To Bhutan – The Land of the Thunder dragon

Hello and welcome back everyone!

Hope all of you are excited to read our new blog post!

This was our second trip outside India as a family and all of us were super excited to go to Bhutan! We had our parents’ close, family friends joining us on this trip – so… more company and more fun!

We planned this for our winter holidays last year, last week of December 2025. To give a quick outlook, here’s a brief itinerary

Bhutan is known as the land of the thunder dragon owing to the fierce, large thunderstorms that crash down through the Himalayan valleys. Historically, the Bhutanese believed these deafening sounds were the roaring voices of dragons.

With all the plans in place, we embarked on our journey. It began with a long flight to Bagdogra airport (West Bengal) and from there to get to Bhutan, you just pass a gate – The Bhutan gate, and you are in the next country. How cool is that?! From Bagdogra, we reached the gate by car, got through the Immigration Desk and lo! we were in Bhutan!

When we passed the gate we entered Phuentsholing, the bordering town of Bhutan. That night was spent in Phuentsholing.. We went to our first monastery that night!

The next day our birding trip started! Through the trip we saw around 118 species of birds and around 8 species of mammals! We covered 7 places including – Phuentsholing, Thimphu (Capital of Bhutan), Punakha, Geliphu, Tingtibi, Bhumthang and Paro.

Now, I will be sharing the highlights of this trip overall. Starting from Thimpu, our birding trip took a start and we started experiencing the cold temperatures!

Here are some pics of some main species of birds that we spotted and had an amazing sight of – 

After this we saw started back on the track to Punakha..

On the next day, we started early going through the silent hills for a long time and from a long distance our guide suddenly spotted the White bellied heron! 

This bird is one of the critically endangered birds with a global population of under 60 individuals and Bhutan holds roughly half of them. So getting a pic and being able to see these birds is very rare.. We saw 3 individuals!

We stayed in the same place tracking the heron for a long time!

The next day we waited next to honeycombs for the Yellow rumped HoneyGuide, that feeds on beeswax and larvae.

We continued going through the hills, and suddenly spotted a leopard cat crossing the road.. The photographers (My dad and Surya uncle) got off the van. It gave us a really good sighting and wasn’t shy at all!

On the way we stopped and went into a place to see the Pheasants!! We were able to see them so close that we were able to click picks on our phones !

Below are some shots of the wonderful foggy mornings and the sunsets!

The day when we left from Bhumthang where the temperature was in the negatives close to -6 *C. This was most of our first experience with snow and we all got down, had fun with snowball fights, fun skating and experiencing some of the best landscapes!

Given that the trip had a lot of intense birding to it, how could we miss some shopping and sight seeing?

We did our shopping in Thimphu, visited different Dzongs and learnt a lot about their culture, also visited one of the tallest sitting buddhas in the world in Thimphu!

On New Year’s Eve, we went on a drive after dinner and saw the beautifully lit up Punakha Dzong.

On the last day we did a trek to one of the monasteries in Paro called Tiger’s Nest which is a trek of about 8km, at an elevation of around 3,000 ft !

And with this, our trip to Bhutan came to an end.. 

This trip was amazingly fun and intense, but having another family with us, made it a one-of-a-kind experience!

We hope to have another fun and memorable trip with them soon!

In the above pic, you also see our wonderful guides through the trip, Phub ( top-left of the page ) and 5-6 ( top right, yes, that is what he is called, a really fun guy 😊 )

Hope all of you enjoyed reading this blog, waiting to hear from you in the comments!