Three Years of Seek Travel Ride. Bike Adventures and the Best Places to Travel by Bike

Seek Travel Ride has just turned three, and for this mid-week episode I wanted to do something a little different.

Instead of a highlights reel, I’m sharing why this podcast exists in the first place, and what three years of conversations with bike adventurers from all over the world has taught me.

In this episode we talk about

• Why Seek Travel Ride has always been about experiences, not gear
• How experience comes after you start, not before
• Why you don’t need to identify as a cyclist to travel by bike
• Choosing your own adventure and letting go of comparison
• Riding as transport and sustainability
• The bike as a connector to people and cultures
• The Seek Travel Ride community and the power of shared stories

I also share insights from a recent article by Alee Denham from CyclingAbout, which analysed years of Seek Travel Ride episodes to identify the best places in the world to travel by bike, based entirely on guest stories and lived experience. Very cool!  Listen to my previous episode with Alee here.

Finally, I reflect on the community that has grown around the podcast, how it has helped people take their first adventures, and why that community is the reason Seek Travel Ride has made it to three years.

Thank you for being part of the journey!

Check out the Manzanita Cradle from Old Man Mountain

Transcript

3 year mid week

Bella: [00:00:00] Hello everybody. Bella Molloy here, host of the show, and welcome back to another midweek episode where I aim to fuel your fire for bike adventure travel. And I've got something a little bit different for you this week, and that's because just a few days ago, seek travel ride this little podcast baby of mine.

Well it turned three. I had a pod bursary. Uh, one of my friends said, congratulations on your child turning three. And it's like, oh, wow. We've gone into toddler phase. But honestly, it actually feels a bit surreal to say it out loud, and I have thought about it quite a lot because three years of podcasting, three years of episodes.

It's actually all the stories that lay behind it. You know, when I started the podcast, I didn't have actually this huge plan or idea of what it would actually become. I didn't actually think that far ahead. I knew what I wanted to hear, and that's what the show had to be all about. And what mattered to me were just sharing honest stories from legends, taking all different types of [00:01:00] bike adventures.

And I didn't want it to be about. Big highlights or low lights. I wanted to focus on the reality of why they're doing it and what it was actually like doing it. So I wanted to hear about their doubts. I wanted to hear how they learnt along the way. I wanted to hear about the times that, you know, they're questioning themselves, getting into a WTF moment and some random place going, what have I done?

But I wanted to hear about that because to me it's all about the experiences. So I originally had an idea that for this week I'd be sharing with you a huge highlight episode for a three year milestone, and that I'd. Pull all these clips from so many episodes together and I talk about this point and have a little snippet of a guest talking here and there and stuff, and then I realized quickly, well, I might still wanna do that, but it's gonna take a lot of time to do it properly, to do it well.

So instead, for this midweek episode, what I want to do is something a little bit different, and I actually wanna take a step back and reflect [00:02:00] why the podcast even exists in the first place. So what of three years of speaking with all sorts of bike adventurers all over the world, who've taken all sorts of bike adventures all over the world, what that's taught me and what are the things that keep coming up when I talk to people about bike adventures?

'cause there are always the similar topics and themes. And when I think about why seek travel ride exists in the first place. I have to take you back to the intention of the pod from the very beginning, and that is that it was going to always have to be about experiences over equipment. So when I first started Seek travel ride, one thing I was really clear on was that it wasn't meant to be a gear related podcast.

It wasn't gonna be talking about specific bikes, it wasn't gonna be talking about specific equipment that you need. Because I feel so strongly, there's already plenty of places and plenty of legends in the podcasting world and our broader community who do that stuff really, really well. And so if you're into [00:03:00] that type of stuff, there's already a whole heap of stuff out there that you can drill into and get a fix on that type of topic for.

So instead, I was super curious about the human side of bike adventures. You know, the human interest stories behind our adventurers. I always say that the bike is the common thread for the show, but it's actually the individual experiences of each guest that make it sing. So, you know, it's about their uncertainties, their fears, the joys, the days of boredom, the moments that, you know, won't make it into a highlight reel on a social post.

