I don’t believe that I have ever started a trip by telling you about the flight, but our flight into Bhutan was a real adventure all by itself. Our flight to Paro Bhutan started from Calcutta India. It was a one hour flight. Our guide in Calcutta said to try and get a window seat as we would spend about twenty minutes flying past the great Himalayan peaks including Mount Everest and Mount Kangchenjunga. I managed a window seat, thanks to Vicky, and it was quite a show. I’m not sure which peak is which but you can see the Himalayas in the first photo. I took this from our plane during the flight.

At some point during the flight, I noticed that we seemed to be getting rather close to the ground. I could see that we were well below the mountain peaks and I could see the small villages and farms on the ground very clearly. You can see what I mean by looking at the second photo.

This was one of the bigger villages that we passed. I didn’t know the elevation of Paro, but I knew that the Himalayan peaks in this area were in the 16,000 to 17,000 foot range. Shortly after I took the second photo, I noticed that our plane took a hard right bank and seemed to be flying down a mountain canyon. Shortly thereafter, our plane banked hard left, again going down the canyon. This continued for several more banks and canyons. At that point, I turned to Vicky and said, “I don’t want to alarm you, but I think our plane is going down”. Vicky looked at me very calmly and said, “Why do you think that?” I said, “Have we ever been on a commercial airliner that did sharp banks down canyons, let alone that we are in the Himalayas?” We did about two more sharp banks, and then quite literally fell out of the sky and landed on the runway at the Paro Airport.

We learned only later that Paro Bhutan airport is perhaps the most difficult airport to operate. There are only eight pilots qualified to take off and land at Paro Bhutan. They all work for Druk Airlines, our carrier, so I presume that one of the eight was piloting our plane. Paro Bhutan is at an elevation of some 7,300 feet and again, the peaks around Paro are over 16,000 feet. Paro Airport is also the only airport in Bhutan. We landed safely, and gratefully, in Paro to start the first week of our trip. We got in our bus to drive away from the airport. The road out of the airport runs exactly parallel to the runway and is only about 100 yards from the runway. In the last photo, you can see a photo I took from our bus. It’s about the mid-point of the runway and it is looking at the direction that we flew into the airport. The red and white sign is at the start (or end) of the runway. The canyons you see in the upper left of the photo are the canyons that we banked our way through on our way down to the runway. It’s also the direction that we flew back out of Bhutan. What a start to the trip!

As a sidelight, the road out of the airport was the ONLY straight road in Bhutan.