The latest adventure of a travel writer from Beltinge concerns the remote country of Bhutan and a date with the King.

Solange Hando, wife of Herne Bay councillor Ken Hando, spent 11 days in the tiny magical kingdom high amid the peaks of the Himalayas.

There, she was one of only a privileged few to attend the coronation earlier this month of the fifth Dragon King of Bhutan.

“He’s a wonderful man,” beams Mrs Hando who counts Bhutan, which borders India and Tibet, as probably her favourite country in the world. “He’s young, he’s handsome, he’s single, and I think every Bhutanese girl is in love with him!”

At just 28, His Majesty Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck is indeed the youngest reigning monarch in the world.

His coronation was on November 6, although he has been on the throne since his father stepped down in December 2006.

Mrs Hando says: “The coronation should have been in 2007 but the country’s astrologers thought that 2007 was a black year so they had to wait for the most auspicious date.

“The coronation was three days of celebration, lots of colour, but no glamour or pomposity at all.

"The King is so close to his people it’s hard to believe.

“There was total trust. I didn’t see a bodyguard anywhere.

“He walked for four hours to greet all his subjects who had turned up, bent double to show how humble he was.

“And in his coronation address he said he would ‘protect his people like a father, care for them like a brother, and serve them like a son’.

"I think that’s rather a nice quote.”

The coronation took place in Thimphu, the capital of Bhutan, a country of some 600,000.

Mrs Hando, who lives with her husband in The Paddocks, spent 11 days in the kingdom on this, the latest and most regal of her regular trips abroad.

The former French teacher, who moved to England from her native France in 1967, makes more than a dozen trips abroad every year for her travel writing, which she took up full-time in 2000.

Next up is Sweden over Christmas and Egypt in January.

“I just love it,” she says; “travelling is discovering and learning things all the time.”