THE SOLO TRAVELLER
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Slow travel
Riccardo Sedola, Founder of Life on a Bike. Image courtesy Riccardo Sedola.
Doing less and noticing more
A Q&A with Riccardo Sedola, Founder of Life on a Bike.
Briefly …
A self-guided cycling holiday leaves nobody else in charge of the day. But when there is no group, guide or fixed departure to fall back on, what makes travelling on two wheels alone actually work?
Riccardo Sedola has spent much of his working life on two wheels. Before founding Life on a Bike, he led multi-day cycling tours across Europe and later co-founded cycling travel marketplace Cyclando. His latest venture builds self-guided cycling holidays that travellers can undertake on their own dates and at their own pace.
The practicalities are taken care of without putting somebody else in charge of the day. Routes are supplied as GPS files for a bike computer or phone, luggage is transferred between hotels and local support is available if something goes wrong. Crucially for a solo traveller, the journey does not depend on a minimum number of people booking the same departure. We asked Riccardo what makes a self-guided cycling holiday work for one, how much cycling experience somebody really needs and what travellers should look for before setting off alone.
What does designing a cycling journey specifically for a solo traveller involve?
Mostly it means taking out the places where being on your own quietly costs you something, rather than adding anything special for solo travellers. There are three of those. The first is the departure. A group tour needs a group, and if it doesn’t fill it doesn’t run, and the person who booked alone six months earlier is the one rebooking flights. A self-guided trip leaves on the date you choose, with no minimum number to make up.
The second is the room, and it’s the one I’d look at hardest. Almost every holiday of this kind is priced two people to a room, and someone travelling alone pays a supplement for the other half of the bed. It’s a real cost, it varies a great deal between operators and seasons, and it is usually buried somewhere near the end of the booking. I would much rather be asked about it in the first email than have someone find it at checkout.
The third is the day itself – navigation you don’t have to negotiate with anybody, bags that move to the next hotel without you, and a local number to ring when something goes wrong. Alone, a mechanical problem in a language you don’t speak is a different size of problem than it is in company.
And then there’s the one nobody can design away, which is dinner. Eating on your own every night for a week doesn’t suit everyone. It’s the reason the route matters more than the scenery.
Cycling near Groningen, the Netherlands. Photographer: SanderStock | iStock.
Your routes vary in terrain and difficulty. Who are these holidays really for, and how experienced does someone need to be before considering one alone?
The flat ones – the big river paths, the Netherlands – are simply where most first-timers start, and that’s deliberate. They take fitness out of the equation and leave you with the actual holiday. What people get wrong is thinking the test is distance. It isn’t. It’s consecutive days. Riding fifty kilometres on a Sunday tells you very little about riding fifty kilometres on the fourth morning in a row, into a headwind, on legs that already did three. If you’ve ridden two or three days back to back at home and still enjoyed the third, you’re ready.
Beyond that I’d want two things of someone going alone, and neither is athletic. One: either you can mend a puncture, or you accept that you can’t and you choose accordingly – an e-bike, a route with a railway beside it, a town every twenty kilometres. Two: you like your own company. Six days is a long time to find out that you don’t. E-bikes have changed who can do this more than anything else in the last decade. People who would once have ruled out anything with a hill on it simply don’t have to any more.
Self-guided cycling allows travellers to set their own pace, including how long they spend somewhere along the way. How does that freedom change the way someone experiences a destination, particularly when travelling solo?
The freedom people picture before they go is being able to stop wherever they like. The freedom that actually matters is not having to perform. On any trip with other people there’s a small constant negotiation running underneath the day – when to eat, whether to bother with the cathedral, whether an hour sitting by the river is a waste of the morning. On your own all of that disappears. You end up doing less and noticing more, which is not the same holiday at all.
There’s a social effect too, and it works the opposite way to how people expect. A group is self-sufficient company; nobody outside it needs to say anything. One person at a table isn’t, and that is usually how a conversation starts.
It would be dishonest to give only the good half. The same freedom means nobody tells you when you’re making a poor decision. It’s four in the afternoon, you have thirty kilometres left, the sky has gone the wrong colour, and there’s no one there to say the sensible thing. That’s the trade, and it’s precisely why we build in the support we do.
Cycling through the vineyards on the way to Hunawihr from Riquewihr, France. Photographer: Pkazmierczak | iStock.
Navigation is provided, luggage travels ahead and local support is available if something goes wrong. How do you decide how much support to build into a journey without taking away the independence that makes self-guided travel appealing?
The test I use is whether the support stays invisible until the moment you need it. Luggage transfer passes that test: a van you never see moves a bag you would otherwise be carrying. The route file passes it too – it’s there, and you’re free to ignore it and take the other road, which plenty of people do. A guide fails it. Not because guides are bad company, but because a guide sets the pace of your day, and the point of the whole arrangement was that you set it.
So the line is roughly this. We cover the things you genuinely cannot fix yourself, in a country whose language you don’t speak, on a Sunday afternoon: a hotel that has lost your booking, a bike that stops working a long way from anywhere. Everything you can do perfectly well on your own, we leave alone. Which also defines what we don’t do. No check-in calls over breakfast. Nobody counting you off at the end of the day. If you decide on the Tuesday that you’d rather stay where you are and read a book, that’s your business, not a breach of an itinerary.
For someone considering their first solo cycling holiday, what should they look for when choosing a route and destination that will suit the way they want to travel?
Look at the longest day, not the average. Every itinerary is sold on a daily average, and the average is never the thing that hurts. Ask for the longest stage and the total climbing, then decide against those numbers instead.
Look at where you sleep, not only at where you ride. A hamlet with one restaurant that closes on Mondays is a very different evening from a small town with a square. Travelling alone, the evening is half the holiday, and it’s the half people forget to check before they book.
Look for a railway line. The great river routes mostly have one running alongside, which means a bad day, a broken wheel or a genuinely foul forecast doesn’t end the trip; you ride to the next station and rejoin tomorrow. It’s the cheapest insurance there is and it costs nothing to check on a map.
And go point-to-point rather than in a loop, in May or late September if your diary allows it. The shoulder months give you the same route with far fewer people on it.