I did it...

Five of us left the hotel at 7am and began our trek at 7.30.  I felt pretty good going up & made sure I kept it slow. You breathe heavily but my heart was not racing. The prep work I did paid off. I kept stopping for photos so was the last to reach the top. The monastery is very beautiful. You have to surrender your cameras, bags, tripod, shoes, everything.  The downside of being here for the festival is that the place was heaving with people and some tourists were extremely irreverent in the temples. (Well you wouldn’t talk loudly in a cathedral would you?) There are actually 10 temples within the monastery but foreigners are only allowed in 5 of them. 
The hardest bit is that once you reach the top you have to descend into the ravine and up the other side to enter the monastery. And once you have been in the monastery you of course have to repeat the process. That is the killer. Coming down was as difficult & as painful as I had expected. The trip took us approx 7 hours and that is very very slow.
We all feel pretty pleased with ourselves, I have a massive amount of painkillers on board and feel perfectly good at the moment. We were supposed to be visiting a local farmhouse for dinner tonight, which was a nice idea but involved sitting on the floor Bhutanese style. Bit daft when 5 of the party probably wouldn’t be able to get off the floor :-) Anyway sense has prevailed and we will be visiting a restaurant instead.
Tomorrow we will spend the day at the festival.

Taktshang Monastery