetan emperor Songtsen Gampo, one of 108 temples raised in a single day to pin down a demoness lying across the Himalaya. This one holds down her left knee. Its main image is Jampa, the Buddha of the future, and each autumn the temple courtyard fills for the Jambay Lhakhang Drup, when crowds pass beneath a burning gate to be cleansed and blessed.

Pema Lingpa was born in the Tang valley in 1450 and became the most celebrated of Bhutan's treasure revealers, the masters believed to recover teachings hidden by Guru Rinpoche. At Membartsho, the Burning Lake, a deep pool in a river gorge, he is said to have dived in holding a lit butter lamp and surfaced with a treasure casket, the lamp still burning. In 1501 he began Tamshing Lhakhang across the river from Kurjey, and its murals, painted within a few years, are among the oldest in the country. Pilgrims still carry his chain-mail coat three times around the inner sanctum.

His descendants include the Wangchuck dynasty, which is why Bumthang carries so much royal weight. In 1857 Jigme Namgyal, father of the first king, built Wangduechhoeling, Bhutan's first palace that was not a fortress, and Ugyen Wangchuck was born there in 1862. After a restoration of more than a decade, the palace reopened in 2025 as a museum of manuscripts, objects and royal history, one of the newest and best reasons to make the journey east.

Bumthang's valleys are too cold for the rice grown in the west, so this is buckwheat country, eaten as puta noodles and khuli pancakes, alongside potatoes, apples, honey and dairy. In Chhume, weavers turn local wool into yathra, cloth woven in bold geometric patterns. The Swiss connection runs deep: a friendship between the Third King and the Swiss Fritz von Schulthess led to decades of Swiss development work based here, and a cheesemaker named Fritz Maurer left a legacy of Emmental-style cheese and the Red Panda wheat beer still brewed in Jakar.

To the north, Wangchuck Centennial National Park, Bhutan's largest at 4,914 square kilometres, climbs from forest to glaciers. Camera traps there have recorded snow leopards, and tigers at 4,400 metres, among the highest ever documented. East of the valleys the road crosses Thrumshing La into Phrumsengla National Park, one of the finest birding routes in the Himalaya, where satyr tragopans and Himalayan monals feed in the rhododendron forest each spring.