But they're the experiences that I love drilling into because often they're the ones that probably give each of our guests their own little personal light bulb moments at the end of their trip. So, you know, sometimes the pod, it does talk about bikes or gear setups and stuff like that because that does become part of traveling on a bike.

Sometimes it breaks down, sometimes that's part of the story of having to get through a certain type of [00:04:00] repair or whatnot. You know, what worked, what didn't work? How people might have had to adapt their setups and stuff. But I personally think focusing on the experiences rather than the equipment has actually made bike adventures feel a bit more accessible to people.

You know, when the story about people and places, it's really easy to imagine ourselves doing something similar, even if you bike looks totally different. You know what I mean? And your setup isn't perfect. You can still picture yourself being there. And I think that focus on experiences rather than equipment.

It connects us really closely to another big theme that comes up time and time again on the pod. And that is the people that talk themselves outta bike adventures. 'cause they think that they don't have enough experience to take one, so they feel like they need more miles under the belt. They need to have already taken a few trips to be confident enough that they can even consider leaving their front door.

But I guess the biggest thing I've learned from these conversations over the last three [00:05:00] years is like experience almost always comes after your decision to actually start on the adventure. It doesn't sort of come before it. Like you decide you want to go and then you learn how to do it along the way.

Like a lot of people who now sound really confident and capable. When they talk about the adventures that they took, they actually didn't feel that way at all at the very start. You know, I've spoken to guests who set off on their first ever bike trip with like totally no knowledge. With totally no idea.

And I don't mean that disparaging, they would say that themselves. You know, people you like make mistakes along the way. They figure things out as they went, you know? Do I know how to change his plateau? No. But if it happens, I'm gonna learn. And as I go, do I know how to plan a GPS route and know which roads to take?

No, but they somehow made it work. And when you ask those people what mattered the most to them, it's uh, really the things that they didn't know at the start that they'll come up with. More often than not, what stands out is they were [00:06:00] just curious enough to give it a go. They're curious enough that they're giving it a go, and they'll figure it out as they, as they come on.

I, uh, say quite often that I think when you go on a bike adventure, you don't know it at the time, but you've signed up to like a crash course in problem solving because you will have problems, but you'll also learn how to fix them. So you don't become experienced waiting until you feel ready. You become experienced by actually going out there, you know, adapting to it, realizing that actually, you know what, when stuff goes wrong, I'm capable enough.

To actually get through this are more capable than I actually thought I would be. Uh, another thing that comes up a lot is how many people don't see themselves as cyclists. Uh, this one, I guess. It was a big aha moment for me because I certainly came into the world of bike adventure travel as someone who would definitely identify as a cyclist.

Like for the best part of almost two decades, I was riding a bike. [00:07:00] I was wearing like, or I was in a road cycling club. The reason I'm in France, you know, a lot of the time of the year is because I fell in love with the Tour de France and I love mountain climbs and stuff like that, and I've, I've changed my trajectory personally.

So when I started interviewing people and they'd say, oh, I'm not a cyclist. And I'd be like, what? But like you've ridden like 30,000 kilometers around the world on a bike. Like yeah, you're a cyclist. But I realized it was a lot more nuanced than that. So I've spoken to so many guests who. You know, don't come from a cycling background, don't relate or identify as a cyclist.

Yeah. They've gone on to do huge distances. They've crossed countries, they've taken amazing adventures, and they've built their life around taking adventures, but they still don't identify as. Being a cyclist because they're pedaling a bike and you don't need to look a certain way, you don't need to ride a specific bike.

You don't need to fit into a particular scene because you don't need [00:08:00] to do that to claim bike adventure. So you don't need to be a cyclist to go on a bike adventure, but you know, the bike is just your tool. It's how you're gonna move through the world at the perfect pace, fast enough to, you know, go, go places, but slow enough to actually notice what's going on around you and feeling what's around you with all of your senses seeing smelling.

