I've put in many thousands of sweat-streaming miles on my bicycle—heart rate monitor strapped on, a Garmin Edge 500 taking a one-per-second snapshot of at least six different ride parameters, Strava.com waiting at home arms wide open for all this data that it will massage into graphs, maps, leaderboards... the suffering becomes numbers, the numbers inspire more suffering. It's an almost laughable addiction, and I know it.

What a relief then to throw away (well, toss carefully aside) the bike computer and heart-rate strap, park the race bike, and decide that instead of riding purely for physiological benefit, I'll take in a new country in the process.

There are many ways to tour—car, bus, foot, donkey, Segway—but I dare say bicycle touring offers the perfect pace. It's fast enough to cover ground between big sights, but slow enough to really take in a country—to stop at the little shops, pause to watch the daily street dramas, and breathe it all in at every panorama. And, if you're like me and all about the food, it's wonderful how how bicycle touring lets you eat like a Hobbit: downing a first breakfast, second breakfast and elevenses, and yet still be ready for an early lunch.

Last year I cycled with a group through the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, covering 1,100km over three weeks. The route from Merida to San Cristobal wound through the colonial towns, Mayan ruins and cenotes of the state of Yucatan, along the Gulf of Mexico coast through Campeche, through the wetlands and cacao-growing region of Tabasco, and finally hitting the challenging climbing of Chiapas.

If you're used to tours by car, bus or train, it's hard to describe the peace that slowing the pace brings. A region is no longer a series of snapshots at the end of motorised journeys; there's a sense of truth; the very terrain is imprinted in your legs.

Some wags have suggested that no matter how one gets to the top of a mountain, the view is the same, but that was clearly a set of humorists who didn't stray too far from the tour bus. When you've slogged up a mountain road by bicycle (or up a trail on foot), it's as if the view was handspun for you that very morning. Hardwon panoramas are precious, especially if the viewing is accompanied by fresh local queso and the spoils of a morning raid on the last town's panaderia and fruit market, followed by chocolate made from cacao grown on the very trees you've ridden past.

Perhaps the most noble way to tour by bicycle is to begin and end at your front door, completely self-sufficient on your fully loaded Surly Long Haul Trucker or Koga-Miyata WorldTraveller. Lose the front panniers (and camping and cooking equipment) to get into “credit card touring”, where you stay at hotels and buy all your meals. And luxe bicycle touring, if there is such a thing, would be fully supported, where a van carries all the luggage and you take just a spare tube and pump, if that.

Our Mexico tour was unsupported, but we stopped at hotels every night, so the rear-panniers-only setup on my Bianchi Volpe gave me enough room for my things, as well as for a few goodies acquired along the way (notably a cylinder of beautiful criollo drinking chocolate bought from the Tabasco hacienda that produced it).

There are disadvantages to bicycle touring of course, though many of these are avoided by going on a guided tour. Navigation can be tricky since the shortest or fastest route between two towns isn't always the most cycling friendly, and convincing your local direction-giver of this can be difficult. If you can't stay within sight of the bicycles, having to lock up at every stop can be a pain, and there's the worry of pannier theft.

Perhaps the biggest downside, if you're a nocturnal creature, is that late-night activities are out of the question, unless you've reached one of the rest days of the itinerary. A good sleep is not optional when riding long distances day after day: we were often heading for bed as the town square was only just warming up for Carnaval.

How could we ever regret this though, riding through quiet streets at sunrise, looking forward to a second breakfast of fresh shrimp omelette at a shack on a shell beach in Campeche? Or having the magical Mayan ruins of Kabah all to ourselves? Or when we passed the barbacoa restaurant whose aroma of grilling goat meat drew us back to one of the best meals of the trip? On a bicycle, these little moments seem to seek you out, and it's then you realise that over handlebars, the view is unbridled. Get on your bike and ride!