Paro Taktsang, the Tiger's Nest, is a cluster of whitewashed temples with golden roofs pinned to a granite cliff 900 metres above the Paro Valley in western Bhutan, and it is climbed to on foot, as it has been by pilgrims for centuries. The monastery was built around a cave. In the eighth century Guru Rinpoche, the master who brought Buddhism to Bhutan, is said to have flown here on the back of a tigress, a queen who had become his disciple, to subdue a demon troubling the valley, and he meditated in a cave on the cliff for three years; the temples were built directly around that cave in 1692, so the grotto sits enclosed at the very heart of the complex. It is not a museum. Monks still come here for strict retreats, sometimes living on the cliff for years and rarely descending to the valley.
The climb covers about 6.5 kilometres there and back, and most walkers need four to five hours, gaining height steadily through blue-pine forest hung with prayer flags, with the monastery appearing and disappearing above. Halfway up, a teahouse on the opposite ridge gives the view that is behind almost every photograph of Bhutan: the whole monastery face-on against the rock, seeming to grow out of it. The last stretch first goes down a long flight of stone stairs to a bridge, where a waterfall drops sixty metres into a pool that pilgrims hold sacred, and then up again to the gate. Inside, four temples and eight caves, four of them open to pilgrims, are linked by narrow courtyards and stairs under the golden roofs, with butter lamps burning in the dark shrines and the valley floor far below the windows. Most of what you see was rebuilt after April 1998, when fire tore through the main buildings, killed a monk and destroyed paintings and statues that had hung there for centuries. The cave survived the fire, as it survived everything else, and it is still the reason the buildings are there.