Asia (all)

This is our second big trip with bicycle. It just started 1998 from Germany over Africa up to Asia with the destination South Korea (2000). Now, again on the road, we are travelling by bicycle in South America. We are since 06/2005 again on the road.

Dies ist nun schon unsere zweite grosse Radtour. Es begann 1998 in Deutschland mit dem Weg nach Suedkorea und einem Abstecher in Afrika. Nun, seit 06/2005, sind wir mit unseren Raedern in Suedamerika unterwegs.

Here are the day-by-day detailed route notes of the ten day, 248 mile, 398 kilometer ride from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Here are the day-by-day detailed route notes of the thirteen day ride from Bangkok to Phuket in Thailand.

In May 2004, after having worked for 18 months in China, I decided to hit the road to fulfill my dream of a lifetime: to travel extensively in Asia and Oceania without the pressure of time and the necessity of airplane travel. My idea was to travel mostly overland and give myself enough time to get to know faraway countries and different cultures by living as close as possible to the local realities.

Having met Fred during my last months in China and finding his ``RTW by bicycle'' a very stimulating way of traveling, I planned my journey in such a way as to be able to join him in the Philippines and spend 6 months on the road with him. The experience was a success and when Fred took the road to Europe from India, I decided to continue traveling by bicycle on my own in South-East Asia and finally Australia.

Planète D. is our volunteering and filming world tour on the tandem bike. It’s that simple.

We cycle.
We film, edit and share videos.
We volunteer for NGOs.

A world tour on a rather odd bicycle.

Read about my adventures by bicycle around the world,taking in Europe, the Near East, India, South East Asia, Australasia, and the USA on Route 66.

For something a little less ambitious, I have prepared details of a three-week tour of the beautiful landscapes of central Portugal.

Or if you prefer a central base and some day rides, read about my routes on the Spanish island of Mallorca - a cyclist's paradise, with warm weather, flat hinterland, stunning mountain climbs, and huge ice-creams!

The information that you will find on these pages is about cycling in central Japan and wild camping in the country. There are seperate links to different rides in Kanto, Kansai as well as Chuetsu regions with travelogues and photos. The main page contains also travelogues and pictures from bike rides in Ontario, Canada as well as a 6 month trip across Mediterranean Europe.

The page contains travelogues and pictures from a number of bike trips across Europe, Ontario (Canada) as well as Kansai and Kanto regions of Japan. The trip across European continent has entries written from the road and together with photos it provides the description of the trip day by day. The trips across Japan give a lot of information about local areas (places to camp, onsens, roads, what to see, etc.) as well as many photos. There is also some general information on cycling, wild camping and hiking in Japan. Hope it will help.

As a rider of the Beijing to Paris 2007 Carfree rallye to celebrate better, carfree mobility (see www.beijingtoparis.com), I am riding in the opposite direction from Paris to Beijing.

I try to get in contact with local cycling culture as much as I can and to spread peace over the world!

The bike I am undertaking this tour with is a recumbent touring bike equipped with high quality components. So far (end of July 07) I haven't had a single technical defect!

We are performing a 2 years (theoretically) trip around Eurasia. During the trip, we are performing a photo documentation for ICOMOS, an expert organization of UNESCO about cultural heritage. The database created will be available on the website.

We wish with this project to perform some challenging cycling, linking with useful actions.

Our website relates our diary and we are putting plenty of photos and comments (and lots of other fields are going to come, such as advices, technical data...).

Welcome to the Wish Tour!

Below you will find the photos and journal from a two-year, 20,000-mile bicycle journey around the world.

Starting in July 2005, this journal will take readers across the United States, Europe, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan, China, Tibet, Nepal, India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Borneo, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand.

The journey began more than 20 years ago, as the seeds of a dream to circumnavigate the globe were cultivated from a deeply personal and painful experience.

[Absolutely stunning pictures.]

