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Since the government requires either entry or exit via Paro Airport, Paro will be your first taste of Bhutan (and your last unless you leave via P/ling to India). There are some places, like south-central Alaska, where the city with the international airport (e.g. Anchorage) is more a stepping-off point for the bigger attraction. That's not true in Bhutan. Paro has some of the best architecture, scenery, hiking, and cultural attractions in the country. Paro is worth spending two days, and because Druk Air flights all depart in the morning, you'll spend your last night in Paro.

The Paro valley (elev 7500 ft) is broad and wide by Himalayan standards, and it grows a number of crops including the local red rice, for which much of the valley is terraced. Paro's good agriculture makes its people relatively affluent, and you'll see larger and better-decorated houses here than in other areas.

Paro's only airline is Druk Air, which vies with Air Nauru as the world's smallest national carrier. You'll arrive from Dhaka, Calcutta, Kathmandu, or Delhi aboard one of two small BAe-146 4-engine jets. The plane parks on the run way, lets down the gangway, and you walk to the terminal.

Druk Air has purchased two new A-319 jets, which will go into service in the second half of 2004. (The A-319 is the same airplane being used into Lhasa, but not by Druk Air.) The A-319 will have almost twice the seating capacity of the current BAe-146s (shown), which should relieve problems with capacity and freight at peak seasons.

Getting to Paro is half the fun. My flight from Bangkok via Yangon and Dhaka almost got stuck in Dhaka because of weather in Paro. Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, was not where I wanted to spend the night. Fortunately, after a few hours' delay, we got aloft.

There isn't really a descent into Paro. Because the plane has to land by visual flight rules (VFR), a cloudy day involves circling the Paro valley as long as there is fuel. Eventually, the pilot spots a hole in the clouds and the plane dives.

One emerges flying just over the treetops in a valley, a bit like that scene in Jurassic Park. The plane flies to the end of the valley, does the hardest bank you've ever been on, then gets closer and closer to the treetops until, miraculously, hard ground (presumably a runway) is found.

For folks familiar with Hong Kong's old Kai Tak airport, here is a description published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Hong Kong Branch, vol 41: "The approach to Paro is a bit more hairy than Kai Tak used to be. It is rather like flying into Happy Valley as far as the foot of Blue Pool Road, doing a u-turn, and then landing on Queen's Road East using a runway about one-quarter as wide as Kai Tak's was."

Downtown Paro is laid out along a single street built in 1985. The street is lined with typical Bhutanese shops, the vast majority of which are "general stores" or "general cum restaurant" or even "general cum restaurant cum bar." The bar is often a couple of stools with some Bumthang apple brandy and a small selection of imported spirits nearby.

A typical general store is a mom-and-pop selling as wide an assortment of merchandise as Wal-Mart in a space the size of a college dorm room. In larger towns, a bank, a post office, and perhaps an apparel store can be found. Thimpu has a few small stores that might be considered grocery stores, a Sony store, and a few apparel stores, though the selection is as hit-or-miss as in the general stores.

Always brightly painted, stores' doors and windows are opened even in February (which is quite cold in the Himalayas), and candy displayed in the windows. At one butcher in Thimpu, big pieces of meat hang in the windows, and a squadron of ubiquitous mutts stands salivating just beyond reach of the meat. Feral dogs have become quite a problem in Bhutan, with the country debating how best to handle the problem. For now, if you're a light sleeper, consider bringing earplugs.