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Bicycle Adventures

The road goes on forever, the story never ends

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Bicycle adventures tours are different other kinds of travel adventures like backpacking and travel in tour groups. You will experience more in a country by bicycle than with any other kind of transport. Nothing beats the experience of traveling on a bicycle, the fact you can come at places where no other travelers come is something special.

The bicycle gives you more then other ways of travel the opportunity to meet people, especially outside the tourist areas.

And it is people that make the journey, not the sights. The further you move from the tourist zone, the better the experience is. Every cyclist knows that.

Because I have been cycling for the last 25 years I can help you with

• Tips and tricks
• Planning
• Clothes and shoes
• Safety, dangers and annoyances, health, food etc.
• Bicycle specs
• Country info
• Bicycles and other transport
• Budget
• Advice how to start, where to go to, what to do ... and much more ...

Your bicycle will bring you to place you have not imagined it even existed. You will get off the beaten travel path and still see the main attractions, isn't that something exciting?

Somewhere in Central Turkey 2000

I am sure some of my experiences could be very useful for you. In some areas I have spent more time (for example a year in India, several years in Thailand, Laos, China Indonesia, Myanmar and Malaysia).

What will you learn?

Nothing is impossible! The weirdest and wildest places are there to be explored. More then ever in history it is easy to explore the world on bicycle. More then ever cycling is popular. Drop your bike on a plane, train, bus or car and get out! And it is healthy.

Contrary to some believes, anyone can cycle. No matter age, sex, race, yes even health, you can start your own bicycle adventure. See for example:

• Read this story about Darshen, a man who cycled more then 10.000 km with just one arm and one leg
• Johan, 8 years old, cycling 250km in 4 days

The magic of cycling

Cycling is addictive. Once on the road, it's hard to go back to normal life. It's not particularly the adrenaline but more the experience itself, being somewhere. Therefore a bicycle adventure is also not really a holiday.

This sounds strange for people at home but once you're on the road for more then a couple of week you will feel the "holiday" feeling changed to a "life" feeling.

And trust me, you can get tired of it, like you can get tired of everything in life. At such times, the magic may temporarily disappear.

It will come back. Find a place with some nice people, a good view, some good food and a book, and take a break (I did that once at the Andaman Islands and it was extremely refreshing NOT to travel). But the road goes on forever... and you will never know where it brings you, despite heavy planning.

My own experiences

Of course I am talking from my own experience. You will find plenty of examples here that will help you to find your own destiny on the bicycle. In fact, everything on the bicycle adventures website is based on my own personal experience. And you can benefit of my travels.

The road was always a rewarding place for me. I met lots of fantastic people, see for example my meeting with a very local Chinese long distance cyclist. It didn't matter were I was.

Take your bike on the boat, here from Langkawi Malaysia
to Satun Thailand 2008

Wherever I came I met wonderful people.

• In Turkey and China I learned what friendship meant.
• Iran taught me about hospitality.
• India was the country of contradictions in cultures
• Malaysia gave me a second home.
• In Indonesia I learned to enjoy the beaches
• Nepal and India taught me how lucky I was being Dutch, and where I saw some true poverty.
• In Vietnam I learned how to change bad luck in good luck

And all I did was cycling from one place to another.

My bicycle adventures are not part of my life, they are my life. And it might be the same for you. You may get crazy things happening, for example when your bicycle starts talking to you! It happened to me, see Jim's (my bicycle) story.

Bad luck can happen, like here (2011) in Vietnam where
the bicycle repairman repaired my tire with a fishingnet rope

Planning and budget

Many people say that bicycling is cheap. In some ways this is true but we will discuss this later with planning, bicycle choice, maintenance etc.. I'm not a bicycle techie, and although that sometimes works against me, it also has brought me in contact with amazing people.

The most important thing about planning ...but ... don't plan too much because you will change it anyway!

But you have to start somewhere... so start right here!

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