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Home » RTW Travel » City bicycle tours are way better than you might think

City bicycle tours are way better than you might think

This is less of a RTW and more of just a general travel tip, but one aspect of it does make it special for the RTW crowd. For many of us who arrive in a new city for the first time, a tour of some kind is the best way to size the entire place up quickly so we can decide which things we want to see in detail during our visit. Bus tours are definitely the most popular in big cities around the world, but if you find yourself in one of the increasing number of places that have regular bicycle tours, do it.This new trend may have started in Europe, and now many cities there have these small-time operations, but you can find them in pockets around the world as well. They tend to work like this: Interested people are asked to show up at a specific corner or landmark at an exact time of the day, and the rest is taken care of for them. In some cases a company will actually be ready with a truck full of bicycles, and other times the tour group is led a few blocks to a storage facility where all the bikes are kept. You usually don’t even have to make reservations, and they tend to be relatively cheap as well.Everyone will get a bike that fits them and next thing you know the tour has begun. Larger groups are sometimes broken into multiple smaller groups, each with their own guide, which helps to make the group less of a target for careless drivers. The tours tend to be about 2 hours or so, and rarely include challenging hills or anything else that would prevent people of average fitness from participating.Since these tend to be small operations, they are sometimes hard to find out about, but check the pamphlets case in nearly any hostel and you’ll find out about a bike tour if one exists in that area. Or ask the hostel people directly because they’d know for sure since these businesses are really popular with the hostel crowd. Of course you can also Google “(city name) bike tours” and with any luck the top choice will be right on the money.Why they are great for RTW peopleThe aspect of them that makes them particularly appealing to RTW folks, especially those traveling solo, is that it’s incredibly easy to meet people on these bike tours. I can tell you from experience as a shy solo traveler that I’ve made way more friends on the 5 or so bike tours I’ve been on than on the 30 or more bus tours I’ve been on combined.There’s just something about the way people mix on these things that leads to interesting conversations and even being social later. Out of 10 people in my bike tour in Barcelona, I think 8 of us, who arrived in 4 or 5 social units to the tour, all met up for a pub crawl a few hours later, and spent the entire evening as a group. It’s strange how that works, but I put bike tours very high on my list of ways to meet people while traveling in general.