Hearing all of that type of stuff. You know, once you stop worrying about whether you fit the cyclist label, the bike sort of just becomes the most accessible way of the adventure travel to exist. Like once you stop worrying about whether you fit the label, it's pretty simple because all it is when you condense it down is that the bike becomes one of the most accessible ways to take adventure travel.

And I guess when I think of adventure travel, another thing that comes up is there isn't a right or wrong way to take a bike adventure. This actually came up in our most recent [00:09:00] episode, which I released with, uh, mark Beaumont, someone who. Has taken many, many, many adventures, world records setter, uh, cycled twice around the world, gone across all continents, and does a lot of stuff that's not on a bike as well.

He's a legend. But Mark in our episode, said to me, there is no wrong way to ride a bike. You know, you can do things every different way, and no one's right and no one's wrong. So some people will want to plan everything in super specific detail. They wanna know what route they're gonna take, where they're gonna stay, how far they're gonna travel every day.

And other guests, they're like totally the other end of the spectrum. So they've got like this deliberately loose plan in their mind, and they know that they're gonna figure it out as they go. And there's people that sit in the middle of that, and all those approaches are just as valid and just as rewarding.

You know, I can't personally be the person that plans things to an infinite detail, [00:10:00] but I can appreciate that other people really need that. And they're not right or wrong, and neither am I. You know, the biggest thread across all of my guest stories hasn't actually been about how much people have planned or what type of bike they rode or how far they went.

It's just that at some point they. Made that simple decision to commit to the adventure and go in the first place. You know, that adventure might look like someone who's riding an e-bike and staying in accommodation each night. It could be someone who's credit card touring or someone who's signed up for an offroad ultra race.

Or it could be, you know, heading out on an overnighter, a ride close to your home, keeping it local, very much in the Al Humphreys way. Or someone else, it's just like, no, I wanna be curious. I wanna see something that is completely different from my everyday life and I'm gonna choose the bike as a way to get there.

And the best thing in the bike adventure space I've learned from all of the guests is like, there's [00:11:00] a room for all of it. Like all of the stories matter. They're gonna matter to you because it's personal to you, and it's not because it fits a particular specific narrative or a particular definition of what bike adventure needs to look like.

Another theme which comes up more and more as the podcast keeps evolving is that the bike is the perfect form of transport. And it's not like just the tool for the sport, it's not the recreation. It's what I was talking about before. I don't need to be a cyclist to travel, but it's actually the perfect tool to travel.

So most of my guests, they're not riding bikes for the sake of riding. They're riding 'cause it's how they're choosing to move through places. They ride to start lines, they ride to events. They're going between places and sometimes they're just doing it 'cause it's the easiest way for them to travel. I've had people who fall it into this space because it was the most affordable way for them to travel.

There is definitely an environmental consciousness that goes along with [00:12:00] bike travel, hand in hand as well. And sometimes that's one of the biggest learnings of a lot of guests when they finish say, a huge adventure is seeing the world and seeing those stark signs of the environment front and center in their mind.

And they become more environmentally conscious as a result of that. And so sustainability might not be something that they really set off and thought about before their bike adventure. And it's sort of something that sort of seeped into them a little bit. But I think more and more, the other thing is riding a bike is slow and it's also connected.

So you do experience everything. You experience your surroundings, you observe a little bit more because you are. In that environment. I mean, my gosh, you definitely observe the weather. You, you often, not a often, not a tailwind though, right? Uh, gosh. Those headwinds, they come up time and time again and, and rain [00:13:00] and stuff.

But again, it's that sort of sensory perception, it's that sensory experience of bike travel and it encourages a different type of mindset because you are just in it all the time. Once you start thinking about bike travel, in that idea that you're in it all the time and you don't need to be experienced, you don't need a perfect bike, and all of this stuff, it sort of goes to the next question of like, well, where's the best places to go?

