Continents (all)

From the moment we started, we knew this was going to be a holiday with a difference. Maybe it was the envious looks we got from British cyclists on the way to Heathrow, or maybe it was the stares from shocked Spaniards as we did a sudden strip-tease beside the baggage reclaim in Madrid, revealing if not our true colours, then at least our lycra-clad limbs. Full of gorgeous pictures well worth waiting for...

Tussen juli 1995 en december 1996 hebben wij een fietsreis gemaakt van Rotterdam naar Kaapstad. Op deze reis hebben we door twintig landen gefietst in Europa, het Midden Oosten en Afrika. In anderhalf jaar tijd hebben we een afstand van ruim 20.000 kilometer afgelegd. Op deze internet-site kun je enkele verhalen over deze reis lezen en de mooiste van onze honderden foto's bekijken.

For Kurban BayramI (``Sacrifice Feast'' in English, ``eid-al-adha'' in Arabic, in honor of Abraham's pledge to sacrifice his son (though God then bade him to sacrifice but a sheep), i.e. the Islamic holiday in the middle of ``Hac'' (``Hadj'' in Arabic), the Islamic pilgrimage month to Mecca), I drove with my Turkish friend TuGrul to the Mediterranean Sea for a mountain-bike tour in the Taurus Mountains. Here's an account of how we braved physical adversity and faced the impeccable logic of rural Turks.

A trip from the Netherlands to the USA - over Asia and Australia. The European part goes through Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Turkey.

Leaving home for a trip like this is not something one does from one day to the other. Along the way I joked often, saying: ``Yeah, one night I went out, got pissed and I am still trying to find my way home.'' In truth I had no foreign experience; well, none on my own. I had never been to an embassy before, I knew nothing about what's out there. Still I wanted to go, and with some hard work I managed to get my trip sponsored too! Getting ready to leave is always something special. Packing for a holiday, going out for a long weekend... Packing for a trip is even more emotional. Because I wasn't only packing my bags, I was packing all my belongings. Most of them went to storage, some of them into my bags. And with what I packed in my bags that 31st of may 1998, I lived for almost 3 years. What an adventure I was heading forward to... What a story you are about to read!

A site filled with tours all over Europe, Africa, Asia, and America.

Reports and pictures from various mountains of Europe, America, and Australia. Partly in Dutch.

Trailsource has started a collection, among others, of European Mountain Bike Trail Descriptions. Mountain Biking TrailSource is your online adventure guide to the best mountain bike trails around the globe! You'll find over 4,000 singletracks in 100 countries.

An enormous collection of bicycle tours all over the world.
Eine enorme Sammlung von Fahrradtouren in der ganzen Welt.

Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man's metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well. [...]

Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also cheap. With his much lower salary, the Chinese acquires his durable bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American devotes to the purchase of his obsolescent car. The cost of public utilities needed to facilitate bicycle traffic versus the price of an infrastructure tailored to high speeds is proportionately even less than the price differential of the vehicles used in the two systems. In the bicycle system, engineered roads are necessary only at certain points of dense traffic, and people who live far from the surfaced path are not thereby automatically isolated as they would be if they depended on cars or trains. The bicycle has extended man's radius without shunting him onto roads he cannot walk. Where he cannot ride his bike, he can usually push it.

The bicycle also uses little space. Eighteen bikes can be parked in the place of one car, thirty of them can move along in the space devoured by a single automobile. It takes three lanes of a given size to move 40,000 people across a bridge in one hour by using automated trains, four to move them on buses, twelve to move them in their cars, and only two lanes for them to pedal across on bicycles. Of all these vehicles, only the bicycle really allows people to go from door to door without walking. The cyclist can reach new destinations of his choice without his tool creating new locations from which he is barred. [...]

Wielerlinks NL is a portalsite for road cycling in the Netherlands and Belgium. The site contains news, background information and lots of links.

Wielerlinks is een portaalsite voor wielrennen in Nederland en België. De site bevat nieuws, achtergrondinformatie en vele links over wielrennen.

[The author travels around the world and reviews hostels, and has built up a large hostel directory.]

What are hostels?

The quickest answer I can give to you is that hostels are budget accommodations where you share a room with other travelers. To be more specific though and to give you a better idea of what to expect I will say that a hostel room is like a hotel room but instead of being just one bed there are a couple (or a few) bunk beds. There are also (gasp!) other people. People you do not know! These other people are travelers who are most likely very much like you in the sense that they are exploring and traveling and doing it as absolutely cheaply as possible. Hostels have been around a long long time. There are over 20,000 of them around the world. Hostels are very much a part of the culture of Europe, and are starting to be known in the USA as well. Hostels are a cheaper way of staying in a city where you do not live.

This search engine helps to find information provided directly from about 490 bike manufacturers.

A high quality photo gallery of over 350 loaded touring bicycles from around the world. A tribute to the loaded touring bike and the places the bikes take us. Expedition links and tourer profiles. Tailwinds!

Ernst Poulsen is a photo journalist, and has photos from bicycle trips to China and Israel.

A list of web addresses of (bicycle) map publishers. At the last count, it listed 610 publishers in 98 countries.

For all those going abroad - or searching for advocacy-advice from other countries - here is a list of the 48 most important bicycle groups around the world. These groups specialize not only in bicycle advocacy but also in tourism, consumer issues, hpv-matters, etc. The list includes e-mail and homepage addresses where I have been able to find them - and a word of introduction (explanation) about the nature of these groups.

Hey guys,

Imagine a site that not only offers you the chance to join other local cyclists on bike trips but also the opportunity to bike the trails with other cyclers while you're out of town or even out of the country - all for free!

Expose yourself to new trails and enjoy a new cycling experience with friends around the world. So next time you pack your bags for a trip away from home, or even near by, don't forget to grab your bike and check out this world wide cycling community site.

Come and join for free.