Cycling holidays

Cycle-touring, Expeditions, Adventures, Major cycle routes NOT LeJoG (see other special board)
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thelawnet
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Joined: 27 Aug 2010, 12:56am

Cycling holidays

Post by thelawnet »

I operate tours in Sumatra, Indonesia.

I was thinking about starting some cycling holidays.

I wonder if anyone has any advice?

The starting point is around 120km from the airport, through the city, which is sprawling and hostile. So I would anticipate providing a taxi to the start point, rather than getting people to cycle there.

Main roads often have stretches like this:

Image
Image

And in minor roads, more like this:

Image

What sort of bikes should I provide?

And what kind of logistical support? I had a couple of trips in mind, something like A-B-A, around 40km each way (takes 2 hours by car), one-way non-stop, and the other way stopping at a point of interest on the way, from my base, around three days, and a second trip something like:

Day 1 A - 20km
Day 2 B - 40km
Day 3 C - 50km (through the mountains)
Day 4 D - 40km
Day 5 E - 60km
Day 6 F - 60km
Day 7 G - 60km

I guess people are probably going to be carrying a lot of luggage, so you need a van to go from point to point with their luggage. A spare bike as well?

What kind of bike spec would you look for? I need to buy the bikes, not spend too much money, and have something that will be reasonably durable and suitable for conditions as well as tourists of different sizes.

One (?) guide on bike, per four people, equipped with spares. Plus a driver + van with the baggage.

I was thinking I would run the trip(s) on set dates, with a minimum of two people.

What sort of balance would you make between cycling and other activities? A lot of the local tourist attractions involve fairly strenuous hikes (scrambling up and down hills), which by themselves exhaust the average traveller. But I would assume that people would still want to do these things as well as cycling. Where is the balance?

And what sort of itinerary length would you look for? Is a week about right?

Also what do you do about rain? Generally it rains torrentially sometime between 4 and 6pm, though it's not guaranteed. In the morning/mid-day rain is much less common. This is 12 months a year, but at some times of the year it is wetter, and morning/lunch-time rain is possible. You could obviously seek to avoid those hours (sunset is 6:30pm), but it cuts down the time available.
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Heltor Chasca
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Joined: 30 Aug 2014, 8:18pm
Location: Near Bath & The Mendips in Somerset

Re: Cycling holidays

Post by Heltor Chasca »

Wow! While others will be along to offer some brilliant technical advice, I would like to offer you my best wishes. I have a background in tourism before I set up a business for something I really love. Horticulture. Now I run a gardening business. I love my work and I equally love the holistic approach I have to take. Sales, marketing, accounts, security, mechanics, dogs body work, etc etc.

It's very exciting even after 10 years so I'm excited for you. THE MOST IMPORTANT piece of advice I can give you is:

MAKE SURE YOU SERVE YOUR CLIENTS SOME OF THAT BEAUTIFUL SUMATRAN COFFEE...!
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Si
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Re: Cycling holidays

Post by Si »

I'd start by identifying the market that you are aiming at.

If it's experienced touring cyclists then they'll probably have their own bikes. If it's people wanting a cycling holiday rather than a cycling tour then the distances, especially in that terrain, might need to be reconsidered. If it's just a holiday that has cycling options then they'll not want to go on roads like that.

The pics that you show look like they are crying out for mountain bikes.....big clearances for the mud, knobbly tyres, etc. MTBers will prefer somewhere with plenty of hills and less mud.
thelawnet
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Joined: 27 Aug 2010, 12:56am

Re: Cycling holidays

Post by thelawnet »

Well I guess it's technically touring, in that you would be going from tourist site to site. It's not a 'mountain biking' holiday in the sense of trying to find exciting places to do MTBing.

The roads aren't all as bad as that, most of the time it's like this (when it's not raining!):

Image

For the 7 day trip it would mostly be like with a few km of worse roads (the 3 day trip takes more of a back road which is about 50% like the second picture (which isn't particularly extreme), and 50% asphalt, with possibly around 2km to reach some caves more like the last picture)

I suppose it's a cycling holiday as much as anything, it's just that you are making your way between the points of interest by bicycle rather than by car.
thelawnet
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Joined: 27 Aug 2010, 12:56am

Re: Cycling holidays

Post by thelawnet »

Well I found an existing itinerary, albeit one that is no longer run

http://www.veloasia.com/country/sumatra/

The daily distances they are talking about there are:

1st day - arrival
2nd day - 60 miles, largely flat, then sightseeing
3rd day - 75 miles, climb to 1300 metres
4th day - sightseeing
5th day - 70 miles, downhill
6th-8th day - sightseeing
9th day - 110 miles, with hills
10th day - 110 miles
11th day - 80 miles
12th day - 35 miles
13th day - 35 miles
14th day - 60 miles

From what I can see on their other pages, they supply Trek FX hybrid bikes with 700x32 tyres, but one of their videos shows everyone on drop-barred road bikes - I guess if you are doing a 'casual' cycling trip, of around 30 miles per day, then that's about right, but the people doing the 100+ mile/day trips would tend to pack their own bikes.

