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Planning For A Bike Tour Of Cuba

Posted October 1st, 2012

With a first family bike tour under our belts, we feel ready for a bigger adventure so this winter we’re heading to Cuba for a month of cycle-powered adventures.

Cuba!!!!!!

The Island of Cuba (1920)Image courtesy of Eric Fischer, on Flickr.

 

To say that we’re excited about this trip is an understatement. Cuba has been high on our ‘bucket list’ for a long time but it’s been hard to justify the relatively expensive plane ticket from Europe. This year, however, we have some savings burning a hole in our pocket and Cuba just happens to be a good destination for a baby as well as for cycling.

Cuba is a cyclist’s dream with its fairly good paved roads and minimal traffic. -Chris & Margo

There’s no concern about traffic (there’s very little of it, and bikes are respected). The medical care is good and there’s no risk of malaria. We don’t need to camp because there’s a large network of family-run B&Bs – and that’s just as well. After all, we won’t have room for a tent and sleeping bags with 150 diapers to pack.

No, we’re not kidding about the diapers.

The notes below represent the information we’ve gathered so far as part of our planning, outside of the usual ‘Lonely Planet’ recommendations.

If you have any tips to add, please chime in with a comment. We can use all the help we can get at this stage!

Books & Maps

The only bike-touring specific book we’ve found is Bicycling Cuba. It’s a decade old but still a comprehensive guide bike touring routes across the island. Updates are available on the authors’ website.


For maps, we bought a 1:600 000 scale map of Cuba from International Travel Maps. It had the best detail. We still don’t know if it’s accurate but we hope to pick up something better when we get there. Apparently GPS systems are not allowed in Cuba, so our Garmin GPS will be staying home.

With A Baby

Finding baby-specific information for Cuba is tough. Most recommendations for families focus on older kids.

What we have gathered is that most ‘essentials’ for babies are not easily found. The UK’s FCO says:

Baby food, disposable nappies, and other baby supplies are only sometimes available in Havana and normally unavailable in the rest of Cuba; if you are bringing a baby it is best to come self-sufficient.

We expect to use about 5 disposable diapers a day and will probably also take 2-3 cloth nappies as an insurance policy. This will be challenging to pack at the start of the trip but at least the diapers will slowly disappear as the trip goes on – leaving lots of room for souvenirs!

We’ll also probably take:

  • Snack food such as fruit leather for Luke
  • A water filter, in case we can’t find bottled water for him to drink
  • A good first-aid kit and a big bottle of high-quality sunscreen

The Bikes

We’re almost 100% sure that we’ll take our Brompton and Dahon folding bikes to Cuba. We have a few reasons for this:

  1. We want to fly direct from the Netherlands to Cuba. That means going with KLM but they charge an outrageous €400 per bike* for a return trip! Clearly this offers an economic incentive to stick within the normal baggage allowance and that means folding bikes…
  2. We’ll be in Cuba during high season (Christmas and New Year). Our plans may also include taking a Viazul bus and we want it to be as easy as possible to fit our bikes on the bus as normal luggage.
Apparently, we could also rent bikes in Cuba but we’re not sure about the quality and at $15 U.S. a day the cost would add up for a one-month trip.
*Since we booked our trip, the KLM website indicates their bike fee has dropped by half but this news comes too late for us, we’ll still take folding bikes.

Helpful Blogs

Posted in Bicycle Touring With Kids, Cuba, Map

Video: Bike Touring In Ukraine

Posted September 28th, 2012

Ukraine isn’t the best known of bike touring destinations, so it’s especially nice to see a new video from keen cyclist and film maker Blanche that looks at cycling in this ex-Soviet state.

If you like what you see here, you can follow Blanche on Twitter, where she also regularly promotes other videos from the bike touring world.

Ukraine from Blanche on Vimeo.

Posted in Map, Ukraine, Video, Visited Countries

Interview: Touring With A Folding Bicycle

Posted August 7th, 2012

Cycling through Africa? On a folding bike? However unlikely such a combination seems at first glance, that’s exactly what cyclists Jo Charnock and Jan Wouters set out to do in 2007 – despite some uncertainty about how the trip would work out.

