Cycling / Bike Touring in September

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.

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.

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.

Andorra packs more famous climbing into 468 square kilometres than almost anywhere in Europe, which is why the Tour de France and the Vuelta a Espana keep coming back. Every road out of the valley floor goes up: the Coll de la Gallina and its brutal Els Cortals d'Encamp ramp, the long Coll d'Ordino, the Port de Cabus gravel wall, and the Port d'Envalira, at 2,408 metres the highest paved pass in the Pyrenees. You can link half a dozen category-one cols in a single ride and finish back in the same valley. Pro teams train here in summer for the altitude, the roads are quiet and well surfaced, and it is a place to come and climb rather than roll along flat. Local operators will guide the cols with a support car.

The Codru hills are the most rewarding place to put Moldova under your own wheels, because the country is small, quiet and made for a wine-and-village pace. Roads roll through oak forest and vineyard between the capital and the cellar cities, with almost no traffic once you leave the main highways and a constant supply of monasteries, roadside wells and family wineries to stop at. It is gentle touring rather than mountain riding: short days link Chisinau, the Codru forest reserve and the underground cellars of Cricova and Milestii Mici, and longer routes run south-east toward the Stefan Voda vineyards and the Nistru. A ride here is really a way to travel between tastings and traditional meals, arriving at a cellar sweaty and hungry rather than by tour bus. For a rider who wants distance without altitude and culture at every stop, rural Moldova is an easy, underrated choice.

Gotland is Sweden's cycling island, a flat, quiet, church-dotted land in the middle of the Baltic that is close to ideal for relaxed multi-day bike touring. The riding is easy underfoot, the roads are calm, and the distances between places worth stopping are short, so you cover an island of real variety at a gentle pace: limestone sea stacks called raukar standing off the shore, medieval Romanesque churches in nearly every parish, sheep meadows, pine forest and long sandy beaches. At its heart is Visby, one of the best-preserved medieval trading towns in northern Europe, ringed by an intact 13th-century wall and inscribed by UNESCO, a place to start and finish a loop. To the north the smaller island of Faro adds wild coastline and the raukar fields that Ingmar Bergman filmed. With good self-guided operators handling bikes, luggage and bookings, you ride hut to guesthouse over stages of around sixty kilometres, swimming and stopping at will. For unhurried island cycling with deep history at every turn, Gotland has few equals in the Nordic countries.