Cycling East Statistics

Here are the results from the group poll of the Cycling East / Silk Road WhatsApp group, conducted in October/November 2025.
A total of 85 members participated. This is about 11% of all members and about 40% of all active members (those that wrote a message between 15th June and 15th November).

Many participants supplied their rough locations. A map of these can be seen here.
Further, some useful route maps, with info for road conditions etc. made by the participants are gathered here.

This survey was designed, prepared, conducted and evaluated under the aegis of Cycling East group admin Felix Puff (@radelix_and_rebikkey on Instagram)!
It is not the work of Belinda and Tizian from Zweiradler-Touren, we merely provided the webspace to publish the results.

For the results from other years, see here.

Contents

There are two peaks when it comes to weight of bike + luggage. Most people’s bike + luggage weights 45kg. Many more lightweight bikers also carry 35 kg. Our lightest participant has only 18kg, our heaviest 70kg.

People who are on the road for longer carry more weight, about 3kg for every time the trip length doubles. However, weight of bike and luggage does only minimally affect the speed of participants (about 0.2 km/day faster for every kg less weight).

Most participants are on a classic bike touring setup, with panniers on back & front racks. Several also carry front bags without a front pannier (like fork bags) or a classic backpacking setup without panniers. Other setups are rare.

Bag setups differ in weight: Classic tourers and 1 participant with a trailer carry more than 60kg. Bikepacking setups carry the least weight and hybrid setups are in between bike touring and bikepacking setups.

Trip length doesn't affect the setup much; there is people on bikepacking setups on the road for several months.

Almost everybody is travelling with the same setup as on day 1. For those who changed something: more people added bags (7 people) than removed bags (4 people).

Most people cook with gas or liquid fuels. Other fuels are rarer.

About half participants travel without an own power source, they only charge from plugs and use powerbanks. Solar panels are quite common but also dynamos are not rare. 6 participants even have both a dynamo hub and a solar panel.

Contents:

Zweiradler Tours: Central Asia Tour

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