Almost for as long as I could remember, Bhutan had been a dream – and a remarkably familiar one. The old clichés were rolled out again and again: the concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH), the compulsory national dress and national architecture, the passion for archery; the dzongs. In a way, I felt I knew it all already. Anyway, the whole thing sounded too good to be true; Shangri-La, as everybody knew, didn't exist. Then, last year, we went there – and found that it did.

The first surprise was Paro airport – and no more beautiful airport building exists in the world. Here was our first sight of traditional Bhutanese architecture – long, and fairly low, surmounted by the traditional three flat wooden roofs laid one above the other, diminishing in size pagoda-style; the walls snow-white, but with all the windows and the entire central section a riot of astonishingly elaborate and brilliantly painted woodwork.

Outside the airport, Hishey was waiting – fortyish and full of charm, enviably sophisticated, his unaccented English as good as ours. He had arranged our trip, planned our itinerary and provided the minibus in which we were going to travel. A superb naturalist and ornithologist, one of the world's leading authorities on cranes, he can instantly identify any animal or bird. The journey along the valley to our hotel was only 20 minutes but we broke it to watch an archery contest. Two teams of 11 were taking turns to shoot, one at each end of the range, 120m from each other. Their marksmanship was astonishing, the whole target being roughly the size of our normal black bull's-eye.