Ultimate Alps Tour

It’s sticky hot here in Thailand so time to relax and write a little about my ride in Europe.

(Updated)

I just completed the Edelwiess Ultimate Alps tour and it really was very good. I had concerns that the daily mileage would not be enough however most days I was riding until dusk so you really would not want to lengthen the route unless riding by yourself with an earlier start and short breaks. Given I wanted to enjoy some late evenings and long lunches in the interesting stops then the schedule of breakfast about 7.30, pack up and have your suitcase at reception by 8.15, daily ride briefing at 8.30 then riding after this worked out fine for me.

I chose a Honda CB600F for the ride and it turned out to be a fine choice, easy to ride and a mostly neutral handling. The front end lacked feedback however it was equipped with Metzeler Z6 tyres same as I use at home so this installed some familiarity to the bikes for me. Certainly felt no need for a bigger bike on the alpine passes.

There were two tour guides from Edelwiess, Ramon and Christoff who shared the roles of tour lead rider and support van driver. I don’t normally ride in a group however these guys were easy to ride with and if I placed myself at or near the front of the group I found the pace to always be acceptable. Each night we had a big group dinner with local wines or beer and with the exception of one couple everyone was quite social and easy going which made for a very enjoyable time.

And so to the roads themselves, as expected there were some great mountain passes to ride and beautiful scenery along the way. My photos do not capture either accurately however I hope they give a small taste of what was on offer. In comparison to riding by myself at home I did not take every opportunity to stop and take photos, you simply would never get anywhere as every corner presents something worthy of stopping to shoot so I would have fallen too far behind so these photos represent just some of the mountain passes ridden.

While most were superb, not every mountain pass was to my liking, the ones with all the switchbacks that look spectacular in photos are not as much fun (IMO) to ride. The passes with smooth flowing bends were better and much more like our mountain roads only much higher and longer. Similar to home or anywhere else, those sorts of roads are not easy to convey by photos. Usually you can capture one or two corners in a mountain of 100’s obscured by forest and the lay of the land. A couple of the passes were very narrow one lane roads with continual blind corners, these were interesting and needed intense concentration to ride. There is more traffic and perhaps in summer season this might be borderline too much however off season it was not a problem.

Day six was a rest or ride day in the Dolomites. It started out raining however that cleared to give a beautiful afternoon ride in the Dolomites which was the most spectacular ride of the tour. For me the roads and scenery around the Dolomites were by far the best of the whole tour and if I was to return I would choose to base myself in the area and ride all the roads there for a week.

After a week of fine and mild weather on the passes (warm in the towns and valleys) the cold weather finally kicked in the last days of the trip. I was then glad to have bought all the winter gear with me as the passes became suddenly very cold in the minus temperatures with snow. I feel so lucky that I got to not only have fine weather to ride every day but also got to experience two aspects of the alpine passes. Last day I had planned to ride a famous high alpine road by myself on the way back to base however it was snowed in so that let me enjoy a last days leisurely ride back via some lovely scenic roads in Bavaria instead to wrap up one terrific ride.

A couple of weeks on and I really cannot think of anything bad to say about the tour. It exceeded my expectations and I am already thinking of what will be my next Edelweiss tour. The guides Christoff and Ramon were genuine nice blokes and that really made a difference to someone just doing a job.

I will hopefully get some photos from the other tour riders to add to this post in time. Already you may note some from another person I have added to the post.

As for riding the alps of Europe it was a very enjoyable time in Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Austria. Switzerland was very pretty and as mentioned above the Dolomites of Italy was the stand out of the tour for me.

Highly recommended for any rider, a must do.