Cover At the Five Nectars Bar in Bhutan’s Pemako Punakha, the view does the talking: the Mo Chhu below, and all of Punakha valley beyond (Photo: courtesy of Pemako Punakha)
At the Five Nectars Bar in Bhutan’s Pemako Punakha, the view does the talking: the Mo Chhu below, and all of Punakha valley beyond (Photo: courtesy of Pemako Punakha)
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A five-night stay across Pemako Punakha and Thimphu in Bhutan, built less around ticking off temples and more around the ceremonies, meals and detours that happen when the schedule gives way
Getting to Punakha is its own story before the trip even properly begins. From Mumbai, it meant a flight to Kolkata, a connecting flight into Paro—Bhutan’s only international airport, tucked into a valley narrow enough that only a handful of pilots in the world are certified to land there—and then a three-and-a-half-hour drive east to Punakha itself.
Our guide met us the moment we cleared immigration in Paro and stayed with us for the rest of the trip, filling the drive with details I wouldn’t have found on my own: that only around twenty-two pilots in the world are certified to land at Paro’s airport, hemmed in as it is by mountains on every side; that Bhutan plants close to a million trees a year as part of its commitment to staying carbon negative; and the long, layered relationship between Bhutan and India that shapes everything from trade routes to the free movement of people across the border. He spoke to us in Hindi from the first minute, as did most of the staff we met over the next five days, and I felt a warm disarming about hearing a language from home this far into the Himalayas—it turned what could have been an unfamiliar trip into one that felt, oddly, close to familiar.
By the time we reached Punakha, the light had already gone, and the car dropped us at the edge of the property rather than driving us all the way in. Waiting there was a man who introduced himself as Karma. After two flights and a three-and-a-half-hour drive, meeting your karma right at the door sounds like the setup to a very different kind of trip—turns out it was good Karma, our personal butler’s name, who would be with us for the rest of the stay. Karma took our bags straight across the bridge crossing the river to a waiting golf cart, and a short drive later we were dropped directly at our villa.
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Soma restaurant at Pemako Punakha (Photo: courtesy of Pemako Punakha)
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Pemako usually opens a stay with a monk carrying out a blessing ritual at arrival, but it was late enough, and we were tired enough, that ours was skipped for the night. From the outside, the villa still looked exactly like a tent—canvas walls, a peaked roof, nothing to suggest otherwise. It was only once we stepped inside that the illusion gave way: a full sitting room, a proper bedroom, and a private heated pool on our own deck that nobody had thought to mention in advance. Pemako Punakha, we’d learn over the next few days, is twenty-one of these tented villas scattered across sixty acres of forest, spaced far enough apart that the buggy isn’t a novelty so much as a necessity.
Punakha is not a subtle valley. Rice terraces run down to a river the colour of jade, and the resort is built low and unobtrusive enough that the landscape stays the main event. It is also, I noticed almost immediately, a place built for two—the sort of valley that has couples finding excuses to hold hands on the way to dinner. Dinner itself, that first night, was at Soma, the property’s main restaurant: simple, ingredient-led Bhutanese cooking that doesn’t need much dressing up when the produce is this good. I slept better that night than I had in months.
Above Sorig yoga is conducted by the resident monk at Pemako Punakha (Photo: courtesy of Pemako Punakha)
Sorig yoga is conducted by the resident monk at Pemako Punakha (Photo: courtesy of Pemako Punakha)
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The second day filled itself in without any sense of rush. Sorig yoga in the morning, rooted in traditional Bhutanese medicine rather than any studio trend, was followed by breakfast at Soma and a prayer flag hoisting that made me feel like being let in on something sacred that belonged to a foreign culture that had accepted me as one of its own. In the afternoon, the resort offered archery and khuru, Bhutan’s national sport and its dart-throwing cousin, out on the lawn with a formality that made clear how seriously it’s taken here. I sat this one out, both in Punakha and later in Thimphu, happy to watch rather than risk an arrow going somewhere it shouldn’t, after all, clumsy is my middle name. What I didn’t miss was the Ara House experience: a tasting of Bhutan’s home-distilled rice spirit, poured out of vessels that looked older than the building itself, with far more ceremony behind each earthen cup than its size would suggest. A yak butter massage followed, using warmed butter instead of oil, and left me looser than any spa treatment I can remember. I was smelling a bit funny by the end of it, but I let myself drown in this luxury.
Dinner that night was the one I keep coming back to: Sura, the property’s chef’s table, tucked away from the main restaurant and run as a single, unhurried tasting menu. Seared scallops opened the meal, set against cauliflower purée, garden cherry tomatoes and a peach wine beurre blanc, finished with a citrus foam that cut through the richness at the right moment. A champagne risotto followed, layered with smoked trout, herbs, highland caviar and a parmesan tuile, and then a pan-seared barramundi with poached spring onion, mango beurre blanc and gremolata that I would happily have eaten twice. All of it was poured alongside Vintria, a dry Shiraz produced in Bhutan and considered by more than a few locals to be the country’s finest wine—dark berry and oak on the nose, with a long, fruity finish that made the case for itself without any help from us.
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Ati, the resort’s picnic spot (Photo: courtesy of Pemako Punakha)
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Day three began gently and then changed shape entirely. Meditation with a resident monk before breakfast, an astrology reading afterwards that I went into sceptical and came out of unsettled by—the monk read my chart and told me to chant Om Mani Padme Hum and turn to the Buddha of Compassion, which is not advice I expected to take seriously and yet, months on, still find myself thinking about and following—and a walk around the property with one of the team, all before lunch at Ati, the resort’s picnic spot by the river. It turned out to be one of the best meals of the trip: a Himalayan garden salad of avocado, garden greens, mango and passion fruit dressing, followed by a spread straight off the grill—seabass fillet, jumbo king prawns, Riverina tenderloin and glazed barbecue chicken breast—and a burnt Basque cheesecake to finish that I am still thinking about.
