BikeAways grew out of more than 25 years of travelling, guiding and looking for interesting ways through Asia.
I’m Bruce Foreman, an Australian tour leader, writer and photographer who has spent much of my working life in this part of the world. I started out leading journeys through China, Nepal, Mongolia, Myanmar and Bhutan, and over the years have travelled by bicycle, foot, train, bus, boat and whatever else was moving in roughly the right direction.
The bicycle remains one of my favourite ways to travel.
Not because I’m particularly interested in cycling as a sport, but because a bicycle travels at about the right speed. You cover enough country for the landscape to change, but slowly enough to notice what’s happening between the places everyone tells you to visit.
A back road through rice fields. A village market. An extraordinary old house that doesn’t appear in the guidebook. Lunch somewhere because it smells good. Someone waving you over to see what they’re doing.
That, essentially, is BikeAways.
Small groups. Interesting places.
Our journeys tend to be small, informal and culturally curious. Some are easy weekend rides from Hong Kong; others are longer journeys through the mountains and backroads of Asia.
You don’t need to think of yourself as a cyclist.
Many of the people who travel with BikeAways are active and curious but decidedly casual riders. The bicycle is the means of getting into the landscape rather than the reason for being there. Where necessary we use luggage transfers, local guides and support vehicles, and we build journeys around what makes sense for the place and the people travelling through it.
Food, architecture, history, migration, textiles, landscapes and the odd strange story along the way are as much a part of these trips as the riding.
Asia, after all these years
I’ve been working and travelling in Asia for more than 25 years, particularly in China and the Himalaya, and increasingly in Indonesia and Southeast Asia.
Along the way I’ve led cycling journeys, trekking trips and specialist cultural tours; crossed the Tibetan Plateau numerous times; worked with local guides on textile and photography journeys in Guizhou; followed tea and architecture through Fujian; travelled the Silk Road and Dongbei; and designed private journeys for people who wanted something rather more particular than an off-the-shelf tour.
I speak conversational Mandarin Chinese and Indonesian — enough to get into interesting conversations and occasionally discover that the road we intended to take isn’t actually a road.
BikeAways still works with local guides, operators, drivers, hotel owners and friends accumulated over years of travelling. Those relationships matter enormously. So does continuing to find new ones.
Why keep doing it?
Curiosity, mostly.
There are so many roads I haven’t ridden, villages I know almost nothing about and stories that send me off looking for something else.
Some BikeAways journeys are places I know intimately and return to again and again. Others begin as an idea on a map and gradually turn into a trip. That’s part of the pleasure of running a small travel company: we don’t have to keep doing somewhere simply because it appeared in last year’s brochure.
Many of our favourite journeys began because somebody simply asked.
Have a look at our Calendar of Rides, wander through our Destinations, or, if you have somewhere particular in mind, ask me to design a journey for you.
Bruce Foreman
BikeAways
bruce@bikeaways.com