Mal & Lee on a world recumbent cycle tour of the world.

Just completed a cross continent tour of Australia and circumnavigation of Tasmania.... Off to the UK now :-)

We are Sarah Erck and James Welle, two 27 year old ex-Microsoft employees who decided to get married, quit our jobs, sell all of our material possessions, and travel around the world on our bicycles for one year...or more!

It all began innocently enough in 2005 when Sarah's mom gave James the book Miles from Nowhere on his birthday. Sarah, being the bookworm that she is, read the book immediately and fell in love with the idea of riding a bicycle around the world. James was a little more reluctant at first; he was an avid cyclist but was worried about quitting his job and spending a lot of money on a trip like this. Sarah persisted and in the end she was able to convice James to take the plunge and in September of 2006 they decided to officially do the trip after James finished his work on Windows Vista. The fall of 2006 was spent furiously planning and preparing for our departure date of January 2007!

In the summers of 2004 and 2005 we cycled the Turkish Black Sea coast all the way from Istanbul to the Georgian border. On my webspace you'll find a description of the route and the pictures of the trip from 2005 to tell the story. Enjoy!

Having sold all our belongings; paid all our debts; having said goodbye to all our friends, we will be looking forward to a five year cycling adventure. It will take us around the world and through five continents.

During our travels we'll keep you up-to-date via this site with travel stories via our diary; photos in our slide show; and we will even try to put some film in as well.

A trip planned in 2007 to cycle across Eurasia. Follow along as Mike discovers Russia by bicycle. Departure from Amsterdam at end of March. Plan is to ride the first month to St Petersburg and then for five months cycling across Russia including the new section of road across Siberia.

A travelogue from an 8 month, 16,000km bike tour from London to Beijing via the ancient silk roads.

A 40,000 km. 3 year ride through 30 countries, from far eastern Russia (Siberia) in winter, to London England, via Australia. Trying to cover the whole route by bicycle and boat only. I have encountered plenty of good times and a few tough ones, noteably in Siberia (camping at minus forty), Papua New Guinea (pushing my bike down a beach as no roads) and Tibet (in winter).

12 countries, 12,000 kilometers, five men and five bikes. This is the story of a remarkable bicycle journey across Asia nearly entirely by bicycle. At the time, we believed it to be geographically and politically, the most diverse summer ride the planet had to offer.

The website contains hundreds of high resolution photographs, extensive journals of each country and much advice on gear, immunizations, maps, routes and visas.

This was our first go at cycling in Asia. Our route along the Mekong and to Sukhothai was an excellent choice for a short bike trip in Thailand - villages, beautiful scenery, good roads and little traffic. We loved it. We also spent some time in Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Ayuthaya.

THE PLAN: My bags are packed, i've got a new bike (long story, best told over beer...) and i'm heading to the airport tonight. My plan for the trip is as follows:

Istanbul --> Bucharest --> Odesa --> Kiev

Each leg of the trip is about 600 km long and will take me about a week (at a stately pace). I'll try to send an email from each city. I'm hoping to take a train back to Istanbul and spend my last week checking out the sights there.

THE REALITY: Spent the bulk of the trip in Turkey, due to its inhabitants' incredible generosity and friendliness, as well as the dismal roads and driving in the Balkans.

The author is selling a book on his tour around the world, but has made several chapters available for free, in PDF format. Espcially the chapters on Ethiopia and Siberia are fascinating to read and among the best stories found on Trento Bike. This is true adventure. Here are two short paragraphs:

• Ethiopia How can two sides of one village be so different? One hundred metres from Sudan and I had left behind Islam and North Africa and was into the continent's heart. The buildings, people and attitudes all felt different. The red dirt road was busy with pedestrians. Barefoot people and donkeys easily outnumbered the few fume-spewing, rattling vehicles. Women walked shaded beneath golf umbrellas, a strange sight in the African sun. Men bore a stout staff across their shoulders, their hands hooked over like wings. In Sudan the ladies flowed in colourful loose robes and men with bushy moustaches glided around in white galibayahs. In Ethiopia the men wore tight little shorts and tattered T-shirts, repaired many times, with a blanket draped over their willowy shoulders.

