Pack Your Bike and Go
The joys of cycle touring
Words and Pics by Hugo Gladstone
Posted: 4 July 2008
There are two reasons why I can remember my first crack at cycle touring so well. The first is that it wasn't all that long ago - just a couple years in fact - and the second was that it was incredibly good fun.
As with all trips it had both highlights and lowlights but, looking back, the only real negative I had to chew on was the recurring indignation that I hadn't done this sooner.
Above: Shirt off, stunning sunset. You're on holiday on your bike.
I mean, I enjoy riding bikes and I enjoy travelling so how come in fifteen years of cycling hadn't I put the two together before? As I realised out the road, there are few things more liberating than going away by bike. You travel under your own steam, ride where you please, and stop, eat and sleep when you feel like it.
Travelling by bike you are not inhibited by the timetables of public transport or the itineraries of holiday companies. And although self-drive trips may offer a similar level of independence, they fail to match cycle touring for green credentials, sense of achievement and intimacy with the environment being visited.
Above: Stop and sleep where you like. Here Nick Craig finds a spot by the roadside.
"When you go by bike you almost become part of the landscape," says Yorkshire lass Laura Geoghegan, who along with boyfriend Jim Davies enjoyed a couple of months touring in South America earlier this year. "You get to see and do things that you wouldn't if you were travelling by other modes. I really remember eating this amazing meal at this little old lady's house in Peru. We would never have done that if we'd been whizzing past on the bus."
As well as providing an incredible and often a quite random array of experiences, going touring has remarkable fitness benefits for more competitive forms of cycling. Just ask Tour de France TV commentator Phil Liggett when you next see him. Back in the early 60s he took a touring trip through Europe then returned to his Merseyside home to take his first ever road race win the following day.
"It was my first cycling holiday abroad - my first time abroad at all in fact," he recalls. "It was a wonderful trip with my friend, Keith Dixon. We went by train to Namur in Belgium and then rode down the Moselle to Trier and through Luxembourg and back."
Above: Touring: go as fast or slow as you fancy. (Don't think Mr Craig does 'slow' - Ed)
Even in today's modern era of high-intensity training techniques, for building strength there's nothing that beats a bit of old fashioned heavily-laden mile crunching. After I went touring in the French Alps with Elite mountain biker Nick Craig, he came back to the UK and won the national mountain bike marathon championships.
Despite these anecdotes you don't even need the mildest of competitive streaks to head off travelling on your bike. You can be young or old, fast or slow and in it for whatever reasons you fancy.
My first touring venture was based on a few days of watching the Tour de France while Tom Kevill-Davies (www.thehungrycyclist.com) spent two years biking the Americas in search of the perfect meal. As a teenager, my dad went touring as a means of escaping inner city London for the surrounding English countryside. On the other hand, comedian Harry Enfield's father Edward discovered the delights of travelling by bike in later-life. Now 78 he's written a number of books about his dawdling journeys through France, Greece, Ireland and Eastern Europe and claims the key to his trips is to stick to modest mileages - just 25 or 30 a day. Some tourists clock up 200.
Above: Use your bike to explore the nooks and crannies of the area you're visiting.
Don't think you have to go anywhere exotic either. I know cyclists who've had great touring holidays having barely left their home county.
The freedom and open-page of it all is the great beauty of touring but whatever your motivations and objectives, a little planning will help you go a long way - maybe literally. Your options are unlimited but amongst some of the questions to consider are the following. Where are you going? Are you going to camp or stay in hotels and hostels? How much money do you want to spend? Will you be warm enough? What sort of terrain are you going to be riding on? What gear do you need? And how are you going to transport it all?
Unless you've made elaborate arrangements with Parcelforce, your credit card company or a somewhat subservient spouse, you'll be carrying all the worldly goods you require by bike, either in panniers attached to racks above your wheels or on a trailer towed behind. Whichever way, you'll need a sturdy machine with low gears and strong wheels and want to pack as lightly as possible.
Above: Helmet, tent and wine. Carry everything you need on your bike.
"Before embarking on a big adventure, do a weekend trip to test the water," advises Essex based club rider Brett Travers, who alongside several shorter excursions in France with his wife, spent three months touring New Zealand with a friend. "Nothing can quite prepare you for the deadweight a fully loaded bike presents at the bottom of a climb. At first even getting out of the saddle is a no-no because of the instability caused by panniers. But with time you do get used to it. Later on in our trip, we got so comfortable with the load, we were sprinting for signposts with panniers on!"
Another tip for the first time tourist is not to try and bite off more than you can chew.
"Always try and be realistic about how far you might go in a day," says mountain bike tourist Jim Davies. "It's all too easy to look at a map and pick a far flung destination. Out in the real world there might be hills, headwinds, interesting places to stop at or, in our case when we went off-road through a forest in Chile, fallen trees every twenty yards. Seriously it took us three days to do about ten miles!"
Above: You'll soon get used to handling a bike with panniers on.
But these sort of adversities are all part and parcel of touring and usually only make for a greater adventure. As Jim recalls of exiting that forest: "We bumped into a family who helped carry our bikes and trailers over the last 300m metres of fallen trees and then went to this amazing hot springs set beside a beautiful waterfall. Suddenly we went from having this really frustrating time to this brilliant experience that was probably the best bit of the trip. It made the previous three day's struggle all the more worthwhile."
Above: Tents and bikes: they go together!
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