What are self-guided walking and cycling holidays

At Bering Travel, we have successfully introduced a new concept to the travel market. The concept is targeted at individual travellers who want an active hiking or cycling holiday at the pace they want and at the time they want.

The concept is simple. You provide your own transport to your destination and we provide the accommodation, bikes and luggage transport. When you arrive at your first hotel, an arrival pack is waiting for you at reception with detailed route descriptions, hiking or cycling maps, practical information and other relevant tourist information.  There is also contact information and phone number for our Route Manager, who will help you if you get lost along the way.

The hotel quality is very good and there are great opportunities to enjoy the local food, the flavourful wines and the many charming cafés and strong espresso.

While you're cycling or hiking from accommodation to accommodation, we'll transport your luggage and when you arrive at the next hotel, your luggage will be waiting for you at the reception or in your room. If you've booked a bike tour, the bikes will be waiting for you at the first hotel, in a size that suits you and equipped with a bike computer, bottle holders and repair kit.

Cinque Terre in Italy is one of the most popular hiking destinations. You can fly cheaply to Milan or Pisa, from where there is a train connection to Levanto. Cinque Terre takes its name from the five picturesque villages of Monterosso, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola and Riomaggiore, located along Italy's most dramatic coastline, the Riviera de Levante in Liguria. For thousands of years, people have lived in this wild coastal landscape and through hard labour, farmers have cultivated the steep mountainsides that lead down to the rocky shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea. A railway runs along the coast and it's easy to hike out and take the train back to the hotel, so you decide how far you want to hike each day.

Another popular hiking and cycling destination is the Amalfi Coast in southern Italy. There are good and cheap flight connections to Rome with Ryanair, SAS and Norwegian, among others.

On arrival in Rome, it's easy to take the airport bus to Termini, Rome's main railway station. From here, the Eurostar AV high-speed train goes to Salerno with stops in Naples. The high-speed train travels at 300 kilometres per hour and the journey to Naples takes 1 hour 10 minutes and 30 minutes to Salerno. Train tickets can be booked from home at www.trenitalia.com or you can buy tickets from the ticket machines at Termini.

When you arrive at Salerno railway station, SITA's blue buses stop just outside the arrivals hall and run every half hour up the Amalfi Coast, stopping just outside the hotel. The buses stop in Cetara, Ravello, Amalfi, Praiano, Positano and Sorrento. The bus ticket to Amalfi costs approximately €6.

There's also the option to stop in Naples and visit the world-renowned Archaeological Museum of Naples, where all the artefacts from Herculaneum are on display, or the equally impressive Capodimonte Museum, or take a full-day excursion to Pompeii. A few days in Rome is also recommended.

Other great cycling tours are from the Dolomites to Lake Garda or the Venetian Highlights.

On our regular cycling tours, the daily stages are 30 - 45 km per day and you ride lightweight hybrid bikes, which are a cross between a mountain bike and a city bike. The bikes are made of aluminium and have 24 gears and a luggage rack.

Our "Active Cycling Holidays" are for cycling enthusiasts who want to, and have the courage to, take on some of the routes where the world's best cyclists have competed in the Giro d'Italia road race. Here, the daily stages are between 65 - 75 kilometres, some with steep climbs. These tours are ridden on carbon-framed racing bikes with Shimano 105 Compact gears. Both the regular bikes and the racing bikes are of very good quality and are never more than 1 year old.

You can read more about our walking tour in Cinque Terre.

And remember, late summer is wonderful in southern Europe.