Twelve days without the noise

The first morning I woke at four, not from jet lag but from the bell. I dressed in the dark and followed the sound across the courtyard, where a single monk was sweeping leaves that had not yet fallen. He nodded. I sat.

GoXimbo had told me nothing about this. It was not on the itinerary. Later I understood that the itinerary was the least of what they had designed; the space around it was the real work.

By the fifth day I had stopped reaching for my phone. By the eighth I had stopped counting days. On the twelfth I stood on a pass strung with ten thousand prayer flags and realised I had not thought about work once. Not out of discipline. There had simply been no room.

They say Bhutan stays with you. Two months on, I still wake before the alarm and sit for a while in the dark. Waiting, I think, for a bell.