Travelling the length of Africa, from Cairo to Cape Town, on folding bikes? Were we completely mad or had we come up with an idea that would prove to be the simplest and most fun way to travel?


They needn’t have worried. The trip turned out to be a hit. They combined cycling with transport by truck, bus, train and plane. They nicknamed it ‘hitch-biking’ and recently published the story of their trip in a new book: A Hitch-Biker’s Guide Through Africa.

Jan also recently took the time to answer a few questions for TravellingTwo.com about touring on a folding bike.

Travels by folding bike

1. What features should people look for in a folding bike for touring?

The bike has to be stiff, needs good components and a sturdy baggage carrier. It’s the same as with all travel bikes; if you go cheap, you’ll end up having more technical problems during your trip. Go for quality or the best that you can afford. We chose Dahon Bikes. They have a specific travel bike which looks really great (Dahon TR).

I rode on a Dahon full-suspension folding bike (Jetstream), which turned out to be great. Jo took a real city type of folding bike (Vitesse) which still stood up to the test. Looking back, if you’re looking for comfort the bike to get would be the one with suspension.

Travels by folding bike

2. And what about the equipment? Is it different from what you’d carry for touring on a ‘normal’ bike?

Choosing the right sleeping bag, tent, cooking gear and all other personal stuff is as important as choosing the bike. One of the most important things is to keep everything very, VERY light. We weighed and scrutinised everything before we left, and ended up travelling with just a small backpack plus a bag on the luggage rack. If you want to take more, get a full-size bike. But just like with any travelling, most travellers travel with way too much stuff that they end up not using.

Travels by folding bike

3. Why did you use a backpack? That’s not traditionally recommended for bike touring.

The reason for this was that we wanted to be able to quickly fold our bikes, and hitch a ride. Also, cycling in Africa can sometimes be a challenge at busy public transport stops when there are a lot of people around. Safety can be an issue at this time, so it’s important to be able to fold your bike, and not have to worry about having to take bags first.

If you really want to travel light in ‘funny’ countries, I would opt for the backpack. If you’re in a ‘safe’ first world country, I would maybe opt for pannier bags. Ortlieb offers good bags. So does Overboard and many other brands. Again, it’s all about keeping it simple and light.

Travels by folding bike

4. When bike touring, ideally you want a bike with parts that are easily found everywhere, in case of mechanical trouble. Don’t folding bikes tend to have specialist parts, and was that a problem for you?

Spare parts are something that most touring cyclists do go completely overboard with! We travelled the whole of Cairo to Cape Town with a basic repair kit, and found most of the repair stuff we needed in little bike shops along the way. We had a lot of flats, but always found inner tubes for our 20″ tyres. I even found cheap Chinese tyres. If you find that stuff in little villages in Africa, I am sure you’ll find them in most places in the world! Most bikes these days really have good components that last a long time.

Stuff that will break first are inner tubes, tyres and spokes, and cables; all very light and easy to carry. It’s again a question of keeping it simple. If you find out that a particular component is getting worn out, get to a city and have it replaced. Don’t wait till it just breaks.

As for the specific folding bike components; these are so well engineered these days, that I think they would be the last to break on the bike. We did our trip in 2007-08 and I still use the same bike nearly every day. The folding components haven’t needed any extra attention so far.

5. Are some destinations or types of bike tours particularly suited to folding bikes or – on the other hand – totally unsuitable?

It depends on what one wants to do. Great destinations include Europe or the United States as you can easily cycle from town to town and from hotel to hotel, with a minimum of luggage.

The only place a folding bike would be unsuitable is for real mountain bike travel or climbing some serious grades in the Alps. If the terrain is really rough, other bikes would make more sense. We used our folding bikes on pretty rough terrain in the Simien Mountains in Ethiopia and we’re not sure we would like to repeat it!

