Lonely Planet Epic Bike Rides of the World , livre ebook

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
AFRICA
Tour d’Afrique
Riding the Rif (Morocco)
AMERICAS
Cuba’s Southern Rollercoaster
To the Tip of Patagonia (Argentina)
The Natchez Trace Parkway (USA)
A Circuit of San Juan Island (USA)
Family Bikepacking in Ecuador
Colorado Beer Bike Tour (USA)
North America’s Pacific Coast (USA)
Mountain Biking in Moab (USA)
Ride the Whitehorse Trails (Canada)
The Minuteman Bikeway (USA)
Buenos Aires’ Bike Paths (Argentina)
The Covered Bridges of Vermont (USA)
Vancouver and Whistler (Canada)
Manhattan Circumnavigation (USA)
ASIA
Mai Chau Cycle Ride (Vietnam)
Bikepacking in Mongolia
Cycling the Seto Inland Sea (Japan)
High in the Himalaya (India)
Bhutanese Dragon Ride
Mae Hong Son Circuit (Thailand)
Sri Lankan Sightseeing
China’s Wild West
EUROPE
Bavarian Beer Ride (Germany)
Down The Danube (Austria)
Monte Amiata (Italy)
The Bryan Chapman Memorial (Wales)
Pedalling the Spanish Picos
Climbing Mt Ventoux (France)
Beating the Birkebeinerrittet (Norway)
West Cork’s Wild Coast, (Ireland)
A Corsican Challenge (France)
Circling Lake Constance (Switzerland/Germany/Austria)
Sierra Nevada Traverse (Spain)
The South Downs Way (England)
Arty Copenhagen Cruise (Denmark)
Around the Île de Ré (France)
The Tour of Flanders (Belgium)
From Sea to Sea (England)
The Cévennes: Riding the Rider (France)
Into the Outer Hebrides (Scotland)
All Along the Loire (France)
OCEANIA
Beaches and Bicycles in Adelaide (Australia)
The Old Ghost Road (New Zealand)
Australia’s Atherton Tablelands
The Acheron Way (Australia)
The Munda Biddi Trail (Australia)
Alps 2 Ocean Cycle Trail (New Zealand)
Tasmania’s Wild West (Australia)
INTRODUCTION
A sk a dozen cycling writers for their most memorable bike rides and you get many more than a dozen answers. For some, biking was purely about escapism and involved nothing more complicated than packing some sandwiches and meandering into the distance with the wind at their backs. One or two went a little further and, GPS unit in hand, ventured into the wilds of Patagonia and the Himalaya, powered by nothing more than their legs and a desire to see what was around the next corner.
Those writers with families recommended flat and accessible loops around traffic-free islands or along river paths. A few contributors preferred to case themselves in skin-tight Lycra and seek out heart-pounding ascents, making ardent pilgrimages to the sites of classic races to pay their respects. Mountain-biking writers wrote of thrills and spills on rugged trails on every continent. And more than a few authors agreed that a good ride wasn’t complete without a beer or two afterwards with old friends or new.
What was clear, though, is that everybody has their personal interpretation of ‘epic’. You can have an epic adventure straight from your front door and be back in time for tea. Or you can follow in the tyre tracks of adventurer Alastair Humphreys and pedal around the world, through 60 countries, for four years.
This book attempts to reflect that diversity and those varying levels of commitment. We can’t all take a sabbatical for cycling! We’ve sought out some of the most entertaining experiences you can have on a bicycle, whether you’re a casual rider or a cyclist with a stable of carbon-fibre machines. The settings of these experiences range from some of the world’s most remote places – Mongolia, Bhutan and the Outer Hebrides – to its hippest cities and dreamiest islands. Some of these rides take just a couple of hours, others a day or two, a week, or more than a month. We’ve usually not tried to specify times the rides might take beyond the distance involved – everybody is different; take as long as required.
Instead, we’ve given a general indication of whether a ride is easy (in terms of terrain, distance, conditions or climate) or more challenging (bigger hills, longer distances, fewer cake shops). The most important point of these stories is to inspire you to get your bike out (dusting it off and pumping up the tyres first if need be) and explore somewhere new with the wind in your hair.
Cycling is the perfect mode of transport for the travel-lover, allowing us to cover more ground than if we were on foot, but without the barriers that a car imposes. We are immersed in our surroundings, self-powered, independent, and forever pondering the question ‘I wonder what’s over there?’. The bike rider is free to follow a whim, discover the limits of their endurance, or stop and settle for while. Hopefully, this book will prove that there’s no better way of simply experiencing a place, a culture and its people than by bicycle. And as some of these tales tell, arriving on a bicycle opens doors, literally and figuratively.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
The main stories in each regional chapter feature first-hand accounts of fantastic bike rides in that continent. Each includes a toolkit to enable the planning of a trip – when is the best time of year, how to get there, where to stay. But beyond that, these stories should spark other ideas. We’ve started that process with the ‘more like this’ section following each story, which offers other ideas along a similar theme, not necessarily on the same continent. Many of these ideas are well established routes or trails. The index collects different types of ride for a variety of interests.