• Siberia We rode on and on through a frigid emptiness of low hills white with snow or black leafless woods. The white road ahead on the wooded hillsides stood out like a photo negative. The horizon's high mountains looked enticing and I felt happy to be here, to be at the ends of the earth with my bicycle. ``I'm out here a thousand miles from my home, walking a road other men have gone down. I'm seeing a world of people and things,'' sang Dylan in my headphones.

Also check out the expedition advice.

We are now in Cambodia, after 10 months of cycling thru New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, Thailand. Our site is bilingual.

Our web site is about the trip that we are now realizing. We have gone across the world to go back to Canada. We already crossed 5 different countries in 10 months. We will keep biking for around 2 more years. The subject treated by the web page is mostly about our trip (story, pictures, organisation) but we added a lot of other stuff like recipes, rock climbing, and small articles. We are French-Canadian, so our web site is belingual.

I've cycled over a number of passes these few weeks, but if I will remember one, then it will be Zoji La. It stands between Alpine-like valleys near Sonamarg and more rugged mountain ranges of upper Kashmir. The road is cut into a steep mountain slope and it seems it's a one-way road. As a cyclist I was allowed to go in the wrong dirrection. Before that, going up to the summit, I had a sur-realistic encounter with incredible number of trucks (at least 200) that were descending the pass practicaly bumper-to-bumber. With dirt road and the headwind it ment cycling in constant dust and exhaust fumes. By the time all the trucks passed I was as white as a baker after a night's shift.

I decide to leave Switzerland and cycle until Tibet. The road decide for me and I finally arrive one and an half year later in Cape Town, South Africa. This is a journey dedicated to freedom, people and nature. This tour may continue to South America but I'm still working as a tour guide in Namibia to get money for the next destinations.

Have a look on my cold stage in Turkey, nice time in Syria, amazing Sudanese crossing, wild Tanzanian experience, pure Namibia, etc... I hope you will enjoy and feel free to contact me.

In March of 2006 we set out to cycle from the UK to Tibet. We didn't quite make it but had a great adventure cycling across Europe in one of the wettest winters on record and then through the wilds of Central Asia. The site includes lots of images from Tajikistan one of the really countries for cycling.

Questa volta dobbiamo ringraziare la perseveranza e la volonta` di Pierangelo che ci ha spinti e motivati nell'affrontare questa avventura.

Erano circa due anni che ci provava ed anche se non abbiamo fatto proprio quello che si era programmato all'inizio, siamo stati sul passo carrozzabile piu' alto del mondo (forse) ed abbiamo scorazzato per dieci giorni tra le montagne piu` alte del nostro globo.

Bicycle world tour part II from Mun Suk and Eric Wehrheim. Actual tour in South and maybe Central America. Open end. On the homepage you will find also some information and fotos from our bicycle-world-tour part I who was from Germany to South Corea by crossing Africa.

If the link to our homepage doesn´t work well (sometimes in South America this happend to me) please go to http://aventurero.cjb.cc. It´s the same page only on another server.

We felt that we were prepared for our trip to Vietnam. We had read lots of guide books, stories of the wars and the peace and novels by Graham Greene and Marguerite Duras. Lesley had spent a year trying to come to grips with some of the intricacies of the Vietnamese language and its pronunciation. We had talked to other people who had cycled in Vietnam. We didn't expect to be surprised. The immigration police lived up to their reputation for being rude and abrupt but everyone else was so friendly and helpful that it was almost embarrassing. Only a relatively short time earlier our country had been involved in a bloody war with these people and they were welcoming us with open arms. It took us by surprise.

