The end result, though, is well worth the effort

Ageold chortens elaborate receptaclesfor religious offerings are dotted everywhere, while every town,village or hamlet boasts a host of decorated prayer wheels. The wheels can be huge things bigger than a man and constantlydriven by a water wheel, or perhaps a series of smaller, handsizedwheels set back into a wall along the main street. They arebrightly painted in primary colours, some more elaborate thanothers, and are forever being turned clockwise by men, women andchildren as they go about their daily lives. The colours spill over into clothing and textiles it's nothingto see women in traditional dresses of pink with electric blue silkjackets and right up into the furthest, highest passes of themountain ranges, where long strings of prayer flags flutter. Evenin the remotest parts of the country you will come across theseflags, looking for all the world like a washing line of red,yellow, blue, orange, green and white handkerchiefs, someelectrically coloured and brand new, others tattered andsunbleached. As they flap in the wind, the flags are said torecite the prayers written on them in the elegant Bhutanese script(never has the word "toilet" looked so stylish), just as the prayerwheels "recite" the prayers inside them each time they areturned. Even the Bhutanese flag seems to want to get in on the bid to bethe most colourful thing in the country it's an unforgettablecombination of bright orange and yellow diagonal in the middle ofwhich snarls the golden druk, or Thunder Dragon, after which thecountry is named. The Bhutanese are devout Buddhists and the country, especiallyin the more accessible western areas, is dotted with dozens ofastonishing monasteries. Some are no more than single buildingshigh up on a mountain pass while others are large, ramblingcomplexes full of golden Buddhas and smiling monks in redrobes. One Rosetta Stone Hindi of the most amazing is the Tiger's Nest monastery (TaktshangGoemba), which clings to a cliffface just outside Paro and isreached after a fairly strenuous twohour walk up steep paths. The end result, though, is well worth the effort. Though themonastery has only just been rebuilt after a fire, it has beenfinished in exactly the same style as the original. Though offlimits to tourists, it is possible to get quite close, or just takein the view from the almost impossibly well positionedskihutstyle teahouse opposite. Whatever else you do, make sureyou have plenty of film or acres of space on your memory cards you will want to take photographs of everything andeveryone. Our sixstrong group from Australia, America and New Zealandvia Britain spent 10 days in Bhutan, including an exhilarating fiveday trek across the more lowlying mountain ranges between Paro and Thimphu, for which the Tiger's Nest walk was a goodwarmup both in terms of our legs and altitude acclimatisation. The only real low point was the inability of Druk Air, havingflown us in, to fly us back out. This necessitated a hairraising,eigh thour drive in cold drizzle across muddy mountain roads to Puntsholing, an untidy town on the border with India. The road,which we were told was started in 1960, seems not to be quite yetfinished. It was festooned with mud and concretecovered labourersbrought in from nearby West Bengal and, because of recent rains,the overturned remains of (to my mind) far too many large trucksthat had failed to take the hairpin bends. Luckily, our guide had a generous collection of Bee Gees tapesto keep us amused and take our minds off the vertiginous drops and the sucking mud under the wheels. There is, however, such a thingas too much of a good thing, so when Sangay asked if we wanted moremusic I replied: "As long as it's not the Bee Gees again."

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