Cyprus: The Adventure Riding Destination You’ve Probably Overlooked

Ask a European adventure rider to name the places they want to ride and you’ll hear the usual suspects: the Alps, the Pyrenees, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, the Balkans, perhaps Romania, Albania or Greece.

Cyprus? Probably not.

And I think that’s a mistake.

I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of time riding off-road in Cyprus. I originally built the Cyprus section of the Trans Euro Trail, and since then I’ve carried on exploring: following tracks to see where they go, joining things together, finding brilliant sections, finding terrible sections, turning around at locked gates, getting stuck, falling off and occasionally looking at something and thinking, Christ, absolutely not.

The result is that I’ve probably ridden half as much again as the roughly 2,100 km of tracks I eventually decided were worth keeping. And after all of that, the thing that still surprises me about riding here isn’t simply that Cyprus is good.

It’s how varied it is.

It doesn’t feel like one riding destination

You can be riding through pine forest in the mountains and later find yourself dropping through vineyards and orchards towards the Mediterranean. There are wide, fast tracks where you can let the bike flow and spend as much time looking at the view as thinking about the terrain, alongside rocky climbs, single track, river crossings, loose surfaces and technical sections where 500 metres suddenly becomes considerably more interesting than the previous 20 kilometres.

Then there are the easy trails where you can relax, look up and simply enjoy being on a motorcycle in a spectacular place.

That’s what I think people who haven’t ridden here tend to miss. Cyprus isn’t one type of adventure riding. It can be technical and easy, fast and slow, tiring and exhilarating — sometimes all on the same day.

“Other people watch the movie. In Cyprus, you get to ride through it”

Kilometres don’t tell you very much

Adventure riders already know this, but distance is a dreadful way of measuring an off-road day. I recently rode 75 km that took me 11 hard hours. On another route, 150 km can be a fantastic flowing day where the bike just disappears underneath you.

That’s part of the fun. You aren’t riding a predetermined course designed to deliver exactly six hours of entertainment before depositing you at a hotel. A line on the map can begin as an easy forest track, become a rocky descent, turn into a river crossing and eventually present you with something that makes you stop the bike and stare at it for a moment.

Sometimes the correct response is “Yep, let’s have a go.” Sometimes it’s “Nope.”

Both are adventure riding.

I’ve ridden everything I’m giving away

My relationship with Cyprus’s trails started properly when I built the Cyprus route for the Trans Euro Trail. Building a route like that teaches you something quite quickly:

Finding tracks is easy. Finding tracks worth riding is harder.

A GPX file containing 3,000 km isn’t necessarily better than one containing 2,000 km. Some trails go nowhere useful, some simply aren’t enjoyable, and others create a tedious connection between two genuinely good sections. Some look promising on a map and are complete rubbish when you actually ride them.

And occasionally you find something absolutely glorious.

So after the TET I kept exploring, and that eventually became the Horizon Adventure Tracks — the HATs. As they stand today, there are roughly 2,100 km of them, and I’ve ridden every kilometre. In reality I’ve ridden considerably more, because I threw a lot away.

I’m making the HATs available free. If you’ve got your own adventure bike and want to come to Cyprus, register, download the GPXs and go and ride them. There’s no requirement to buy anything from Horizon Rider.

I built them to be ridden.

How difficult is it?

This is where I dislike simple answers. Cyprus can be extremely easy, and Cyprus can also be extremely not easy. Pretending otherwise doesn’t help anybody.

There are sections where a reasonably competent ADV rider can spend the day flowing along tracks, enjoying the landscape and wondering why they haven’t ridden here before. There are other places where I’ll stop, look at what’s ahead and think, Christ, that’s scary.

I’ll mark it and tell you it’s there. If you’re better than me and want to ride it, crack on. It doesn’t mean I’m following you.

That matters because I don’t believe adventure riding should be about proving how hard you are. It’s about choice. If there’s a fantastic technical section with an easier way around it, both are perfectly legitimate routes.

The challenge is there if you want it.

Cyprus changes with the seasons

The island changes through the year, and so does the riding. My favourite periods are probably April and May, and October and November. If somebody told me they could come whenever I recommended, those are the windows I’d point them towards first.

