Cycling / Bike Touring in April

Amsterdam is the easiest world-class city in the world to see from a saddle, and cycling here is less a tour than the way the city actually moves. Bikes outnumber people, the streets are laced with protected cycle paths and priority junctions, and the flat, compact centre means you cover the canal ring, the Jordaan, the Museumplein and the leafy Vondelpark in a single relaxed morning. Push a little further and you are quickly out of the city on the dyke-top paths of Waterland or the polders toward the windmills of Zaanse Schans, past cows, drawbridges and wooden houses, all on car-free routes. Guided rides put a local between you and the tram tracks and the etiquette of the bike lane, which takes the nerves out of a first ride, while rentals set you loose on your own. This is the national activity in the city that made it famous, and doing it well means simply riding as the locals do, upright, unhurried and everywhere.

For a few weeks each spring the Bollenstreek around Lisse becomes one of the most photographed landscapes in the Netherlands, and a bicycle is the right way to be inside it rather than stuck in a coach on the road. The bulb fields run in solid stripes of red, yellow and pink to the horizon, and the flat, quiet lanes between them let you ride from block to block, stop where you like, and reach corners the tour buses never see. Lisse is the base because it holds the Keukenhof, the great spring bulb garden open only from mid-March to mid-May, and you cannot cycle inside Keukenhof itself, but rental kiosks at its gates hand you a bike and a signposted loop through the working farms all around it, from a gentle few kilometres to routes of 25 or 35 km down toward Noordwijk and the dunes. The bloom is brief and weather-dependent, so timing is everything, but catch it right and a day on the bike here is the quintessential Dutch spring.

The Luxembourg bank of the Moselle carries one of the most relaxed river rides in Europe, a flat, car-free cycle path that runs the length of the wine country from Schengen in the south to Wasserbillig in the north. On the Luxembourg side the route is part of the national cycle network as piste cyclable PC3, paved and signposted, hugging the water below the vineyard terraces and passing through Remich, Wormeldange and Grevenmacher. Because the valley floor is level, this is riding almost anyone can do, and the wine towns are spaced a few kilometres apart, so a day turns naturally into cellar stops, a riverside lunch and a boat back. Bridges cross to the German bank at several points, letting you loop both sides of the river and the vineyards that climb from each shore. In autumn the terraces turn gold above the path.

Hong Kong is not the first place most people picture on a bike, which is exactly why the New Territories cycle network is such a pleasant surprise. From Sha Tin, a dedicated, mostly flat cycle track shadows the Shing Mun River and then the shoreline of Tolo Harbour all the way to Tai Mei Tuk and the great dam wall of Plover Cove Reservoir, around 22 kilometres one way with the water on one side and the Pat Sin Leng ridge on the other. It is car-free for almost its whole length, which makes it accessible to families and casual riders rather than only the lycra crowd, and it strings together riverside parks, old walled villages, the temples and markets of Tai Po, and waterfront seafood at the far end. The reservoir itself is a quiet novelty, a body of fresh water reclaimed from a sea inlet by damming the cove, ringed by hills that hikers climb for the sunset. A guided ride adds the local texture the track alone does not give you: which village to detour into, the history of the Hakka settlements and the reservoir engineering, and a lunch stop worth stopping for. Autumn to spring is the season, when the humidity drops and the harbour views are sharp. This is the mellow, green, water-level side of Hong Kong that most visitors never see.

Pulau Ubin is the closest thing left to old rural Singapore, and a bicycle is the way to see it. Ten minutes across the water by bumboat from Changi Point, the island is a throwback to the 1960s kampong life that the mainland has entirely built over: wooden stilt houses, abandoned granite quarries turned into jade-green lakes, fruit orchards, and forest tracks where wild boar, long-tailed macaques and hornbills still roam. You rent a bike at the village jetty or join a guided ride and follow dirt trails to the Chek Jawa Wetlands, a rare intertidal ecosystem of mangrove, seagrass and coral rubble crossed by a boardwalk and a viewing tower. The riding ranges from easy flat lanes to rooty, hilly single track, so it suits a gentle family potter or a proper off-road workout. It is a genuine nature-and-heritage escape twenty minutes from a global city, and cycling covers far more of the island than walking ever could.