It felt incongruous to see the passenger, Tenzin Gyatso, in such a remote spot. Smiling and laughing, conveying his spiritual and political doctrine with the bonhomie of a favourite uncle, he has become an icon of modern history. What no one watching him being driven down a dusty track in the Dhauladhar mountains knew was that the 73-year-old Gyatso, better known as His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, was being whisked from his home in the Indian hill station of McLeod Ganj to a hospital in New Delhi, a 90-minute flight away.
Old men become older and their health inevitably deteriorates. But, with Beijing hoping the issue of extended Tibetan autonomy will die with Gyatso, seldom has one man's physical well-being received such scrutiny nor his death borne such geopolitical ramifications.
On assignment with the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) - the body that oversees the political and social welfare of the Tibetan diaspora, which has grown to about 150,000 people in more than 33 countries - it was fascinating to observe the ripple effect as word of the Dalai Lama's hospitalisation spread. For most civil servants in the CTA, the news came via overnight BBC radio broadcasts, which, judging from the worried faces the next morning, caused widespread shock.
Professor John Powers, author of History as Propaganda: Tibetan Exiles Versus the People's Republic of China, says the secrecy surrounding the health scare gives some indication of how news of the Dalai Lama's demise might be handled by the CTA.
'As a remnant of the closed, insular system of old Tibet, the government-in-exile still has significant issues with transparency,' he says. 'However, His Holiness' condition is a matter of deep concern for Tibetans and any rumours of his ill health will cause a panic among the community, which the administration naturally wants to prevent.'
Powers adds wryly that the CTA would be hard pressed to outdo the precedent of 1682, when the Tibetan government contrived to keep the death of the fifth Dalai Lama a secret for 15 years, ostensibly to prevent social turmoil in the interregnum.
Secrecy and security have been integral to the current Dalai Lama's life. Fifty years ago, he was spirited from Lhasa's Norbulingka Palace after an escalation in what Mao Zedong labelled the 'peaceful liberation [of Tibet] ... based on unity with the masses and patient education'. Gyatso subsequently trekked across the frozen Himalayas to seek asylum in India, where he has remained since, and where only two years ago his personal security became tighter on news his name had been found on an al-Qaeda hit list.