It looks like the thing to do is to emphasise the 'sag wagon', so anyone who doesn't fancy cycling from 0 up to 2500 metres above sea-level can always give up and get driven.
iviehoff
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Re: Cycling holidays

Post by iviehoff »

110 miles is too far in a day for most cyclists, especially in Sumatran climate. They'd have to be really fit cyclists on light road bikes with a good road surface, and acclimatised.

You do need to think about the climate. If your clientele are coming from places with cool climates, it takes them quite a while to acclimatise to the climate. If they get straight off the plane to riding full days on the bike, they'll get heat exhaustion and you'll soon have a group of rather ill clients expelling material copiously from both ends. You have to warm them up with short rides, at most half a day, for a few days first until they can ride all day in that heat and humidity. Moreover, they need to be careful to take things very easily when off the bike too, those first few days, and drink very copiously.

You describe the tour as travelling between points of interest by bike. Is the ride not very scenic? That may make it difficult to sell, unless the points of interest are frequent. Most cyclists expect scenery on the way too, though frequent interesting villages count as scenery. I found riding in Malaysia quite boring a lot of the time because I couldn't see further than the trees lining the roadsides, and when we went through large oil-palm and rubber plantations that was tedious in the extreme. But I thought Lake Toba etc was supposed to be quite scenic.
thelawnet
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Joined: 27 Aug 2010, 12:56am

Re: Cycling holidays

Post by thelawnet »

Yeah I wasn't anticipating on doing that distance. I agree about the climate - I see many people who get destroyed by the humidity on relatively simple hikes, though I think bicycles provide a little wind cooling, compared with walking.

The 7 day ish route I had in mind in my first post would be initially a shortish ride past rice fields
to here
Image

Then a longer ride here:
Image

then a hill climb up to here:
Image

via

Image

down slightly to here, via some scenic mountain roads:

Image

down here:

Image

over to here:

Image

then down this switchback:

Image

to reach here

Image

and then winding across over to here:

Image

The journeys to the start, and from the end point are potentially past a lot of palm oil plantations, which I'm not keen on, so I was thinking of starting and finishing the trip with car journeys, basically.
thelawnet
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Joined: 27 Aug 2010, 12:56am

Re: Cycling holidays

Post by thelawnet »

I had a look at some Indonesian bikes:

http://www.polygonbikes.com/id/bikes/de ... 5-5.0#spec - perhaps excessively chunky/mtby? (£275)

http://www.polygonbikes.com/id/bikes/de ... -5.05#spec - more sensible but maybe could do without the suspension fork? (£275)

http://www.polygonbikes.com/id/bikes/de ... e-i71#spec - this is going to be undergeared I think (£325)
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Si
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Re: Cycling holidays

Post by Si »

Now that latest set of pics are selling it a lot better! :D (apart from the quality of the track in the second one)
eileithyia
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Location: Horwich Which is Lancs :-)

Re: Cycling holidays

Post by eileithyia »

Wow when i can sign up.....
I stand and rejoice everytime I see a woman ride by on a wheel the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood. HG Wells
thelawnet
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Joined: 27 Aug 2010, 12:56am

Re: Cycling holidays

Post by thelawnet »

So I did an initial survey, it was about 20km each way, of which probably 13km was good surfaced road, but the rest was unsurfaced road as well as a shorter distance of heavily potholed asphalt. The unsurfaced road is large (smooth) stones embedded in the road surface and in some areas loose stones, and several hills (not particularly steep). I was on a borrowed £100 BSO with only one brake and six-speed Shimano revoshifters, which was definitely well short of the job (quite fine on tarmac).

Climbing on the stoney road, and descending on loose gravel (the back of the bike tends to slide away) was a bit outside of my normal comfort zone, but anyway I'm now thinking that the right tool for the job is a proper mountain bike and shorter daily distances on unsurfaced roads, rather than any kind of hybrid.

