An on-road tour is about the ride and everything around it. You spend the day on tarmac – mountain passes, coastal roads, long sweeping valleys – and the evening somewhere worth arriving at. No mud, no recovery, no wondering whether the track ahead is passable on a loaded bike.
That does not make it easy riding. Days of 250 to 350 kilometres through the Carpathians or the Albanian Alps ask for stamina and concentration, and there are corners here that will hold your attention. But the surface is predictable, the bike is set up for comfort with luggage cases, and the support van follows behind with everything you do not want to carry.
Any rider who is confident handling a large adventure bike on winding mountain roads. You do not need off-road experience, you do not need to be fast, and you do not need to have toured abroad before.
These are also the tours that work for couples. There is a dedicated passenger price, the bikes are set up for two, and the support van means a passenger can ride in comfort for a stage if they want a break from the saddle. Our off-road tours are rider-only, which is one of the clearest differences between the two.
Breakfast at the hotel, a short briefing, then out. The guide rides in front and sets a pace the group is comfortable with, with regular stops for fuel, photographs and coffee. Lunch is somewhere local rather than somewhere convenient.
Afternoons tend to be where the best road of the day sits, and we arrive with enough daylight to see the place we have stopped in – whether that is a walled old town, a lakeside, or a harbour. Dinner is together, in a local restaurant. The luggage is already in your room.
Romania and the Carpathians, where the Transfagarasan and the Transalpina climb above two thousand metres. The Balkans, crossing borders between Montenegro, Albania, Bosnia and Croatia with the Adriatic on one side and the mountains on the other. And Greece, where the mountain roads of the Pindus connect Meteora, Delphi and the Peloponnese coast.
All of them are built around roads we ride ourselves, with a maximum of eight motorcycles per group.
9 days
