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. They are all there to enclose a cave. In the Bhutanese telling, Guru Rinpoche, the master who brought Buddhism to Bhutan, flew up to this rock on the back of a tigress to subdue a demon troubling the valley. The tigress was a queen who had become his disciple. He meditated in a grotto on the cliff face, and the temples went up around that grotto in 1692. What you climb to is not a museum. Monks still come here for strict retreats, some living on the cliff for years and rarely going down to the valley.
The way up is a walk of about 6.5 kilometres there and back, four to five hours for most people. You climb steadily through blue-pine forest hung with thousands of prayer flags, past prayer wheels that the cold streams keep turning. Bhutanese pilgrims use the same trail, and many are up and down before breakfast. Halfway, from a teahouse on the ridge across the gorge, you get the monastery face-on against the granite: the angle behind almost every photograph of Bhutan. The last stretch goes the wrong way first, down a long flight of stone stairs to a bridge, a sixty-metre waterfall falling beside it into a pool pilgrims hold sacred, then steeply back up to the gate. You leave bags and cameras there. Inside, narrow courtyards and stairs link four temples and the caves under the golden roofs, and butter lamps light rock walls darkened by centuries of pilgrimage. Most of it is younger than it looks. Fire went through the main buildings in April 1998, killing a monk and destroying paintings and statues that had hung there for centuries, and everything used to rebuild them came up the same path on foot and by mule. The cave at the centre needed no rebuilding. It is a hollow in the granite, and everything else on this cliff was only ever built to keep it.