Taming the Tiger’s Nest

Well no trip to Bhutan is complete without climbing to the Tiger’s Nest, just outside Paro. It is typically placed last in a traveler’s itinerary, to be the climax to the trip and, I suppose, so as not to overshadow other sights that might otherwise come later. And it is pretty special – the images of it are ubiquitous, but that does not seem to interfere with the astonishment you feel when seeing it in the flesh and wondering how in the world they built it up here.

The site first became important when Guru Rinpoche’s consort manifested herself as a tigress and flew him, as manifested tigresses are wont to do, up to a cave in the cliffside where he meditated for three years, three months, three weeks and three days in order to subdue the evil demons bedevilling the area and convert them into protective deities. The complex itself was not commissioned until the late 17th century, though how they managed to build it in the late 1600s is anyone’s guess (if you guessed by mixing mud with the local ruler’s hair to make it stick to the cliff you would apparently be on the right track). You have to want to get there to get there – the trail is about 3.5 km each way and the vertical gain is about 550 meters (1800 feet), and there is a surprise for the uninitiated when you come around a shoulder and see the Nest well below you, meaning that you have climbed “too much”, and then realize that in order to deal with a gorge and cross below a waterfall you actually have to go down about 200 steep steps and then go up another 200 to get into the complex. A series of small and medium temples awaits, one of which has a kind of alter that covers the entrance to the most sacred cave, opened up once a year for the faithful who walk up the path before dawn to line up for a chance to enter. And there is another cave more generally open, though one would have to pretzel oneself to get to a succession of the most doubtful looking ladders leading into an unlit hole, and despite the obvious attraction we decided to pass. If there was any disappointment about the place it was that there were a lot of visitors, even though we started off at 8:00 when it opened. We had not seen more than a person or two anywhere else we had been and the dissonance of having multiple guides murmuring explanations in a temple at the same time was a bit offputting.

And so that was our last big Bhutanese event. But we had found fun in Paro the day before. Our guide cocked an ear and declared she could hear a prayer ceremony happening as we were walking around and so we zigged instead of zagging and found a huge prayer tent/hall in which four long rows of monks were chanting and playing drums and horns and oboe-like things led by some senior monks with microphones – see video below for a quick sensation. Apparently this is an annual thing, which might go a few days, praying for the removal of obstacles and negative spirits for the benefit of sentient beings everywhere. This was accompanied by what felt a bit like a trade fair, with various long series of effigies representing, among other things, the animals with which each person is associated based on their birth year and to which one could say a prayer for the removal of obstacles and make a small donation. We set off and found our dog and sheep respectively and touched our banknotes to our foreheads and bodies and dropped them in the baskets and came away from it, one hopes, encumbered by an obstacle or two fewer than we started off with.

And, as on most days, we had a beautiful walk. From the National Museum in a round watchtower high above the Paro dzong we had a long traverse high along a hillside past a small closed tower that houses the local protective deities and past countless lookouts over the Paro valley. This we did notwithstanding the weather forecast which confidently predicted a 100% chance of rain most of the day. The forecast has been for rain almost every day, and yet we have been rained/snowed on only once, with the exception being the day we went to the Tiger’s Nest when it was predicted to be sunny and 20C but instead was cloudy and a very pleasant 15 or so – which is to say that we stopped looking at the weather forecasts early on in the trip.