Motorcycle Touring, Destination Anywhere

If you're thinking of booking a motorcycle holiday this year, with hotels, transportation and routes all taken care of by someone else, then take heart – there's more choice than ever before. Not only are there more tour operators vying for your business than there used to be, but the range of destinations is growing too. Want to visit China and ride up to Mongolia? You can this year. Take a cruise ship up to Borneo, then ride a bike around the island meeting people from Brunei, Malaysia and Indonesia? No problem. Tibet? Goes without saying. Half a dozen companies will guide you through Asian countries, and if you fancy riding in the mountainous area of North India, you can do that too.

But it's not just exotic locations offering greater choice than even before. You might think that there's nothing new to see in countries like Thailand, or Vietnam, but greater competition has spurred the motorcycle tour operators to offer new destinations this year – Thailand and Vietnam are both big countries, with plenty of good bits that most of us have never yet seen.

As ever with organized tours, they don't all do it in quite the same way. Some try to keep daily kilometers low, others include long days of over 350 kilometers. Not many insist that you ride as a group all the time, especially over longer distance, just giving everyone a rote map and leaving them to make their own way to the hotel or next destination. A lot of riders prefer this – you can go at you own pace and stop whenever you like, secure in the knowledge that you'll meet up with the rest of the group at day's end. Whichever company you go with, a guide on a motorcycle is part ot the package, though now increasing numbers are offering self-guided tours as well – they book the hotels and work out the routes, which you then ride on your own. Which way suits you depends on what sort of holiday you want.

Now you might think that offering guided tours of good old Thailand is a bit of a pointless exercise. Surely we all know where to ride in Thailand, if I read the bike travel forums in/or about Thailand, it sometimes seems that everybody knows his way around the country. But Thailand has several guided motorcycle tour operators, and most offer trips in the North part of Thailand, some in the South and a few offer tours around the Northeast part of the country.

In Vietnam, several companies seem to be offering guided tours of the country these days, but I have to say that we have little experience with guided tours in Vietnam.

Cambodia by motorcycle is a newcomer, and we tried one of their tours a few months ago. It's on the same format as many others, riding your own bike of in this case a hired Honda 250cc enduro machine. Tours are of three, five, seven or ten days, and each one includes a guide, accommodation and evening meals.