Hot stone baths are the traditional way to de-stress in Bhutan so, after hiking all the way up to the Tiger’s Nest, of course I had to try one. You order your evening bath first thing in the morning because it takes seven or eight hours to heat the stones, so you can’t wait and see if you fancy a bath later, you have to plan ahead.
A lot of the baths are found in outbuildings on traditional farms, and that’s where we went for ours. Each wooden building has a vent outside, linking to the bath on the inside, where the heated river stones are dropped into cold, clear mountain water that’s been freshly drawn. The fire was blazing away by the time we arrived, exhausted from our hike, and our stones were white hot and ready for use.


We went into the wooden outhouse which had two wooden baths inside, with a shower curtain dividing the room to preserve our modesty. The farmer had added crushed artemisia to the water, which helps with relaxation as it has a meditative effect, and it treats fever and inflamation. The hot stones also release key minerals into the water, and they can only be used once.
The idea is that once you’re ready to get in the bath, you bang on the wall and tell the farmer outside to add a stone. He drops it into the pit which has a vent leading into the bath and heats the bath water. You hop into the bath and if it’s not hot enough, or starts to cool, you bang on the wall and shout ‘One more rock, please.’ As ‘one more rock’ is not a precise method of heating water, you might find that one extra rock makes the bath too hot, as I did. In which case there is a cold tap above the bath that you can use to cool the water down – except that in my case the tap didn’t work. I sat there getting hotter and hotter and twisting the tap round and round to no effect, until eventually I had to leap out and hop around the room shouting ‘Help! My cold tap doesn’t work!’ So the farmer added a bucket or two of cold mountain water directly into the vent with the rocks, and I was eventually able to climb back into the water without feeling that I was being lightly poached in an artemisia flavoured broth.


Afterwards when we were all feeling relaxed but somewhat flushed and sweaty, the farmer invited us into his house to try some home made rice wine, and to admire his weaponry.


The farmer had an impressive collection of bows and arrows because archery is the national sport/obsession here and every little village has its own archery field. It’s a fascinating sport – teams are often put together after consulting an astrologer, and that same astrologer is then used to put curses on the opposing team. In order to maintain maximum focus and concentration, archers are told not to spend the night before a tournament with their wives, and the whole team often spends the night in a barn or in the woods. But on the other hand, the teams are allowed to drink alcohol for breakfast before the tournament – so what does that do for their focus and concentration?

We stopped to watch a team practising on a field outside Punakha. The target is a hundred and forty-five metres away – to put that into perspective, a football pitch is a hundred and five metres long – and it’s very small; I could hardly see it from the other end of the field. And what really impressed me, when I walked over for a closer look, was that the other archers were casually leaning up against the target while the opposing team shot at them … obviously very confident that the arrows wouldn’t go wide of the mark.


The winning team all get together and perform a song and dance at the end.
It’s quite low key, but they’re probably weak with relief at having escaped unskewered – or perhaps they’re simply too hungover after their alcoholic breakfast.