Punakha Dzong sits at the confluence of two rivers the Bhutanese have always spoken of as male and female: the Pho Chhu, the father river, and the Mo Chhu, the mother river. We hadn’t planned on seeing either up close before visiting the dzong, but as we were leaving the hotel that afternoon, Karma suggested we raft the Mo Chhu first—the water was good that day, he said, and the dzong wasn’t going anywhere. So instead of driving straight there, we found ourselves on the river, gentler than the name might suggest: wide, cold, glassy in stretches and lively in others. Our rafting guides sang Bollywood songs the whole way down, badly and happily, and partway through we noticed a handful of hotel staff standing calf-deep in the shallows on the bank. It turned out they’d played football that morning and were soaking their feet to work out the aches—a habit we were told to try ourselves, since the river is said to be rich in minerals good for exactly that, so we trailed our feet in the water for the rest of the ride. It ran long enough into the afternoon that the rest of the day’s plan simply didn’t happen; we didn’t make it to Punakha Dzong or the suspension bridge that day, with the urge to slow down instead of packing the day with a bunch of hurried activities. This was refreshing.
Above Alchemy House at Pemako Punakha (Photo: courtesy of Pemako Punakha)
Alchemy House at Pemako Punakha (Photo: courtesy of Pemako Punakha)
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Dinner was at Alchemy House, the property’s Bhutanese restaurant, and it was the most purely local meal of the stay. Hoentoe—buckwheat dumplings filled with dried turnip leaf and local cheese—arrived first, followed by kakuru jaju, a chunky pumpkin soup sharpened with Sichuan pepper and crushed local chilli, and sikam datshi, slow-cooked air-dried pork with local cheese and Bhutanese spices that tasted like it had been simmering all day, because it had. After a day on the river, it was the kind of home-style cooking that asked nothing of us except to eat.
After breakfast at Soma the next morning, we finally made it to Punakha Dzong, one of Bhutan’s most striking fortress-monasteries, and seeing it from the same confluence of rivers we’d been paddling down the day before gave the whole valley a shape it hadn’t quite had until then—the male and female rivers meeting exactly where the dzong stands, as if the building had been placed there on purpose, which of course it had. We crossed the Punakha Suspension Bridge on foot afterwards, one of the longest of its kind in the country, swaying enough underfoot to make you hold the cables a little tighter than you’d like to admit.
From there it was roughly three hours to Thimphu, with a stop at the Buddha Dordenma statue en route—a vast bronze figure watching over the valley that photographs badly and undersells itself in every picture I’ve seen, including my own. Pemako Thimphu has sixty-six rooms and suites to Punakha’s twenty-one villas, and on paper that makes it the bigger property, but it felt smaller the moment we arrived. Where Punakha spreads its villas across sixty acres of forest, Thimphu stacks its rooms into a single building in the heart of the capital, favoured by foreign delegates, corporates and the sort of guest who needs to be in the city rather than away from it. It gave us another welcome ceremony on arrival, and the capital immediately felt like a different register of the country: busier, more built-up, still calm by any international city’s standards but noticeably less rural than Punakha.
Above Bhutanese cuisine (Photo: courtesy Pemako Punakha)
Bhutanese cuisine (Photo: courtesy Pemako Punakha)
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Our last full day opened at Changangkha Lhakhang, one of the valley’s oldest temples, followed by the Royal Takin Park, home to Bhutan’s national animal—a creature that looks assembled from several others and is somehow more endearing for it. In the evening, the hotel dressed us in kira, the traditional Bhutanese dress, for an evening cultural programme that turned into something neither of us expected: rather than sitting and watching, we ended up pulled into the folk dancing ourselves, badly and repeatedly, by performers who seemed delighted to have us try.
Dinner was at Chigjagye, Pemako Thimphu’s dedicated Bhutanese dining room, set apart from the main restaurant in a space that goes all in on atmosphere: walls draped in deep red curtains, ornate patterning worked into the screens and ceiling, and lighting warm enough to counter the mountain chill outside. It was, without much competition, my favourite meal of the entire trip: chicken and vegetable momos, yaksha paa—stir fried yak meat, yue chum marp—the local red rice—and trout cooked Bhutanese-style, all served the way a family meal might be if the family in question had spent generations perfecting it. It was food built for kings, and by the end of it I understood why.
The next morning brought a long drive back to Paro International Airport, breakfast packed up and handed to us on the way out. Five nights felt both exactly enough and nowhere near it. I keep trying to land on the one moment that stuck with me, the way you do after any trip like this, and I can’t quite manage it—not the dzong, not any single dinner, though several of both deserved the credit they got. What stayed with me instead was everything I hadn’t planned for: a guide who used the drive from the airport as a briefing on the country rather than small talk, a river that talked us into getting on it, a dance floor we hadn’t meant to join. Pemako’s trick, if it has one, is building a stay around moments that don’t feel scheduled even when they are. All you have to do is go with the flow.
As the Regional Editor for Watches and Jewellery and Editorial Content Lead for Tatler GMT, Amrita Katara specialises in luxury watch and jewellery coverage across Asia, with expertise in editorial strategy, feature writing and interviews with industry leaders. Her past roles span luxury lifestyle media and client partnerships. Based in Mumbai, Amrita’s work bridges global trends and Asian market insights.
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