There’s a particular kind of magic in standing on a mountain pass, legs burning, and realising that the road beneath your wheels was carved by the same landscape that funnelled an army of war elephants, or a fleet-footed wanderer of a different kind, centuries before you got there. That’s the feeling Bike Odyssey has spent the better part of two decades trying to bottle: the sense that a bike is not just a way to see beautiful places, but a genuine time machine one pedal stroke at a time.
Bike Odyssey isn’t a conventional cycling holiday company that happened to add a bit of history to its brochure copy. It’s the other way around. History came first. The bikes came after. And the story of how that happened starts, of all places, with a BBC documentary crew and a very long ride from Spain to Rome.
From the British Museum to the BBC
Every Bike Odyssey tour carries the fingerprints of one person: founder Sam Wood. Before he was designing cycling itineraries, Sam was a Roman archaeologist by trade – he studied Classical Archaeology at the University of Sydney, then went on to work and consult for institutions like the British Museum in London, the Met in New York, and the Mellon Foundation. He wasn’t a desk academic, either. Sam spent years running excavations and teaching field archaeology on real digs for Stanford, Bradford and Sydney Universities, unearthing history at sites across Pompeii, Crimea, Bermuda, the Greek islands and back home in Australia.
Then, in 2009, everything changed direction. Sam designed a historic bike route tracing Hannibal Barca’s legendary march from Spain to Rome – the same campaign that saw a Carthaginian army, war elephants and all, cross the Alps to strike at the heart of the Roman Republic – and rode it with a BBC television crew alongside his brothers, Ben and Danny Wood, filming as they went. The result was On Hannibal’s Trail, a six-part travelogue documentary that went on to air in more than 70 countries worldwide through the BBC, National Geographic and Viasat.
Sam gave up the academic and museum life to keep chasing that feeling. He built a cycle touring company around the idea that a bike route could be a genuine historical narrative, not just scenery, and the Hannibal ride he’d filmed for the BBC became Bike Odyssey’s flagship tour – the one that started it all, and still runs today in a reimagined “Highlights” format across Catalonia, Provence, the Alps, Piedmont and Tuscany.
What’s in a Name (and a Wolf-Headed Logo)
Even the company’s name and its slightly unusual logo trace back to that same historical instinct. Bike Odyssey takes its name from Homer’s Odyssey- a ten-year wander of a journey, packed with monsters, gods, and hard-won homecomings, which felt like the right spirit for a multi-day ride through storied landscapes. The logo goes a layer deeper: it depicts Argos, Odysseus’ loyal wolfhound, who in Homer’s telling waited twenty years for his master’s return and – lying neglected and flea-bitten by the time Odysseus finally came home in disguise – was the very first living creature on Ithaca to recognise the hero, wagging his tail with his last breath before he died. It’s a small, deliberately odd detail for a cycling company’s branding, and that’s rather the point: history, done properly, is full of small, human, slightly odd details that stick with you. Read the full story here
That founding instinct – that the story of a place is as important as the road surface – is why “Exceptional History” sits alongside “Exceptional Cycling” as one of Bike Odyssey’s core selection criteria for every route it runs. The company deliberately keeps its calendar small, operating only a handful of departures a year, precisely so that the energy that would otherwise go into growth can go into research, into relationships with local archaeologists and historians, and into making sure every Odyssey actually earns its name.
The Historians Who Bring the Roads to Life
A guide who can fix a derailleur and read a map is essential on any cycling tour. Bike Odyssey’s guiding philosophy is that a guide who can also explain why the road you’re riding exists, who marched or sailed or rode it before you, and what happened at the ruin you’re free-wheeling past, changes the entire character of a trip. So woven through the guide teams on every Odyssey are historians, archaeologists and local specialists whose day job, in one sense or another, is the past.
Richard Cosgrove is our historian on Tasmania and few historians anywhere could be better matched to a route. Born in Launceston, Tasmania, Richard studied archaeology at the Australian National University before spending three years in Townsville researching the Aboriginal archaeology of Queensland’s rainforest peoples for his Master’s degree. Back home in Tasmania, he spent six years as an archaeologist with the National Parks and Wildlife Service, and in the 1980s took part in the Franklin and Gordon River field expeditions – the surveys that discovered limestone caves occupied by Aboriginal people for over 40,000 years, largely during the last Ice Age. That discovery became a key piece of evidence in the campaign to stop the Tasmanian Government damming the Franklin River, later cited as a catalyst in the High Court decision that saved it. Richard went on to complete a PhD at La Trobe University on Ice Age occupation in southwest Tasmania and spent more than thirty years teaching and researching archaeology there, with fieldwork stretching from the Kimberley to China to the rock art sites of France and Spain.