Like, if you wanna take a bike adventure, where are you gonna head? And you can say, there's no right or wrong answer on that. And I, I cer, there's certainly no right or wrong answer on that. But what was really interesting for me is very recently a previous guest of the Pod Alee Denham from CyclingAbout he published an article.

So Alee published an article on his cycling about site, which blew my mind because it's based on this pod. Um, he practically pretty much went through the transcripts across every single episode, published in the last three [00:14:00] years. And he analyzed them for which country's guests spoke about most positively.

And then he turned that into a ranking list for the best countries for bike tour in 2026. And the thing that's cool about this list is I don't know that I've ever specifically asked this question to guests like, what do you think the best place to go cycling is? And look, maybe, gosh, maybe randomly I have, I, I have actually asked that to Alee.

I take that back. And that's because a few years ago, Alee did produce his own personal list, so I asked him on his episode. What that means is when Alee been analyzing all the pod transcripts, it's just come through natural conversation. So there's no preconceived idea that we wanted to pull out which country should be on where This is just from all these conversations with all these amazing guests, what's come up?

And so I thought for this three year episode, it'd be fun to hold up a mirror and go, okay, well what places have we collectively loved the most and why? So, according to the article, the [00:15:00] ranked countries are, so I'm gonna start from the best country here and work down. So the number one country guests that I've interviewed have said for the best places to take an adventure is Turkey.

Then I've got the us, India, and China are then tied. Then comes Australia, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, the Patagonia region as a whole. So Argentina and Chile combined, because often people who traveled to Patagonia are actually going in and out of both countries. Then comes Tajikistan, Canada and Peru. So there are some honorable mentions later in the article, which talks about places that were near misses.

So Mexico comes up and Nepal, Morocco, New Zealand, France, Norway, all those countries do come up, but they're not on the big hit list here. And what I love about the list again is it wasn't created based on gear and equipment or infrastructure or stuff like that. It was just about stories. So these are the places which guests have talked about because of their [00:16:00] experiences, because of what they felt there.

Was it hospitable? Was it the landscape? Was it the culture? Was it the food? You know, the way that traveling by bike changes the way you relate to a place and the people in it. That's what. Made people come up with their own. It's how they felt in certain places, and I love that this list has been created.

Off the back of that, I'm gonna provide a link in the show notes to the full article. If you wanna drill down deeper into it. I'd actually really love to hear from you, the listener. To figure out exactly where would you pick, because there were times where I was nodding on that list and I was thinking, yeah, I know who, I know which guests were talking about this country favorably.

And there were ones where I was going, oh wow. I'm actually a little bit surprised that's there. So yeah, I'd love to hear your, your views on that as well. So, you know, by all means, get in touch with me and let me know. You know, do you agree with Alee? Do you not? Do you think there's a country that should be there?

Um, but I guess it's not even agreeing with Alee This [00:17:00] is just coming naturally through all the podcast episode conversations from guests who've experienced bike travel literally all around the world. And that really sits well with my next theme, which is that right at the heart of any bike adventure is just how much.

Taking an adventure on a bike becomes a great connector to people because there's something about seeing someone who's out on an adventure, which makes people and strangers curious, and it doesn't matter what your setup looks like. They don't care if you've got panties. They don't care if you've got bike packing bags.

They don't care what you're wearing. It's that you're traveling and choosing to travel like this, which opens the door to conversations. People will ask you questions. You know, the typical, where are you coming from? Where are you going? How long have you been on the road? What are you eating? Is your butt sore?

You know, they're the questions that people will come up and ask you, and I've heard it over and over and over again from so many guests. Like traveling on a bike makes you so approachable and you're exposed in a way that you wouldn't be if you were in a car, on a bus, on a [00:18:00] train. It just means that you have this openness, which in return is often met with so much hospitality.

When I interviewed the great Heinz Stucke, who spent, you know, 51 years traveling around on the bike, you know, he's a great example of this and Heinz knew it. Like he would actually dress his bike up and put signs and stuff on it as an invitation to people come and have a conversation with me. Um, so, you know, Hines was really toned into that, but.

