Sam Wood - Bike Odyssey Founder and Director
Founder Sam Wood comes from a very different background to most bike tour operators. From cycling for the BBC to directing archaeological excavations around the world he brings a unique angle to Bike Odyssey's touring portfolio.
Bike Tour Leader
Sam has designed routes and led tours around the world for 15 years for cycling groups, documentary series and charity events. This broad experience has refined Bike Odyssey's aim - to run 10 tours per year only, in unique and spectacular locations around the world. To concentrate efforts and expertise to yield thoughtful, finely crafted, well-researched and executed itineraries - essentially to create unique exceptional odysseys.
BBC
Sam designed his first historic bike route and cycled it with a BBC TV crew filming, creating ‘On Hannibal’s Trail’ a six-part travelogue documentary in 2009 which has been shown in over 70 countries worldwide on BBC, National Geographic and Viasat. Sam wanted to share this amazing experience with others, so he built a cycle touring company and he has run the Hannibal Odyssey since.
Academic
Sam studied Classical Archaeology (Hons) at Sydney University before working and consulting for the British Museum, London, The Met, New York (Metropolitan Museum of Arts), The Mellon Foundation. He has been published by a dozen different magazines ranging from Cycling Weekly to World Archaeology. He gave this all up in 2009 to cycle and create bike tours with genuine historical content.
Archaeologist
Sam is not just an academic though, but a real life Indiana Jones who excavated on many prominent archaeological digs searching for artefacts and treasures and piecing together their history. He ran excavations and taught field archaeology for Stanford, Bradford and Sydney Universities on digs at Pompei, Italy, Crimea, Ukraine, Bermuda, USA, across the Greek Islands and home in Australia.