Sometimes on the road it is good to have an out-of-body experience, just as a reminder of how extraordinary travel can be. I had one such moment on Bhutan’s East-West Highway, a thin ribbon of hardtop that doodles its way across the eastern Himalayas. We’d just topped the 3,390m Pele La pass, and were about 30 minutes into a long, twisting descent, when I saw half a dozen huge birds riding the thermals high above. “Griffon vultures,” shouted our guide Phub Tshering from behind. “Something must have died.”

For a moment, I saw us through their eyes. Three cyclists and their guide careering down a single-track road in a kind of madcap fairground ride, swerving around yaks, dodging landslips, hollering at macaques, listening out for the guttural roar of the occasional gaudily-painted truck on blind corners, and peering apprehensively over the far edge, where the drop-off was sheer. Even if something hadn’t yet died, you couldn’t blame the vultures for running the numbers.

It was, all in all, a strange kind of lunacy, choosing to cycle through one of the world’s most mountainous countries. The locals clearly thought so too; why go to all the time and effort of pedalling up these hills, they asked, when bringing up the rear of our procession was a perfectly good minibus? It was a good question, to which there turned out to be good answers, as I discovered along the way.