This was November!

Wheelie Cyprus – tanned legs available 365!

Last November 2008 I took a trip over to Cyprus to meet Wheelie Cyprus, the bike holiday company who can show you around an island that should be far more popular with cyclists than the usual winter training camps…..

Right now it’s 5 degrees here in the UK and raining, wet rain as well mind.  The kind of rain that doesn’t just get you wet but soaks your eyeballs so they feel like a couple of maltesers floating in glass of dirty washing up water.

But not in Cyprus.  Currently in Polis, in the North of the Island it’s 20 degrees and sunny.  Mallorca is 14 degrees and 52% precipitation and it’s snowing in the Pyrenees.   Last November while I was getting picture messages of snow in the South East of England I was sitting by the pool in 25 degrees after a 5 hour ride around the Troodos Mountains.  I was feeling smug.
It was a family holiday in a 3 bedroom apartment with a pool and overlooking the sea and a melon orchard

Q.Mountain Bike or Road bike for Cyprus? A.Go back with the other!

and, of course the bike came too.  For this holiday I chose the Merlin XLM mountain bike.  A titanium hardtail with 100mm of travel at the front and whatever spring I had left in my legs by November at the back.  Actually it was a bit of a dilemma, the road bike or the mountain bike as Cyprus is perfectly ideal for either.
Situate yourself, as we did, near Polis in the north of the island and you have some fantastic trails all to yourself or some long tarmac climbs up to nearly 2,000 metre into the Troodos mountains.

To further ascertain which bike to take was easy, I contacted Wheelie Cyprus of www.wheeliecyprus.com. They run a bike hire and guiding business based in the hills outside Polis and know everything about riding on Cyprus.  Since the summer of 2008 was a complete washout in Britain I went for the mountain bike to finally get some dry, dusty trail action before winter hit.

Your guides from Wheelie Cyprus

Helen & Alistair are your  Wheelie Cyprus guides and are fully trained up as OTC accredited cycling guides.  They also produce some excellent guides on riding around the island.  If you want to go off roading they will show you the hidden trails, the best bits and add a fair bit of local knowledge to the riding.  They also offer accomodation in their beautiful mountain side stone house with big views over the Chrysochous Bay.
B&B, airport transfers and guiding is all part of their packages so just book a flight!

The northern part of the island and especially the Turkish areas remind me of cycling around Spain many years ago.  The terrain is all interesting, no flat bits, with no obvious signs of Brit holiday invaders.  Once you travel through the interior villages to the mountains you get a feel of Cyprus’s unique culture sat in the middle of Greece, Turkey and Tripoli.    North Africa and the Suez canal are just a short hop over the ocean so it is no wonder that the weather is so good in November!

The isolated Akamas Peninsular

From October on to April when the rest of Europe is donning mudguards and winter jackets the temperature is between 15 and 25 degrees and another bonus is no none of the strong headwinds that you’ll find in the usual winter cycling favourites.  In fact, in November the temperature was warm enough to spend the rest of the day swimming and lounging around by the pool with the family.

For mountain biking, the island is criss-crossed completely with tracks and trails with no legal barriers to riding anywhere (apart from on the motorways!).  If you stay with Wheelie Cyprus or organise your own accomodation around Polis then you’ll have the incredible Akamas Peninsular to yourself.  This is a long ridge of over 600 metres above sea level running along the far Western corner of the island with the stunning Lara Bay to the West and views over Polis and the Chrysohou Bay to the North.

The E4 long distance path traverses the length of Cyprus

There are several cycling guides and maps available from the Cyprus Tourist Office but an excellent start to get some local knowledge is to download the Cyprus Cycling Guide, an e-book available from www.cyprus-travel-secrets.com.
In addition to the myriad of off road trails is the European Long Distance path called the E4.  The start of the path is actually in Gibraltar and then passes through Spain, France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, mainland Greece, Crete and currently finishes in Cyprus.  It is over 10,000kms long in it’s entirety and the Cyprus portion is 640kms long.  It doesnt visit all the best areas of the island but it’s a great route down from the Troodos mountains back to sea level, all off road and with plenty of switchbacks.

For the roadies Cyprus provides a compact, scenic island where even the main routes between towns are pleasantly rural.
Although Cyprus hasabout 8,000 kms of tarmac if you want some winter training where you blat out 100 miles a day on flat, windy roads practising your through and off and sprinting for signs Cyprus doesnt fit the bill.  It’s not a flat island and in some place the road surfaces are sketchy.

Quiet roads for winter training.

However, if you want a winter cycling destination that tests your mettle and elevates your soul as well as your whole then the Troodos Mountain range in the middle of the island rises up to 1950 metres, and remember you’ll be starting off at pretty well zero metres.  That’s twice the elevation gain of climbing Alpe D’Huez!  It’s quite amazing to see the change in scenery as you climb from sea level to the Troodos mountains.  The expanse of pine forests that unfold before you as the road rises is quite unexpected when you are used to the dusty and barren scrubland that makes up most of the island.

Even tubeless tyres wont stop the snakebite punctures in Cyprus

There is a sure way to test the quality of a destination for a cyclist, actually there are several, another being whether you would go back again but a definitive result is when you have that feeling you are discovering something for the first time.  You might not be the first to travel that path, you might even have been taken there by a guide but to you that awesome view, that endless

Thanks to Wheelie Cyprus, back soon!

dusty descent or the acheivement of a summit belongs solely to you.
Cyprus was full of rewards and I’ll be going back for more.  And anyway, come next November I’m sure the tan will need a top up.
NEIL WRAGG