BikeMike
A Danish tour guide with a difference, based in Copenhagen.
Autobiographical storytelling / copy / design
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Excerpts from the Copenhangen “City Tour”
Bikemike’s story
Autobiographical storytelling
I’m Michael, Bikemike to most.
I’m not your average walk-in-the-park tour guide. I’m energetic, eccentric and above all, larger than life. I was born and raised in Copenhagen and educated at the school of life while trail-blazing the path less travelled. I live and breathe my country’s history, politics and culture. I ride my bike daily, rain, snow or shine—this ritual has gotten me through hell and back during my lifetime.
In 2007* I ditched the rat-race to start Bike Copenhagen with Mike Tours and what a wild, rewarding ride it has been. In my experience, the path less travelled is rarely a shortcut. It’s a long, winding road with many hurdles along the way. Flat tyres. Detours. Turbulence. Conversations with strangers. Forks in the road.
For me, the first of many meandering adventures began when I set off on a 6 month hitch-hiking journey which rolled into five years abroad in the blink of an eye. A new hunger stirred in my curious, wandering, 22 year old soul. I had found my calling in life: to travel the world and explore the great unknown for as many waking minutes as I walk the earth. I had been turned on to a whole world of possibility. In the wise words of Denmark’s very own Hans Christian Andersen: “To roam the roads of lands remote, to travel is to live”.
So off I went, into the great unknown, finding pieces of the puzzle wherever I roamed. This is the story of becoming Bikemike.
One bitterly cold, whirlwind of a night in 1978, I met a fellow Dane named Christen at his home away from home in San Francisco. He greeted me in our mother tongue with “come inside. Stay as long as you want, but only if you join me for a bike ride around the city. We leave in 10 minutes”. Filled with intrigue and an appetite for adventure, I followed Christen into that blustery San Francisco evening. We rode through the night, winding up and down the hills, exchanging endless stories—him from a long life full of experience, me, at the very beginning of my journey. Christen was a fountain of knowledge, charisma and clever wit. He was an explorer himself and a kindred spirit. He opened my eyes to how one can experience the heart and soul of a place armed with nothing but a bike and a curious mind. He made me see the importance of taking a look beneath the surface. That there’s so much more to places than can be printed on the pages of a travel guide. It takes something special to capture these things, to bring a place to life and empower others to do the same.
Our impromptu night tour set the slow and steady wheels of change in motion. I had found a dear friend, a mentor for life and the inspiration for my tours had materialised right in front of my (now) wide-open eyes. This experience was reinforced many years later, on the most meaningful tour of my life, when I strapped one-year-old son into the baby seat of my bike and cycled around Denmark. Like my tour with Christen, my eyes were again wide open. It was as if I was seeing every detail of my beautiful country for the very first time, through the eyes of my child.
Fast forward 45 years and here I am, not Michael, but Bikemike to most. I revel in every tour as if it was the very first. I’ve made it my life's work to live, breathe and share my take on the Danish way of life: unscripted, uncut and authentic.
