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There are many ways to experience a foreign country and culture. Organized bus tours are a popular option; so is renting a car or buying a train ticket and striking out on your own. Touring on a bike, however, offers many rewards that just can't be found in motorized vehicles.
I left my job with an international organization last year to pursue two passions — foreign travel and biking. The months I spent leading luxury bicycle tours in France and Scotland and observing the guests and their individual experiences led me to some conclusions.
When you are biking, all of your senses are activated and tantalized. You are not enclosed in a climate-controlled glass shell, but rather thrust out into this new world with senses stimulated and mind awakened. The Provencal wind blowing over the fields of lavender delight the nose and eyes. The light mist of Scotland delicately moistens your face. The Highlands are punctuated with the smell of fertile earth and the roar of the Spey river supplying water to the whiskey distilleries. The distilleries themselves demand your senses' attention, emitting a distinctive odor as peat fires roast barley to make the Scottish spirit. And at the end of the day, the culinary delights of a particular region are a welcoming sight, and a tasty reward for an active day spent in the fresh air.
Unlike sedentary bus tours, bike touring is good for your health. Even though bike tours, especially luxurious ones, often ignore calorie totals during gourmet evening meals, indulgences are easily counteracted by six hours of biking the next day. Better still, those six hours of exercise won't feel like six hours of exercise, what with all the beautiful scenery, the sounds, the smell of fresh bread and pastries.
Bike touring encourages, if not requires, interaction with the locals. Too often, tourists buzz through a town without once interacting with a "real local," only to leave these folks in the dust as the diesel bus roars out of town.
But on bike tours, guests very often come face to face with the people of the area. Perhaps it is just a friendly exchange in the morning at the bakery while buying a baguette for lunch. Sometimes it is for more urgent reasons, like finding a bathroom that doesn't require a funny-looking coin no guest seems to have (French public bathrooms do not take traveler's checks). Or perhaps it is asking directions from a farmer upon realizing that it is 30 minutes to dinner time and there hasn't been a hotel, let alone a town, for three hours. An amazing amount of information can be exchanged when neither party speaks the other's language. The guest comes away from the situation infinitely grateful to the farmer for helping her find her next meal, and the farmer has a good story to tell that evening at the cafe over a glass of pastis.
Guests on my tours have been invited in for coffee by a Scottish couple up in the Highlands. Another really lucky couple took an interest in grape pickers, and was promptly offered a basket of freshly harvested French wine grapes. These experiences will be talked about for years, and sure beat postcards and lectures by tour guides.
In all these situations, guests experience the culture firsthand, often with no intervention by a guide. They learn a lot, become more confident of their ability to navigate in a foreign land, and begin to break down stereotypes they may have previously had about the culture. Gone are the phrases "French people are just rude, they never smile, they don't like Americans..." They are replaced by little stories about the guest's interaction with a local, whether it was the baker, the farmer in the field, the grape harvester, or simply the waiter at the restaurant.
Overcoming cultural prejudices can be accomplished in much the same way as we counteract homophobia. We break the larger community or culture into individual units someone can meet and talk with. Suddenly stereotypes do not apply, and the other person seems almost (gasp!) normal. Sure, there may continue to be large political or ideological differences which separate the two people. But the more I travel, the more I realize just how common we all really are. The sooner we realize that it is not our differences which keep us apart, but rather our ignorance of just how similar we really are, the better off we all will be.
Trent Bonsall is a graduate of Middlebury College who has worked and traveled abroad extensively. He is currently living in Grenoble, France, with his boyfriend, learning a lot about French immigration law.