Hitch Bikers Guide To Africa Also, if you want to cycle the whole way, a folding bike is not the best option. There are other and better full-size bikes available for that purpose. But if you go for a combination of cycling and other means of transport the folding bike is the way to go.

When the scenery is beautiful, you cycle. If it’s boring or you are tired, catch a bus or hitch a ride. We call it ‘hitch-biking’ and it means that you meet all sorts of interesting people along the road.

***

Thanks to Jan for this interview. If you want to know about his travels with Jo, check out their book: A Hitch-Biker’s Guide Through Africa and their website Folding Bike Travels.

Posted in Africa, Equipment, Touring Cyclists

Video: Our First Big Family Bike Tour

Posted July 31st, 2012

We just returned from our first extended bike tour as a family. 

With 5-month-old Luke in tow, we cycled 550km through the Netherlands, Belgium and France. We’ll be blogging more in the coming weeks about the lessons learnt from this tour but first, a video that we managed to shoot and assemble (in our tent at night) along the way.

Posted in Belgium, France, Inspiration, Journal Entries, Netherlands, Video, Visited Countries

Bike Touring Belgium & France: Our Planning Resources

Posted July 24th, 2012

We’ve just returned from a 2-week bicycle tour though southern Belgium and northern France. Here are some of the resources we used to plan the trip, plus a few thoughts on how it worked out.

Trip Overview: The goal was to cycle 550km from the Netherlands to a small town in northern France, where friends had rented a house for a few days. We hoped to camp most of the way. In terms of sights, we wanted to see:

Leaving the highest beer cafe in the Netherlands

The Route: This was our first bike tour with 5-month-old Luke. Our main priority was to find smooth, quiet roads. We used the following sources:

Putting all of this together, we came up with the route that you see below. It includes a train journey back home. You’re welcome to download the GPS track but beware: it includes all our wrong turns and detours! There’s also this relatively clean pre-trip plan.

How did our trip work out?

Highlights: We definitely achieved our goal of riding only on quiet roads and bike paths. We were often on dedicated bike paths and the roads we did use had very little car traffic. We felt very safe with Luke in tow. We also loved the area around Compiègne in northern France: it’s full of beautiful chateaus, forests and historic sights.

Lowlights: In addition to poor weather (just a matter of bad luck), here’s what we didn’t like so much…

  • Bike paths in Belgium weren’t always up to scratch. Sometimes major paths such as the RAVeL network were little more than a muddy track through the forest, and a poorly maintained one at that. The picture below illustrates our point. On one day, we spent more time walking than cycling. It wasn’t always so bad. Many sections were excellent but the inconsistent quality was frustrating.

Belgium's 'national' Bike Route
Walking and lifting our way along a bike path in Belgium. Photo by Alicia.

  • There’s little to see in southern Belgium. Once we left the Ardennes, we found very little to see other than the countryside. It was surprisingly hard to find supermarkets and other services without detouring to major towns. The whole area felt a little isolated and run down. Finding a nice cafe to have a coffee and a slice of cake seemed like mission impossible. This was very different from the cycling we’ve done in northern Belgium.
  • Coming back by train was a pain. It’s perhaps stating the obvious but getting a fully-loaded touring bike on a train in Europe is often difficult. Bike wagons may or may not exist, often involve lifting your bike up a steep set of stairs and can be crowded in the summer. We managed but only thanks to the help of many other cyclists along the way, and a good sense of humour. We were also lucky that the staff at two stations led us across the tracks to change platforms, rather than making us lug our bikes and gear up and down flights of stairs. We are seriously considering folding bikes (such as the Dahon Speed TR) for future tours of Europe. A reader also suggested that the Bicycle Bus (Fietsbus) would be a good option for journeys to and from the Netherlands.

Conclusion: Not one of our most memorable bike tours, though we are happy to have done it and we particularly enjoyed cycling in France. If we cycle to Paris again, we’ll probably plan a route along the North Sea and then south through France – and we’d get folding bikes for an easy train journey home.

Posted in Belgium, Bike Touring Tips, Cycling Trips, France, Map, Netherlands
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