Hi Sprout,
The forwarding processing on the routers is as follows:
When the AR1 sends packets: If a valid address of any local interface is used as the source address, the router searches the routing table and forward the packet based on the outbound interface. The routing table is used to forward packets, therefore, the processing here can be considered as a hop.
When AR2 receives packets: After the packet reaches the AR2, the router does not search for the routing table. (The packet is not sent to the loopback interface and then sent to the CPU.) Instead, the router finds that the destination address of the packet is the local address, even if the destination address is not the address of the inbound interface, the packet is directly sent to the CPU for processing.
Therefore, even if the loopback address of the peer router is pinged, there is only one hop for the forwarding.
Hope to help you!