It seems to point to something like this https://www.bicyclesonline.com.au/2016- ... ntain-bike

Which is pricier than I was anticipating,
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andrew_s
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Location: Gloucestershire

Re: Cycling holidays

Post by andrew_s »

thelawnet wrote:Climbing on the stoney road, and descending on loose gravel (the back of the bike tends to slide away) was a bit outside of my normal comfort zone

It's the tyres that need to be fatter for rough and gravel roads, rather than the wheel size as such. 1.75 would be a minimum.
You may also like to consider getting bikes with a range of different wheel sizes - 26" for smaller women or 29" for tall blokes. Bikes generally ride better if the wheel size is more or less fitted to the frame size.
hamster
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Re: Cycling holidays

Post by hamster »

Having lived, cycled and bike commuted in Singapore then a normal European distance needs to be reduced significantly by the effects of heat and humidity. I would suggest 40 miles per day is the absolute maximum for visitors who will not be acclimatised.

I think identifying a target customer, the fitness and experience you expect will help massively. You cannot be everything to everyone.
nickpaton
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Location: Newcastle upon Tyne

Re: Cycling holidays

Post by nickpaton »

thelawnet wrote:Well I found an existing itinerary, albeit one that is no longer run

http://www.veloasia.com/country/sumatra/


Ah, happy memories of Lake Toba circa 1987! Love the idea of cycling round Samosir.
Hope they've updated the ferry - The huge old truck engine they used frequently stalled, and only way to restart it was using us passengers in tug of war mode on the end of a long rope wrapped around the flywheel! It mostly worked......
thelawnet
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Joined: 27 Aug 2010, 12:56am

Re: Cycling holidays

Post by thelawnet »

I bought a bike locally, an Indonesian made Polygon, they sell in Australia also and are mostly Shimano parts on the higher end bikes.

I have an Xtrada 6, which is unfortunately more expensive under the post-Brexit exchange rate. Price was about £325 pre-Brexit, and now more like £380.

Spec is Suntour XCR fork (the XC series goes XCT (worst), XCM (better), XCR (better again). Lockout is on the fork (not remote), Deore/Octalink drivetrain (40/30/22, 11-36), M355 (Alivio) disc brakes, 2.25" Schwalbe Smart Sam tyres. Frame geometry is what they call 'leisure', 27.5". The new model at the same price has I think upgraded M365 (non-series) brakes.

The pedals are I think own-brand, and I had the ball bearings fail. Someone replaced them for me, but I went out yesterday for a bone-crunching ride over roads and they started creaking again, so I think it's best to just buy some new pedals.

The weather was conducive yesterday, being cloudy but not rainy, although I still managed to get sunburned( I cannot find a cycling cap large enough for my head, in England). The route was, roughly:

12km of good tarmac to the next town
12km of potholed tarmac (you had to weave but you were always on tarmac) to junction
10km of good tarmac to next town
then a right turn and after about 2km into a plantation. There were no signposts at all and we had to backtrack when we went the wrong way. The plantation was dirt/rock truck track, which isn't great but not impossible to ride on. The next part was a motorbike track, so narrower, which turned into a concrete singletrack on the side of a ravine, and then a rickety suspension bridge across, where there was a small village on the other side of about five houses. This rejoined the main 'road' a few hundred metres up the hill. This road was loose stones and dirt, which makes it quite hard to cycle up, and down is also a bit treacherous. This was around 6km to our destination.

At our destination there was a hotspring, but was it was a bit dry due to the locally dry weather (very localised, a few miles away they have head rains), so not very appealing. We hiked up into the jungle and went to visit the 'Light Cave' . Just after that was 'Dark Cave', and then apparently Snail Lake, but we didn't get that far. According to the local farmer who went with us, nobody goes in Snail Lake because the snails don't have tails and they don't know why (some sort of local superstition I think, they are generally very superstitious). We went down and swam in the waterfall instead. After that we saw three orangutans in a tall fig tree. There were also a couple of hornbills calling to each other.

We went back a different way, which was the same initial 4km of up and down loose stones, and then a flatter version of the same road, before a bit of good tarmac and then a long way through a (different) plantation, which had a road of basically flat hard dirt track, which wasn't too bad, as you could basically make the same progress on a bicycle as on a motorbike or car. But all the stones are pretty wearing on your hands.

The journey was around 3 hours out (but less if we didn't get lost), 2.5 hours in. I think a bit too much for a day, but we could have slept the night there and continued on the next day somewhere else.

Someone else's video of part of the road:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH82fvXcDJE

Destination:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jU3wLfMHsIY
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