Michael “Mikey” Rice is the local specialist and historian behind Shogun, Bike Odyssey’s tour from Fukuoka to Mount Fuji along Japan’s old kaidō – the highway network established under the Shōgun’s rule during the Edo period. Mikey grew up in Kansas and Colorado, graduated from the University of Kansas with a degree in East Asian Languages and Cultures focused on Japanese, and moved to Japan in 1991, where he still lives today near the foot of the Hakone–Mt Fuji–Izu National Park. He’s ridden the country by bike ever since – literally: he’s averaged over 10,000km a year on a car-free lifestyle for more than three decades – and is well known in Japan in his own right as the presenter of Cycle Around Japan, an NHK World television series now in its eleventh year.
Yasar Demiroz leads riders on The Odyssey and Alexander, tracing Homer’s original wanderer from Istanbul to Ithaca. Yasar was born into an eleven-child family in south-eastern Turkey, trained at military high school and academy, then went on to study civil engineering and tourism before pursuing a master’s degree on the travels of ancient Greek athletes at the Mediterranean Civilizations Research Institute in Antalya. Since 2019 he has worked as part of the Aphrodisias excavation team, a joint project with archaeologists from NYU and Oxford – one of the most significant ongoing digs in Turkey. He’s also a former member of Turkey’s national orienteering team, a sport that, fittingly, is what led him into cycling in the first place.
Aydin Aygun, who also guides The Odyssey, brings a strikingly different route to the same trip. Born by the River Euphrates in eastern Turkey, Aydin graduated as a first lieutenant from military academy before leaving the army to earn a graduate degree in Christian and Roman History at Gonzaga University in the US, where he began leading academic study groups for archaeological and biblical programs. A serious endurance athlete, he competed for the Turkish national team and still holds his old Military Academy’s record for the 3000m steeplechase, set in 1991. He’s been guiding biking and hiking expeditions across Greece and Turkey since 1994, and after a career spent in Turkey, the US and now Belgium, his own motto sums up the whole Bike Odyssey philosophy neatly: “the more we learn, the more we love.” Riders on The Odyssey pass through the Gallipoli Peninsula with Aydin, a stretch of the route he’s described riding through with goosebumps.
Tor Schei Hellesnes – Thor, in the English spelling most riders default to – guides the Vikings tour from Copenhagen to Ålesund, and his listed role with the company is simply “Historian.” His particular passion is Nordic medieval and Viking Age history, the same world of longships, sagas and fjord settlements that the Vikings route rides directly through, tracing the raiding and trading routes of the Norse from Denmark’s cycling-mad capital into Norway’s fjord country. Ask him about the first recorded Viking raid – the 793 CE attack on the monastery at Lindisfarne that shattered western Europe’s sense of safety from the sea – and you’ll understand exactly why this route exists.
Seán Mulvany covers Allies, Tasmania and Shogun, an unusually wide geographic spread that reflects his own well-travelled life. Born into a British military family, Seán grew up bouncing between West Berlin, Canada and assorted deserts before settling, by way of his Irish heritage, in Aotearoa New Zealand, where he now lives with his wife Michelle and calls himself a proud Kiwi. His career since has moved through outdoor education, leadership training and ski patrol before landing on cycling guiding – and on Tasmania’s Under DownUnder route, he counts the climb up Jacob’s Ladder among his favourite rides anywhere in the world.
Ken Nairn, known to the team as Kenny, brings something rarer still to the Allies tour, which follows the Western Front from Normandy through Belgium, Luxembourg and into Germany. Ken is an appointed MacRoberts Speaker for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, a role in which he gives talks and leads walks on its behalf throughout the year – a position that grew directly out of a deeply personal journey. In 2006, Ken took his mother to visit her great-uncle’s grave in Belgium, and the family were the first to visit since he fell in 1918. Twelve years later, on the centenary of that soldier’s death to the day, Ken and his wife Linda returned to honour him properly. It’s the kind of personal, unforgettable history the Allies tour is built around.
These six are just the historians whose names travellers ask about most, but they’re part of a wider pattern at Bike Odyssey: guides across every tour who are “sommeliers, bike mechanics, archaeologists, historians, linguists, soigneurs and coaches” as well as cyclists. History isn’t an add-on lecture delivered over dinner (though it is often that too) – it’s baked into who is riding alongside you all day, every day.
What ties Sam’s founding story and this whole roster of historians 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. In the second part of this story, we take that idea out onto the actual roads: Where the Riding Meets the Reckoning, a look at how each of Bike Odyssey’s twelve Odysseys turns a great ride into a genuine journey through history.