Paro Taktsang — the Tiger's Nest — marks the spot where, legend says, an 8th-century master flew in on the back of a tigress. Guru Padmasambhava, the saint who carried Buddhism into the Himalayas, is believed to have meditated for years in a cave on this cliff, and Bhutanese revere it as the holiest of thirteen 'tiger lair' retreats he used across the region. The whitewashed temples clinging to the rock were raised in 1692 by Gyalse Tenzin Rabgye, 900 metres above the floor of the Paro Valley at an altitude of 3,120 metres. A short circuit set the main building ablaze in 1998, killing a monk and destroying centuries-old murals; the government rebuilt it almost exactly as before, and by 2005 the golden roofs stood again. Today it is Bhutan's defining image — the one temple almost every visitor to the kingdom comes to see.
There is no road and no cable car; the only way up is a walk of about 6.5 kilometres that most people take four to five hours to finish. The trail climbs through blue-pine forest strung with prayer flags, past water-driven prayer wheels turning in cold streams, until the monastery appears across a gorge, tiny and improbable against the cliff. The final stretch drops down stone stairs to a bridge where a waterfall falls sixty metres into a sacred pool, then climbs steeply back up to the gate. Inside its temples, butter lamps light rock walls darkened by centuries of pilgrimage. Reaching it is meant to be earned — and so is reaching Bhutan itself, which asks every foreign visitor for a Sustainable Development Fee, currently 100 US dollars a night, under a 'high value, low volume' policy kept since the country opened to tourists in 1974.