stuff out of sight.
Before you know it, you’re pulling over at every roadside souvenir shack and tat emporium, hoping to find those missing decals before you stray too far from the area, as if in search of the lost chord.
Back at base you drag your panniers in to the bathroom, scrub clean their fly-struck surfaces so the glue will take hold and start to apply the precious badges you’ve netted in the day’s haul. That voice on your shoulder is back again, counting how much you’ve spent. You tell yourself you just don’t care; you don’t have to eat tonight…
All this confession is good for the soul, “Hi everyone, my name is Nich and I’m an alpaholic”, but the simple truth is; pass bagging adds another dimension to a love of mountain roads. Now I get to enjoy the anticipation of arrival many times through the day as well as enjoying the sheer variety and technical challenges of the road itself, the stunning views and the crisp air.
Clever baggers
For some, pass bagging is about ticking-off items on an experiential to-do list; ‘101 mountain-tops you must see before you die’. For others it’s a numbers game. How many passes, how high, how many in a single day, how many in different countries, the number of passes visited over a number of days or hours.
Serious pass-bagging requires research, lists, route-plans, marked-up maps for the traditionalists, carefully entered co-ordinates for those who prefer GPS. Google Earth and an increasing number of websites giving information about roads and trips are rich resources for anyone who wants to have a go. My recommendation is to go to
www.bestbikingroads.com I’ve yet to find any books on pass bagging, but in ‘Motorcycle Journeys Through the Alps and Corsica’ [Whitehorse Press], John Hermann lists 265 Alpine passes, giving route details for 71 self-guided trips including a 400 kilometre tour of the Dolomites that would bag 17 passes in one long day – I’ve done no better than half of that in one day.
Hermann is regarded as the most comprehensive resource for riders wanting a print format guide to the Alps, Corsica, Slovenia, the Pyrenees and the Picos de Europa mountain ranges. His books describe more than 100 routes with maps showing the dramatic changes in topography. Motorcycle touring is such big business in central Europe that specialist magazines and websites are plentiful – and thanks to Google and other search engines providing easy translation, these make an easily accessible and understandable resource for any UK rider planning a trip
www.tourenfahrer.de is perhaps the biggest of these.
How far? These Western European mountain ranges are within sensible distance for a two week holiday. You can make the distance to the northern edge of the Alps in a long day from Dover, or put the bike on moto-rail and be at the Mediterranean so you can point homeward and enjoy the trip. The ferries to Northern Spain put you right for the Picos and Pyrenees. Depending on where you live, Scotland may be closer to home, and you can certainly get a taste for pass-bagging. Most of the highest public roads in the UK are, not surprisingly, in the Highlands. These roads may be relatively low lying compared to continental Europe, but they can still be very technical and the natural beauty just as compelling. The same can be said of the Lake District, North and South Wales.
For fly-ride holidays in the USA, Colorado seems to be the place for canyon carving, or you could plan a big trip and follow some of the mountain ranges that span almost the entire western edge of the Americas, form the Andes to the Rockies.
If you really want to go for the extreme then there’s India, or perhaps more correctly, Tibet, which offers perhaps the greatest concentration of the world’s highest motorable passes: Suge La (5,430 metres, Semo La (5,565 metres) and Marsimik La (5,590 metres ).
Trust me – try the Tyrol
One of the best locations for UK riders with a couple of weeks holiday to take in some mountain wonders is the Tyrol region spanning Austria and Italy close to the border with Switzerland.
I’ve been a couple of times, most recently in the late summer of 2010. I ran in to MAG corporate supporter Bernie Brinkmann of StahlKoffer Panniers
www.stahlkoffer.com who runs regular tours of the area and spent five great days in the middle of my trips.
Many hotels and guest-houses display ‘bikers welcome’ signs on the side of the building, but it’s not always easy to tell which are just trying to cash in on the popularity of the region with riders from all over Europe and beyond. One source of information on hotels that are more serious about biker-friendly accommodation is through the give-away maps or 'Tourenkarte', available at some of the bigger bike shows; they may not be very detailed but they highlight some of the best road routes. Hotels that are serious about biking often co-operate in marketing themselves on the internet or by direct recommendation – take a look at
www.motor-bike-hotels.com. Hotels in these self-marketing groups like to help when it’s time for you to move on to another part of the region, knowing that another 'partner-haus' in the group will be at the end of your
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