Bhutan is not a country you arrive in on a whim. Every visitor travels on a pre-arranged, prepaid trip booked through a licensed Bhutanese operator, so the planning happens before you leave home rather than on the road. That sounds restrictive and turns out to be the opposite: the itinerary, the guide, the driver and the rooms are settled in advance, and what is left for you is the travelling.
This section covers the decisions that come first — where Bhutan is and how you reach it, what the country is like through the year, how a trip is put together and paid for, and what to have in the bag when you fly.
Two things worth knowing early
Season shapes the trip more than anything else. Spring and autumn are the clearest and the busiest; the monsoon is green, quiet and cheap; winter is cold at altitude, bright, and empty. If your dates are fixed, the question is not whether to come but where to go in that season.
Count hours, not kilometres. The land rises from 200 metres in the south to over 7,000 in the north, and the roads follow it. Thimphu to Punakha is about 70 kilometres and takes three hours. Itineraries that look conservative on a map are usually about right.
Each page below takes one of these properly. When the reading turns into a route, tell us your dates and we will come back with an itinerary — usually within one working day.