Conde Nast Traveler, How Bhutan Avoids Being Overrun by Tourists
Believe it or not, this is a package tour. You walk down a dirt trail, past rice paddies, stupas, and colorful prayer flags, toward a charming little hillside village. Your guide is a Bhutanese local in his early thirties, who shows you the wooden homes with their hand-painted wall murals of ornate Buddhist symbols. He bumps into his friend, a homeowner—and before you know it, you’re chatting inside his living room and sipping yak butter tea. Later on, he takes you to the local Buddhist monastery, where the air is thick with incense smoke and chanted mantras. Then you go shopping—in an outdoor riverside market where nobody hustles you for money. This trip feels like a personal visit to a local friend, in a place that seems to regard you—the foreign tourist—with a refreshing kind of innocence. And it’s nothing like the pre-planned, cookie-cutter experience that’s handed out to busloads of tourists elsewhere.
Read more at the following page: https://www.cntraveler.com/story/how-bhutan-avoids-being-overrun-by-tourists
PUBLICATION : Conde Nast Traveler
DATE PUBLISHED : 28/Mar/2019