Un viaggio incredibile tra le montagne e l'India, per conoscere veramente l'anima di questo stato, per assaporarne appieno la gente e i meravigliosi paesaggi ogni giorno nuovi.

I can't really remember how we came up with the idea. It wasn't like, 'Hey, let's cycle from Europe to Asia.' It was an accumulation of small and different snippets of information via the Internet, certain other events and I suppose fate, that all slowly came together to give us our planned destination 'ISTANBUL'.

One thing was definite, the good old faithful Blue Danube River played it's usual important role in the idea, which was to safely guide us, not all of the way, but at least a part of it.

``What road? There is no road. Just stones and rocks and rivers flowing over what is supposed to be the road. You cannot cycle there. Still there are some who try.

I do not know how, but they do. But it is impossible.'' An old English traveller tells about the road from Keylong to the Baralacha La. ``But I do not want to discourage you.''

We have cycled six weeks in the Indian Himalayas through Sikh, Hindu and Tibetan Buddhist country. We had to cross some of the highest cols of the world (5.000 m plus) to reach the stunning Ladakh, Nubra, Lahaul & Spiti valleys.

Joris en Stella fietsen vanaf augustus 2005 van Nederland richting China. Na een uitstapje door het middenoosten wordt nu de weg naar het oosten voor gezet.

[Commercial tour operator, plus general information.]

A unique and special tour crossing Israel hot spots. 2 weeks of travel (that are devided to 3 sectional rides) in which we will meet people, ethnic foods, culture, amazing historic sites and much more.

The Route:

Americas: Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina
Atlantic Traverse: Azores Islands [Portugal]
Europe: Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey
The Middle East: Iran
Central Asia: Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Pakistan, India
South East Asia: Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia
Australasia: Australia

Welcome to the Brink Expedition!

Imagine attempting a global traverse that would take you 50,000 kilometres through some of the most difficult terrain and extreme weather on the planet, all the time attempting to use only human power and the natural elements.

Starting deep in the heart of Amazonian South America the Brink Expedition will encounter unforgiving Patagonian winds, snowed over Himalayan Mountain passes, monsoons on the sub-continent and the oppressive heat of Australia's Red Centre.

So while the clock ticks, the seasons will turn, making this a full-throttled Race Against the Elements!

This website accompanies the book ``Why Don't You Fly?'' (ISBN 1-905203-25-X published by Pen Press).

How does it feel to trade comfort and security for life as a nomad and to pare one's life down to the bare necessities? What is it like to push at the frontiers of one's physical and mental endurance?

``Why Don't You Fly?'' is the account of an epic adventure in search of an elusive sense of identity in which triumph, disappointment, discomfort, exhaustion and exhilaration all trade positions against a backdrop of prodigious physical endeavour. During a gruelling 16,500-mile examination of physical and mental stamina the author ate and drank in roadside cafés in the company of inquisitive lorry drivers and shared dormitories in remote Chinese villages with fascinated farm hands and gleeful mosquitoes. Sceptical western existentialism met religious fatalism in the restaurants and teahouses of the Middle East and India in the course of a physical and spiritual journey that constantly raised questions about the attitudes and values that prevail in the West.

The Website includes a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of the book, a sample chapter and 93 photographs.

Photo albums and brief travelogues from two bicycle trips in South-East Asia in 2001 and 2002, repectively. The trip 2001 started in Singapore and took us through Malaysia, Thailand, Viet Nam and Lao. The journey in 2002 started in Chiang Mai, took us through Northern Lao, Isan, and Cambodia.

Travelogue of a 2700 km journey in Himalachal Pradesh, Ladakh, Nubra and Rupshu. The route was consistently on altitudes higher than 3000 metres, crossing Lachalung La 5065 m, Taglang La 5360 m, Khardong La 5603 m, Chang La 5519 m, Kiagar La 5000+ m, and Polakongka La 5115 m. Some of the passes were passed twice, as it was not possible to do a loop.