These are the parts of Asia we know, work in and keep returning to — places where we have friends, guides and people on the ground, where we can readily put a journey together, or where we’re simply itching to explore further ourselves.
BikeAways has never been about ticking off destinations. We go back because there is always another road, village, story or landscape worth following — and occasionally we add somewhere new for the sheer joy of exploration and curiosity.
Some of the journeys below appear as scheduled departures on our Calendar of Rides. Others lend themselves particularly well to private trips, and some are ideas we’re still developing. If somewhere catches your imagination, ask us.
Fujian Tulou & Tea Country · China
Fujian is one of China’s great cycling secrets. Back roads wind between tea fields, villages and the lesser-known tulou — extraordinary multi-storeyed Hakka earthen fortresses scattered through the countryside around Yongding and Nanjing.
Beginning and ending at Xiamen, this is a compact journey through one of southern China’s richest landscapes of architecture, tea and rural culture. It fits comfortably into a long weekend, but feels like a proper little adventure.
Kaiping & the Four Counties · Guangdong, China
Here the sweet waters of the Tan River feed kryptonite-green rice paddies and clumping bamboo, divided by tiny farmers’ lanes that make for wonderfully easy, flat cycling.
This quiet corner of the Pearl River Delta was transformed by the great migrations of the 19th century. Men left the Sze Yup — the Four Counties — for the goldfields of California and Australia, creating some of the earliest overseas Chinese communities in both countries.
Those who returned brought money, ideas and architectural influences home with them. The result is Kaiping’s extraordinary diaolou: fortified towers and mansions rising incongruously from the paddies, built partly to defend families and their new wealth from bandits and kidnappers.
The architecture is wonderfully eccentric — columns, cupolas, curlicues and fragments of European, Asian and post-Gold Rush baroque transplanted into the Guangdong countryside.
Yangshuo · Guangxi, China
Yangshuo is rural South China at its most beautiful: golden-mud brick farmhouses, rice paddies, quiet villages and astonishing limestone peaks rising almost vertically from the landscape.
Our backroad rides follow the Li and Yulong rivers, leaving the busy tourist centre behind for farm lanes, village tracks and some wonderfully rustic country. The riding is mostly flat, the food light and farm-fresh, and the scenery ridiculous.
Guizhou · China
Land of wind-and-rain bridges, great wooden drum towers, indigo cloth and homemade rice whisky, Guizhou was for centuries one of China’s poorest and least accessible provinces.
Its isolation also helped Miao, Dong and other communities retain extraordinarily rich traditions of architecture, textiles, music and festivals. Roads and high-speed rail have transformed access, but once off the main routes, Guizhou remains one of the most culturally fascinating parts of China.
BikeAways has explored the province in many different ways: our Indigo Road ride from Zhaoxing to Sanjiang, textile journeys designed with our specialist Miao guide, photography trips, village homestay rides and even a journey built around a shaman festival.
Nepal · The Mid-Hills
Nepal does not have to mean trekking. Between Kathmandu and Pokhara is a great rumpled landscape of river valleys, terraced hills, little market towns and villages strung along ridgelines — with the Himalaya appearing and disappearing impossibly above it all.
Our mid-hills ride heads out through historic Gorkha and then follows the quieter country through Sundar Bazar and Bhorletar towards the lakes of Begnas and Rupa, before finishing in Pokhara. It is proper hill-country riding — climbs are part of the bargain — but the reward is travelling through a Nepal that most visitors simply drive past on their way from one famous place to another.
Tea shops, buffalo, school kids, suspension bridges, dal bhat and enormous mountains on the horizon. Nepal remains one of the great places in Asia to travel slowly.
Bhutan · Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon
Bhutan is almost absurdly well suited to travelling by bicycle. One road winds up through blue-pine forest to a prayer-flagged pass, then drops for kilometres through rhododendrons, little villages and precipitous valleys before beginning the next climb.
The distances can look modest on paper; the mountains make sure they aren’t. But there is very little traffic, the air is clear, and every day’s ride seems to connect another dzong, monastery, farmhouse or tiny town tucked into the folds of the Himalaya.
Our journeys combine riding with the things that make Bhutan much more than a cycling destination — village life, Buddhist culture, architecture, food, festivals and time to get off the bike and poke around. In November we time a special ride around the arrival of the black-necked cranes in the Phobjikha Valley and the wonderfully local Black-Necked Crane Festival.
Mongolia · Steppe, Sky & Genghis Khan Country
Mongolia has the opposite problem to most cycling destinations: almost nothing gets in the way of the view. Grassland rolls to an enormous horizon, horses wander apparently ownerless across the steppe, and a white ger on a distant hillside can be the only sign of another human being for kilometres.
This is riding for people who like space. We mix cycling with the business of travelling through Mongolia itself — staying in ger camps, meeting herding families, eating what turns up, and following tracks and small roads through a landscape still shaped by horses, livestock, weather and the extraordinary legacy of Chinggis Khan.
Summer brings long days, green steppe and some of the biggest skies you will ever ride beneath. It is wild without requiring an expedition mentality — and culturally unlike anywhere else we travel.
Indonesia · Banjarmasin & the Meratus Mountains
Historic sultanate on the Bornean spice trade, modern river port and home to wonderfully prosaic floating markets, Banjarmasin is our gateway to southern Kalimantan.
The city lives on water. Boats nose between houses, markets assemble on the river in the early morning and the waterways still function as streets. From here we head inland, leaving the flat wetlands behind for the Meratus Mountains and the homelands of the Loksado Dayak.
The riding takes us through rubber and cinnamon country, forest, villages and mountain valleys in a corner of Borneo that sees remarkably few foreign visitors. There are bamboo rafts, longhouses and muddy backroads — and a version of Indonesia a very long way from Bali.
Thailand · Chiang Mai & the Northern Hills
Chiang Mai is an easy escape from Hong Kong, but within an hour of leaving the city you can be riding through a very different northern Thailand — rice fields, forested mountains, teak houses, temple villages and roadside stalls where lunch costs very little and tastes ridiculously good.
Stay in a traditional rice barn converted into a small mountainside hotel, then ride through the countryside past farms, elephant camps and hill villages before dropping into Chiang Mai’s old moated city.
By night, bicycles are still one of the nicest ways to explore the markets, food stalls, back streets and bars that make Chiang Mai one of Thailand’s most colourful cities. It’s an easy place to reach, an easy place to like, and a surprisingly good place for a long weekend on a bike.
And then I’d finish the entire page with your practical bit:
Set departures for these journeys are listed on our Calendar of Rides.
Don’t see the place or dates you’re looking for? BikeAways also designs private journeys for small groups, clubs and groups of friends. Many of our favourite trips began because somebody simply asked.
bruce@bikeaways.com