I think it's actually probably one of the most quietest strengths of taking a bike adventure is that it connects you to the places you're gonna go to. It's gonna spark conversations, it's gonna spark encounters with strangers, and it connects you to people. I feel like that's such an important aspect of it.

And I guess to finish things up, like in a funny way, that's what the bike adventure community has become for this podcast, you know, three years of running the show. This pod has helped so many people take their very first bike adventures. [00:19:00] It's helped turn people's ideas and bucket lists into things that maybe felt a bit impossible into something that has suddenly felt.

Really doable. You know, I've seen friendships won because of the podcast. You know, people meeting through stories or events or shared curiosity about seeing different parts of the world and getting in touch with this adventure to get an I, you know, get some information and then they, they become buddies and fast friendships and I, I guess I wanna be honest as well.

It hasn't been an easy three years for me. I cannot count the amount of times I've nearly actually quit the pod. There's a lot of work that goes on behind it, and there's times where it has maybe felt a bit too much like work, and I've questioned, you know, how sustainable is it to actually keep this going and.

Every single time it's actually you, the listener out there that's kept me going. 'cause I'll think, ugh, why am I doing this? And then all [00:20:00] of a sudden I'm getting a message, I'm getting an email. Someone's DMed me on Instagram and people will tell me I listened to this and it, it let me do this. And I'm like, oh my gosh.

Wow. Like people are actually invested in this. Somehow this podcast has created like an adventure community. Yeah, I, it's made it all worthwhile for me, and I cannot say thank you enough to everybody out there who has done that. If you are listening to this as someone who's taken adventures. If you are a guest who shared your adventures, if you're someone who got told about it by someone who's tuning in and is now tuning in, and you've gotten in touch with me, if you're someone who doesn't actually even connect with me ever, but you know, this podcast comes up as a new episode and your pod player, and you'd tune in each and every week.

Maybe not even to take a bike adventure, but maybe just to learn about the world. Like you are very much a part of this community and you are the reason why this show still exists. You're the [00:21:00] reason why this show got to year three and hopefully why it will also get to year four and yeah, I just wanna say I.

This whole community is why this exists. And it goes back to that whole principle of its people and their experiences. Definitely not equipment or gear. So big thank you to you. Thank you so much for three years. So now I wanna do my favourite part of these midweek shows, which feels extra poignant this week to say thank you to you.

My legends of super fans who've actually taken the next big step and shown your appreciation for the pod by buying me some coffees I could not do. This show certainly would not exist without you super fans. So to everyone out there who has done that. Thank you so, so much. Uh, you've literally kept this podcast going This week I would like to give a shout out to Chris Rowe.

Chris, you have said, hi, Bella. [00:22:00] Apologies for not buying you a coffee sooner. I've loved listening to you interview a huge variety of cyclists over the past year, and I recently completed my bucket list bike ride across the USA and your episode certainly made some of those miles feel a lot shorter. I'm in that weird place now, actually, where it feels like it's never happened and is a distant memory.

Thank you. Oh, well, thank you Chris. And, uh, listeners. Chris also sent me a link to his blog where he has written about that ride, which is@https://ko-fi.com/BadgerAcrossAmerica  And, uh, Chris, you're, you're a great example now, someone who's taken the bucket list, ride, done the adventure, and you are sharing your story and hopefully that will have other people do the same as well.

Thanks so much for buying me a coffee. And then listeners, I need to say a big thank you to someone. Yes, that's right. Someone again, who has. Not left their name or a message, but they [00:23:00] have bought me a coffee and supported the show. So thank you. And look, if you are listening to the pod and you're a super fan and you wanna do as Chris Rowe and someone has done, you too can support this podcast.

Simply head to buy me a coffee.com. Slash seek travel ride. Buy me a coffee and let me know what is it that you love about this podcast, and where will your next bike adventure be taking you? And until the next episode, I'm Bella Molloy. Thanks for listening.