© Marcus Enno

© Cass Gilbert
- EPIC BIKE RIDES OF THE WORLD -

THE TOUR D’AFRIQUE
Tour d’Afrique lives up to its name: a ride across the entire continent of Africa. It’s tough on the bike and gruelling on the body.

T hrough stinging beads of sweat I looked ahead and the road shimmered into the distance – a thin grey line with endless plains of sand on either side. We’d cycled 50 miles (80km) so far and had the same distance to go. The sun was beating down, and the desert wind was relentless. It was like riding into a hairdryer. With added grit. What a crazy place to go cycling.
This was my first day on the Tour d’Afrique, a long-distance race from Cairo to Cape Town, Africa’s traditional northern and southern extremities. This annual test of endurance covers around 7500 miles (around 12,000km) divided into eight stages of 14 days, giving four months to ride the continent end-to-end. And while some pedal the whole distance, those with less time can ride just a stage – which is no mean feat in itself. There’s also a team relay option, and in 2009 I was part of a Lonely Planet team, with two riders completing each stage then handing on the baton.
The Tour d’Afrique starts at one of Africa’s best-known landmarks, the Pyramids of Giza, on the edge of Cairo. After obligatory photos in front of the giant monuments, and one for luck in front of the Sphinx, the peloton heads south to begin its epic journey. Route details change each year, as new roads are built or borders close, or when countries become too volatile to visit, but the Tour d’Afrique follows pretty much the same overall pattern. From the Egyptian capital, riders head to the Red Sea then follow the coast road before tracking inland to reach the Nile Valley and cycle through a landscape of palm trees and crop fields that have barely changed since Pharaonic times.
A ferry ride along Lake Nasser brings the riders to their second country, Sudan, and a demanding few days on sandy roads through the Nubian Desert, an eastern extension of the Sahara. In this remote part of Africa, where travel is hard at the best of times, cycling adds an extra level of endurance and excitement.

© Martyn Colbeck | Getty Images
the Simien mountains in Ethiopia
In Khartoum my own adventure began, as I joined a Lonely Planet teammate on that heat-soaked highway through the endless desert landscape. Distances between towns were long, so we often stopped for a drink and a rest at basic roadhouses, some little more than a lonely shack surrounded by sand. We enjoyed small glasses of sweet black tea, and an unexpected bonus was the availability of glucose biscuits. Together they kept us fuelled for another hour or two of tough cycling.
From Sudan we crossed the border into Ethiopia. Almost immediately, the flat desert changed to a fertile landscape of green rolling hills, and dead-straight roads gave way to frequent bends as we climbed into the Ethiopian Highlands, a range of mountains sometimes dubbed the Roof of Africa.
From the vantage points of the bikes, we were able to see local people working in the fields, kids going to school, everyone just getting on with daily life. We were also joined by a group of Ethiopian cyclists, and a highlight of the trip was riding alongside them as the dramatic scenery rolled past, chatting about life in Ethiopia and the finer points of the local bike-racing scene.

CAIRO TO CAPE TOWN RECORD BREAKERS
The first Tour d’Afrique in 2003 set a new benchmark in long-distance cycling events, and also set a new world record, with nine riders cycling from Cairo to Cape Town in 120 days. Over the following decade, the record was reduced by several solo riders. In 2015 the record was broken by British cyclist Mark Beaumont, covering around 6718 mile (around 10,812km) in a brisk 41 days, 10 hours and 22 minutes.

After Ethiopia, the Tour d’Afrique goes to Kenya. The route may be out of the mountains, but the cycling gets even harder with a traverse of the arid Dida Galgalu Desert. When the Lonely Planet team were here in 2009, a freak rainstorm turned dirt roads into mud. One of the riders later reported: ‘It was much more than just cycling. It was a matter of survival.’
A day of climbing into the lush foothills of Mt Kenya comes as a welcome relief, enhanced by crossing the Equator, from where it’s an easy ride to Nairobi and on to Tanzania through a classic African landscape of savanna grasslands dotted with flat-topped acacia trees. On a bike it’s easier to see monkeys, giraffes, zebras and other wi