Category: Articles & Essays
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Why The SLSC Is A Life-Saver For Touring Cyclists, Plus Some Notes On The WarmShowers Controversy
I crossed The Entrance Bridge, leaving the previous day’s mishaps behind me, and pushed north, following off-highway trails through forest fringes. Finally the New South Wales Coast Cycle Trail began to offer what it had promised, taking me far from the Pacific Highway and brokering a tightly-negotiated route along the various barrier islands and reefs that were smeared along the coastline. I bounced between placid seawater lagoons and the omnipresent Pacific surf, stopping mid-morning for coffee at a shipping-container kiosk on the southern point of Catherine Hill Bay. Freewheeling down past the beach, the waves looked so inviting that I couldn’t… Continue reading →
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What Not To Do On Day One Of A Bike Trip (For Example)
As I pedalled towards The Entrance through a never-ending conglomeration of suburbs and seaside towns, the hills seemed to get steeper, the hard shoulders narrower, and the traffic heavier. Tangled cycleways gave way to long-winded highway crossings, nasty climbs through hilly rainforest spat me out onto caravan-clogged beachfront boulevards, and all under a sweltering late-summer sun. The momentum that had inspired me to push on into the afternoon began to taper off. Had following the New South Wales Coastline Cycleway been a mistake? In Bateau Bay, struggling to reconcile the route I’d planned on komoot with the signage on the… Continue reading →
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Why Ride The NSW Coast Cycle Trail Anyway?
My plan was simple: leave the house, follow the coastline north, and see what happened. The deadline was a family wedding in Sydney; the route already established. I’d stop pedalling when I ran out of time, take the night train back, show off my fabulous new tan-lines, and we would all live happily ever after. It was a nice, simple plan of the type I encourage newcomers to cycle touring to try, requiring no preparation beyond throwing some gear in a pair of panniers and hitting the road. Now, given my particular history of bicycle-mounted expeditions, you might think a ride up… Continue reading →
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Bike Touring New South Wales: Sydney’s Northern Beaches
Ten minutes was all it took to slot back into the role of sweatiest, most vulnerable, most linguistically explicit road user. In Newport I loaded up the relevant New South Wales Coast Cycle Trail segment and struck forth on a narrow coastal road called The Serpentine. As the name suggested, this was the start of a meandering rollercoaster of obscene gradients winding through humid forest amongst staggered hillside dwellings. Riders on this designated cycle route would find themselves hurdling headlands and conducting flybys of secluded beaches, all the while wondering if they were covering more horizontal distance than vertical. These hills… Continue reading →
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Tom’s Bike Trip Continues: Down Under Edition
By the time you read this paragraph, I’ll have embarked on my latest bike trip, riding solo along the lush coast of New South Wales, Australia. I haven’t tackled a ride of any significance since before the Covid-19 pandemic – and while I’m relishing the prospect of hitting the road, it’s a tempting moment to look back at the evolution of this blog, TomsBikeTrip.com, and my parallel bike touring career. You could say it began 17 years ago when I signed up for a free Blogspot account and created a blank page entitled “Semi-Coherent Thought Chowder”. At the time, I… Continue reading →
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Is The Touring Bike Slowly Dying Out?
While recently updating the all-time most-read post on this blog, “What’s The Best Touring Bike?”, I realised something. Every year, the list of touring bikes seems to get shorter. First we lost bikes that were relatively obscure. A good example is the Revolution Country Traveller, built by the Edinburgh Bicycle Co-operative. This was a fantastic value entry-level tourer, retailing for under £500 and earning great praise. But it was limited in its distribution to EBC’s handful of locations in northern Britain, and I’m guessing it can’t have made much of a profit for just how cheap it was. But then, a… Continue reading →
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There Is No Better Time To Be Planning Your Next Dream Cycling Adventure
Now is probably not the best time to be setting off on a globetrotting bike trip. But as we’ve all discovered over the last few months, upheavals can create the ideal conditions for change – including changing the way you think. Amid much uncertainty and, yes, real hardship and trauma, this year has brought with it a priceless opportunity to reimagine the paths we’ve been travelling through life, and to redirect those elements of our futures we can control towards newly-reconsidered destinations. That’s why – even if your departure date remains to-be-confirmed, and even if the places you’re thinking of going are… Continue reading →
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‘Janapar: The Game’ Is Now Available. Download It For Free Today!
For the last few weeks I’ve been putting the finishing touches to a project I’ve been working on for many years – and with so many of us in isolation and looking for things to do, the timing could not be better! Yes, that’s right – the story of my award-winning documentary Janapar: Love on a Bike has finally been adapted for video game format! Mixing both role-playing and action genres, Janapar: The Game will take you on a failed journey around the world by bicycle, teaching you tough lessons about life and love in the process. You’ll start Level… Continue reading →
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About The Time I Upcycled A Vintage Hardtail For Bikepacking & Rode It Across Armenia
In the months leading up to Bikepacking Armenia, I thought long and hard about whether to get myself a shiny new ‘bikepacking rig’ for the trip. Since I was in the UK for a few weeks in May, I took the opportunity to test-ride a Sonder Frontier with Adventure Pedlars in the Peak District. I tried out a Surly Karate Monkey at the Cycle Touring Festival, and I began mentally drafting my friends at Kona an email to see if they had a spare Unit X lying around. These bikes all fitted the current vogue for adventure bikes – all-terrain geometry,… Continue reading →
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#BikepackingArmenia: Why, After 12 Years Of Cycle Touring, I’m Finally Riding For Charity
In 72 hours’ time, I’ll be doing something I’ve never done before: embarking on a charity fundraising cycle challenge. Yes, I’ll be riding for a cause, raising money by means of a bike trip – in spite of much previously published cynicism. The challenge? To bikepack the length of Armenia, off-road, by a new and (mostly) untested route. And the cause? The Transcaucasian Trail, of course – an ambitious and largely voluntary trail-building effort, of which I am one of the original founders. It’s largely because of the last four years of work on the Transcaucasian Trail in Armenia that… Continue reading →