Croatia and Balkans Tour

Eighteen nights across seven countries, guided, 3,125 miles from the Channel to the Balkans and back, on the rider’s own motorcycle.

This is the longest tour the operator runs and the one that goes furthest east, which is the argument for it: the Balkan roads are as good as the Alpine ones and carry a fraction of the traffic.

The Reims-Gueux circuit and the B500 open it, then two nights in the Austrian Tirol with the Grossglockner, thirty-six hairpins to 2,504 metres. Slovenia follows by Postojna, twenty-four kilometres of cave galleries, and Predjama Castle, built into a cliff over a cave mouth. The Dalmatian coast carries the route south to two nights in Dubrovnik, with the walls and the film locations, then Sarajevo for two, where the Latin Bridge marks the spot Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914 and the Tunnel of Hope records the siege of the 1990s. Mostar and its rebuilt bridge follow, then two nights at the Plitvice Lakes, sixteen terraced lakes dropping through travertine, Lake Bled with the Vrsic Pass and its fifty hairpins as a ride-out, and the Timmelsjoch at 2,509 metres with the mountain motorcycle museum at the top.

The Eurotunnel crossing, seventeen nights in four and five-star hotels, daily breakfast, four evening meals, route maps and GPS files, all the parking and a guide throughout are all included; fuel, tolls, entry fees, other meals and insurance valid in every country on the route, Bosnia included, are not. The price shown is per person for a rider and pillion sharing a bike and a room. May to September is the window, and nineteen days with five double nights in it keeps the daily distances sensible across a route of this length.