A great cycling road is a wonderful thing on its own terms – the rhythm, the scenery, the warmth(burn!) in your legs on a long climb. But at Bike Odyssey, every route is built on a second layer: an actual historical narrative the road follows, with a guide team that includes archaeologists, historians and local specialists whose job is to make sure you understand exactly what happened on the ground you’re covering. This is where that comes together each Odyssey riding straight through a story.
Highlights of Hannibal – Barcelona to Rome, through Catalonia, Provence, the Alps, Piedmont and Tuscany is where Bike Odyssey began, and it remains the tour with the deepest roots – the same route founder Sam Wood rode for the BBC’s On Hannibal’s Trail back in 2009. Riding in the footsteps of one of history’s most audacious military campaigns – a Carthaginian general leading sixty thousand men and roughly forty elephants over the frozen high passes of the Alps to strike at Rome itself – the route delivers some of the best cycling roads in Europe alongside a story about a family blood-oath, a doomed war against an empire, and one of antiquity’s great might-have-beens.
Vikings – Copenhagen to Ålesund trades Mediterranean sun for Scandinavian drama: glittering canals giving way to fjords, snow-capped peaks and waterfalls that seem to appear around every bend. The route builds outward from Denmark’s remarkably bike-friendly capital into the Norwegian heartland the Norse called home, tracing the world that produced the raiders who terrorised -the coasts of early medieval Europe – and, as historian Tor Schei Hellesnes is always ready to point out, quietly reshaped the political map of a continent in the process.
Britannia –London to Edinburgh takes on all five nations packed into one small archipelago – England, Wales, Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland – riding through a landscape that feels half-familiar to countless Antipodean and North American riders whose own family histories trace back to these islands. From Stonehenge to Glencoe, it’s less a single narrative than an accumulation of centuries: castles, battlefields and village pubs that have quietly witnessed most of what “British history” actually means.
Allies – Normandy to the Rhine is Bike Odyssey’s most solemn route, and deliberately so – it launched in 2018, exactly one hundred years to the day after the armistice that ended the First World War. Riding out from the walled port of St Malo, past Mont St Michel and into Normandy’s D-Day beaches, the tour crosses France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany through Picardy, Flanders, the Ardennes and the Moselle Valley: landscapes shaped, quite literally, by both world wars of the twentieth century. With historian Ken Nairn’s own connection to the Commonwealth War Graves -Commission woven through the route, this is history experienced at walking pace, not textbook distance – one recent guest even laid a wreath at Belgium’s Menin Gate in Ypres for a fallen relative, with the rest of the tour group standing alongside them.
Lionheart – Venice to Paris follows Richard the Lionheart’s own desperate, ill-fated journey home from the Crusades – shipwrecked near Venice in 1192, the English king (who, tellingly, barely spoke English and once said he’d sell London if he could find a buyer) was forced overland in disguise. Riders trace that route north through the Dolomites and Austrian Alps, over some of Europe’s most storied mountain passes, to the Danube, where Richard was eventually captured, and on toward Paris – castles included, because really, where else would you sleep on a tour named for a king?
Venetians -Venice to Dubrovnik circles the Adriatic from the lagoon city that was, for eleven hundred years, one of history’s great maritime republics. This is the route of Marco Polo, the Venetian merchant whose account of his travels to Asia – not the first such journey, but the first widely chronicled one -helped shape Europe’s entire idea of the East. Riders trace the old trading empire’s coastline through the Istrian Peninsula and down the Dalmatian coast, through landscapes many claim are the most scenic coastline anywhere in the world.
The Odyssey -Istanbul to Ithaca is, fittingly, the company’s namesake route and its most literal one: starting beneath the Byzantine dome of the Aya Sofya, riders head south past Troy – the legendary starting point of Odysseus’s own decade-long voyage – before island-hopping by gulet across the Aegean toward Ithaca itself. With historians Yasar Demiroz, Aydin Aygun and Enrico Dal Monte all guiding stages of this route, and the Gallipoli peninsula along the way, this Odyssey layers Bronze Age myth over Byzantine history over the more recent, rawer history of the ANZAC landings.
Alexander -Mount Olympus to Cairo grew directly out of Sam Wood’s own academic background researching Hellenistic-era history and artefact distribution. It traces the outer edges of the largest empire the ancient world had ever seen – built by a king crowned at twenty and dead in Babylon by thirty-three – from the mythic slopes of Mount Olympus in northern Greece, along Turkey’s Turquoise Coast by luxury yacht, to Egypt and the Pyramids of Giza, the last of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still standing.
Highlights of Othello -Marrakesh to Lisbon takes its name from Shakespeare’s tragic Moorish general – a story of a dark-skinned outsider who rose through the ranks of the Venetian army, only to be undone by prejudice and manipulation – and uses it as a lens for a route that crosses from Morocco’s Atlas Mountains and Sahara fringes into Spain’s Andalusia and Portugal’s Alentejo: a physical journey across the same cultural and historical divide, East to West, Moorish North Africa to Iberia, that gives the tour its name.
Shogun -Fukuoka to Mount Fuji rides the old kaidō highways of feudal Japan under historian Michael “Mikey” Rice and guide Seán Mulvany, tracing roads first laid down under 700 years of shōgunate rule – a feudal system so recent, in historical terms, that Japan was still transitioning out of it barely 150 years ago, which is part of what makes the culture riders pass through feel so vividly, recognisably continuous with the past.
Tasmania -UnderDownunder turns the historical lens closer to home, exploring Australia’s island state through both its natural extremes – more than 42% of Tasmania is National Park, much of it World Heritage-listed – and its layered human history: the often brutal story of European settlement at sites like the convict ruins of Port Arthur and Sarah Island, told alongside the deeper, older history of Tasmania’s Aboriginal people. With archaeologist Richard Cosgrove guiding, whose own fieldwork helped uncover 40,000 years of Aboriginal occupation in the state’s southwest and fed directly into the campaign that saved the Franklin River, this route carries genuine scholarly weight behind every stop.
Che – Santiago to Volcano Osorno closes out the Southern Hemisphere lineup with a four-week traverse of Chile, from the wine valleys first planted by Jesuit missionaries – the same valleys, centuries later, that produced revolutionary spirits of an entirely different kind – south along the coast, inland across the volcanic Andes into Patagonia, and through the Lake District to the Chiloé archipelago, before finishing on the slopes of Volcano Osorno itself.
An Odyssey, Properly Defined
What ties all twelve routes together isn’t a shared continent or a shared century – it’s a shared conviction that the best way to understand a place is to earn it, slowly, on a bike, with someone beside you who actually knows what happened there. Bike Odyssey’s guides aren’t reciting summaries from a support van window; they’re archaeologists who’ve excavated the sites you’re riding past, historians with personal and professional stakes in the stories they tell, locals who grew up in the culture the route is trying to illuminate.
That’s the difference between a cycling holiday and an Odyssey. Anyone can put you on a good road. Bike Odyssey sets out to put you on a road that means something – and to make sure you know exactly why, dust, sweat, sore legs and all, by the time you get there!