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Wheelers MTB holidays – Lousa, Portugal
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Posted 9 years ago
Not posted much recently, but came back from a week at http://www.wheelersmountainbikeholidays.com/ in Portugal and felt compelled to spread the word! I’ve been to the Alps several times and always had a great time, but a mate found Wheelers online and we thought we’d give it a whirl.
The first positive is the price – €350 per person, for a week long stay in a nice villa with a pool, hot tub, breakfast, evening meal, beers and transfers to and from Lisbon PLUS, 6 days of uplift and guiding from Brett Wheeler. With Easyjet flights at £200 with a bike and bag, the whole week could come in at under £600 including lunch which is ridiculous value. Accommodation is in their villa which has an annexe out the back where they stay when the house is full of guests. It’s a beautiful place, clean and spacious with a decent sized pool and hot tub and best of all, a workshop in the basement where you can tinker and fettle away to your hearts content!
Brett is a really nice guy and irritatingly talented on a bike – an ex-motocrosser and now downhill racer who finished 6th in a Portuguese national last week – there’s videos of him on Pinkbike backflipping his DH bike and clearing a 60ft triple! He setup Wheelers MTB this year with his Portuguese wife who’s originally from the area and clearly loves the fact that he gets to ride his bike now for a living! His wife, Jo, is a great cook and host and very patiently puts up with hours of repetitive bike related conversations and GoPro viewing every evening! This is him racing recently:
Uplift is done via either a 7 seater pickup for smaller groups or a minibus with trailer for larger ones (we were a party of 3) and the local trails are about a 10 minute drive from the Villa.
The local trails are just awesome. Think Afan meets Aston Hill and multiply it by 10 times in size. Rooty, twisty singletrack goes into super steep, super techy rock gardens and gulleys and then into a mini-whistler-esque fast whooping bermy section with tabletops and (small)road gaps. We spent the first day sessioning the top runs, so a 10 minute uplift made for a flat out 5 minute downhill run, with about a dozen different route options and permutations. Brett lead for the first few runs, stopping at any bits we needed to be aware of, and then let us take it in turns leading at our own pace. 15-20 minutes per uplift and run meant a genuine 3 runs per hour was easy, so by lunchtime you could easily have 10 runs under your belt.
At lunchtime and at the end of the day, we rode all the way down into the town which meant a 20 minute ish run – one of the routes was recently used for an Enduro race and this was my favourite – 15 minutes of super narrow singletrack, cut into a steep mountainside (don’t look left we called this!) with super very gnarly steep sections where at times it felt like a controlled fall rather than a ride as you clung on for dear life and let the bike do what it needed to do to get you down in one piece – stopping mid section was impossible due to the steepness. These full runs were very tiring but I loved the fact that you could really get into the flow so later in the week we spent most of the day doing full top to bottom 20 minute plus runs.
Once Brett had assessed us and decided we weren’t going to kill ourselves, later in the week he took us further afield to a few downhill race tracks, one of which was ideal for people learning to fly as it has red and blue grade obstacles/jumps/drops so you could build up to the bigger ones (most of them at least – the 20ft gap jumps we left for Brett!). These runs varied from 5-10 minutes in length but were a little more Alpine/Bike Park so made for a nice variety with the more natural stuff.
The local bike shop is run by a World Cup Downhill racer who can service your bike/forks/shocks and is as good value as everything else seems to be in this part of Portugal (a massive lunch of chicken and rice with a drink is €6) – my forks decided to lose half of their travel one afternoon, so Brett lent me his DH rig for the afternoon and Daniel at the bike shop serviced them, my rear shock and cleaned my bike for less then half the price I’d have expected to pay in the UK, and had it ready for collection at 1830!
We were a little unlucky with the weather – blue skies at 25 degrees when we arrived and the driest dustiest trails I have ever seen (actually made it hard if you were at the back of the pack to see where you were going it was so dusty) but it then rained for a couple of days in the middle of the week (but stayed warm). To be honest, I loved the fact that we could ride the same trails super dry and then super wet and then once the rain stopped, the ground was dry but less dusty so we really did get the best of both worlds.
Two of us went on 150/160 ‘Enduro’ bikes and Brett and another mate were on full on DH rigs – although there was very little pedalling to do, I didn’t come away wishing I’d had a DH-rig as everything was perfectly rideable on my Bronson and a couple of the Enduro race track sections had some slight uphills where I was very grateful NOT to be on a DH bike.
I’ve got hours of GoPro footage a mate is making an edit of so I’ll stick that up when it’s done if anyone is interested.
Here’s a quick vid of me and my mate coming through one of the rocky gulleys:
http://snapwidget.com/v/726941905464980162#.U5OlH5SwKAQ
and Brett has some good videos showing the setup on his website:
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