Bicycle Tours - Voyages

Voyages

Bicycle touring can be of any distance and time. The French tourist Jacques Sirat speaks in lectures of how he felt proud riding round the world for five years – until he met an Australian who had been on the road for 27 years. The German rider, Walter Stolle, lost his home and living in the Sudetenland in the aftermath of World War II, settled in Britain and set off from Essex on 25 January 1959, to cycle round the world. He rode through 159 countries in 18 years, denied only those with sealed borders. He paid his way by giving slide shows in seven languages. He gave 2,500 at US$100 each. In 1974, he rode through Nigeria, Dahomey, Upper Volta, Ghana, Leone, Ivory Coast, Liberia and Guinea. He was robbed 231 times, wore out six bicycles and had five more stolen.

Another German set off three years after Stolle and is still riding. Heinz Stücke left his job as a die-maker in North Rhine-Westphalia in 1962 when he was 22. He has never been home since. By 2006 he had cycled more than 539,000 km (335,000 mi) and visited 192 countries. He pays his way by selling photographs to magazines. From Asia, Gua Dahao left China in May 1999 to ride across Siberia, the Middle East, Turkey, western Europe, Scandinavia, then another 100,000 km across Africa, Latin America and Australia.

But there are many who attempt long voyages in exceptionally short amounts of time. The current circumnavigation record by bicycle is just 91 days, 18 hours, by Mike Hall.

Some distinguished writers have combined cycling with travel writing including Dervla Murphy, whose made her first documented journey in 1963 from London to India on a single speed bicycle with little more than a revolver and a change of underwear. In 2006 she described how, aged 74, she was held up at gunpoint and robbed while cycling in Russia. Eric Newby, Bettina Selby and Anne Mustoe have all used cycling as a means to a literary end, valuing the way that cycling brings the traveller closer to people and places. Selby said,

(the bicycle) makes me independent in a way no other form of transport can - it needs no fuel, no documents and very little maintenance. Most importantly it goes along at the right speed for seeing everything, and as it doesn't cut me off from my surroundings, it also makes me a lot of friends.

In more recent years, British adventurers Alastair Humphreys, Mark Beaumont, Rob Lilwall and Tom Keville-Davies have all been on epic bicycle expeditions and written popular books about their exploits.

But most Bicycle Tourists are ordinary people out of the spotlight. Cyclo-Camping International makes a point of including shorter tours with children in its annual presentation in Paris. Children have also been the stimulus for longer journeys, among tours featured by Cyclo-Camping International has been one by Brigitte and Nicolas Mercat and their three children, five, seven and nine when they left France in July 2002. They rode through Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, New Zealand, New Caledonia and Indonesia. They taught their children from school books as they rode and returned to Chambéry to find that not only were they ahead of their classmates but they had learned several languages on the way.