March is different. There’s mud, wet limestone, slippery trails and plenty of river crossings. I’ve ridden more than 20 days in March in a single year and had a fantastic time, although my washing machine had rather less fun. It isn’t a month I’d recommend to somebody with virtually no off-road experience, but if you’re comfortable when the bike starts moving around underneath you, March can be brilliant.

February? I wouldn’t bother. It’s cold, wet and miserable by Cyprus standards, and being cold and wet becomes substantially less amusing once you’ve fallen off and you’re also sore.

July and August are at the opposite extreme: too hot.

Horizon Rider doesn’t pretend Cyprus is a perfect ADV destination 365 days a year, because it isn’t. I’d rather tell somebody when I think they’ll have a great time than take their money in a month when I wouldn’t particularly want to be out there myself.

Then something unexpected happened

Over time I’ve had other riders come out and ride with me, and I started hearing essentially the same reaction. The bikes get praised, the navigation gets praised and the place they’re staying gets praised, but the thing that matters most is usually some variation of:

“Fuck me. Cyprus is an amazing place to ride.”

That’s when the idea behind Horizon Rider became rather obvious. The problem wasn’t finding good riding — I’d already done that. The problem was how somebody living in Britain, Germany, Scandinavia or elsewhere could actually experience it without turning the whole thing into a logistics exercise.

You can absolutely bring your own motorcycle to Cyprus, and if that’s what you want to do, brilliant. Download the HATs and come ride. But what if you’ve got six days available and don’t particularly fancy transporting a motorcycle halfway across Europe?

That’s the problem Horizon Rider is intended to solve.

Fly in. The difficult bits are already done.

You come to Cyprus and there’s a properly prepared adventure bike waiting for you, with the current GPX files already loaded onto the navigation system. You’ll also have received the routes before you arrive, so if you’re the sort of person who wants to spend three months examining every possible option before the trip, you can.

If you’re not, don’t.

The bikes have unlimited mileage, tools are provided and, if you want to disappear further across the island and camp, we have the camping equipment. You also have a comfortable base to come back to, which means that for normal day riding you don’t need to carry your life around on the motorcycle.

And then we largely leave you alone.

There isn’t a Horizon Rider itinerary or a guide announcing that everybody is leaving at 08:30. Nobody tells you Tuesday is Mountain Day. Get up when you want, look at the map, pick a direction and go and have an adventure.

If you want advice, ask me. I’ll happily tell you what I’d ride, what I’d avoid, what gets difficult and where I think you’ll have the best day.

But it’s your trip.

The bikes matter

I didn’t want to put people on completely standard rental motorcycles and decide that was good enough. The bikes have been developed for the riding we’re actually doing here.

At launch we’re using the Rieju 307 and CFMoto 450MT, with the fleet expanding from there. Suspension, protection, ergonomics, filtration, navigation and other details have been considered around how the motorcycles are actually going to be used.

That doesn’t mean I’m claiming we’ve invented the world’s greatest bikes. It means we’ve tried to make them very good at this particular job.

One of the riders coming back shortly owns a Honda CRF450L. He thinks our 307 is as good — possibly better — for what we’re doing here.

This isn’t a guided tour

I’m not trying to sell six days of following me around Cyprus. Horizon Rider’s job is something different:

To unlock Cyprus for an ADV rider exceptionally well.

That means doing the work that makes the adventure possible without removing the bits that make it an adventure: finding the tracks, discarding the rubbish ones, continuing to check them, preparing the bikes properly, sorting the navigation, giving you somewhere great to stay, providing the tools and equipment, and telling you what I know when you ask.

And then getting out of the bloody way.

Because the best bit shouldn’t be Horizon Rider. It should be Cyprus.

So, two ways to do it

If this article has made you think, “Fuck me, I didn’t know you could ride that in Cyprus,” good. That’s largely why I wrote it.

If you want to bring your own motorcycle, the Horizon Adventure Tracks are free. Register, download them and come and explore.

And if your reaction is, “That looks fantastic, but I really can’t be arsed getting my bike to Cyprus,” that’s why we built Horizon Rider.

Come here. We’ll have a bike ready, the routes ready and the tools you need to explore them.

The rest is up to you.