A warm authentic homestay in farflung Gasa

Three or four hours of climbing from the old capital of Punakha brings you to Gasa, a district measured out in extremes — a dzong that seems to grow directly from its cliff, ringed by peaks still wearing snow past the season, and a population that thins with the air until the villages feel like afterthoughts scattered along the mountain slopes.

Aum Chimi's Homestay, a.k.a Chimi Farmhouse, sits just below the dzong itself, close enough that its whitewashed walls seem to answer the fortress above. The place belongs to the warmly gracious Aum Chimi, for whom it's named, and her husband, a regional parliamentary representative. Six rooms (five upstairs and one downstairs) open off timber-dark corridors, anchored by the warm and spacious central living space which has a Bukhari iron stove with a crackling fire that's always on, where the family cat, the family and guests gather during mealtimes, sitting on floor-level cushions and Bhutanese woven rugs. The two bathrooms one each upstairs and downstairs serve the house, and nothing here makes a nod at the conveniences of a lodge. That absence is the point. What replaces it is harder to manufacture: the smell of woodsmoke threading out through the roof from the cozy iron stove, a table set with home-cooked Bhutanese fare — red rice, ema datshi, whatever the season and the garden allow — and the sense of having been let in rather than checked in.

The couple's young son animates the place. Bright-eyed, quick with a question, visibly delighted by the strangeness and familiarity of guests passing through his family's home, he trails conversations in two languages and moves quickly from shyness to precociousness — the kind of child who makes you understand, more than any museum could, what it means for a house to also be a life.

The Gasa hot springs are close enough that there's often time before dark for a soak — mineral water steaming up from beneath the mountain into healing baths, the ache of the day's climb dissolving into water that has been doing this work long before anyone thought to build a road up to it.