Australian Mountain Bike Travel Special

Rider : Kepler Rek Photographer : Sean Lee Queenstown, New Zealand. It was my last day in Queenstown, so after a long day of shooting in the bike park with Kep, we decided to hike up toward the peak of Ben Lomond to catch the sunset. The top of the Queenstown Bike Park can just be seen in the lower right corner of the photo, hundreds of metres below us. It turned out that this ridge was almost twice as high as the bike park itself, and a quick ‘45 minute hike’ turned into double that. The last of the golden sunset can be seen on the tips of the Remarkables mountain range in the background. This was the last shot taken before we bombed it all the way down to Lake Wakitipu,…

My passport bears some interesting stamps. My top drawer has at least five currencies in it – but only in small change. My Strava profile has rides logged from lots of different states and nations. And the two different bike bags I have used for about a decade of two-wheeled wanderlust should have accrued their own frequent flyer points. I love to travel. I love exploring. Not just for escape, but to learn new things, meet new people, ride new trails and to challenge myself. I travel to find my own adventure. Since primary school I have found a bike to be the perfect tool for adventure. From riding around the local streets and fire trails until the sun went down after school, or learning how to connect friends’ houses through…

Australians love to travel – wander through an international airport terminal when you’re outside of our great country, and you are still likely to hear the familiar accent of another Aussie. We tend to stick out a little too. Although our own broad country is full of opportunities for adventure on our mountain bikes, it is hard to resist the allure of riding somewhere so very different to the trails we find at home. The joy of finding historic routes up over high mountain passes and onto the snaking singletrack through hidden valleys in the Alps is just as good as the buzz you get from racing wild, ungroomed trails in Central Europe. You might travel overseas with your mountain bike for a race, or for an organised tour, or just…

I staggered off my bike, completely spent. I’d just finished Stage 7 of the 2013 Old Mutual joBerg2c, a nine day MTB stage race from near Johannesburg to the sea, near Durban. And I mean only just finished. I’d spent the last 78 km being pushed up the hills by my team mate John Allison as an illness I’d picked up meant that I couldn’t breathe. Walking over to the recovery tent, I grabbed some water and slumped on the ground and barely moved for half an hour. Now I had to tell John I was pulling out. This was especially disappointing as we’d spent the first six days of the race on the podium in the over 50 age group. But it was obvious things were only going to get…

The highest point of North Africa is situated in Morocco and it is 4165m above sea level. We wanted to know whether it is suitable for mountain biking, so we had to go and look for trails away from our homes in Switzerland, and into the thin mountain air of Africa. We are sitting in Imlil, ”the Chamonix of the High Atlas” as it is lovingly called by Moroccans, letting the charm of this place work on us with a few glasses of sweet mint tea. For us this place is quite different from the mountaineers’ metropolis at the foot of Mt. Blanc. And yet Imlil and Chamonix have one thing in common: both places are a starting point for the tallest mountain in the country as well as for the…

Norway is known for natural landscapes, jaw-dropping fjords, mountains and the midnight sun. As well as explorers such as Roald Amundsen, Fridtjof Nansen and Thor Heyerdahl. Think of Norway and sport, and it is winter activities that often come to mind for most people, especially after the success of the Lillehammer Olympics in 1994. The country’s success is unparalleled over the 21 Winter Olympiads with 118 gold, 111 silver and 100 bronze medals collected over the years. Remarkable for a population of around 5 million. There are a few notable Norwegian cyclists. Edvald Boasson Hagan, Thor Hushvod and of course the legendary Gunn-Rita Dahle Flesjå who won the women’s mountain bike cross-country gold medal at the 2004 Olympic Games as well as six World Championships and six European Championships. But what is…