This week’s dream: beguiling Bhutan

The little Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan is "magical", says Clover Stroud in the Sunday Telegraph. Until a decade ago, its former absolute ruler, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, kept the country strictly isolated, limiting tourism and even banning television. But from 1998 onwards he instigated democratic reforms so that now the country has opened up a little; but the pace of change remains slow. As a result, its "sublime" mountain scenery is unspoiled, its "colourful, eccentric" Buddhist culture quite "unadulterated" by modernity - and the spell they cast on the visitor is all the stronger for it. (But be warned: tourists must still pay a tax of $250 a day.)

Since the country's capital was moved to Thimpu in the early 1960s, the once tiny town has grown into a city of 100,000 souls. New development continues apace - half the buildings seem to be "propped up with bamboo scaffolding". More beguiling is the little old town of Paro, about two hours' drive to the west. A 17th-century watchtower here houses the national museum, a "winding warren" of rooms and staircases, their walls painted pink and ochre. Among the "crazy treasures" with which it is stuffed, you'll find "frog-skin saddles" and the dancing costumes of yak hunters, with their "orange knickerbockers".

From Paro, a day's trek up a spectacular valley will take you to the 17th-century Bumdra Monastery, perched at 13,000ft. On the way you'll pass two-storey farmhouses that seem "like a bucolic dream of how a smallholding should be". And, as the path winds up the mountainside, there are superb views across the valley to the temple of Taktshang Goemba, "the Tiger's Nest", which sits in a "gloriously precarious position" atop towering rocks. It is the holiest site in the country - closed to foreigners - and "the jewel in Bhutan's crown".

Greaves Travel (0207 487 9111) offers 10-day tours of Bhutan from £3,875pp incl. flights and visas. ·