Berlin on Bike

Why does Berlin look the way it does? Berlin doesn't have a cohesive urban landscape like other cities. It's an exciting and quirky collage, an eclectic and edgy mix that is full of contradictions. Every historical era has had its share of destruction, both intentional and otherwise, leaving behind opportunities to rebuild, sometimes with style and modernity, often with unusual utopian ideals, making Berlin what it is today.

We ride through 800 years of Berlin history: from historic to modern aspects, where the renowned and the questionable come together to make up a city that will always be: "damned to a fate of always becoming something and never being it" (Karl Scheffler).

Our 'Berlin's Best' bike tour begins in Prenzlauer Berg, once a working class area and now endlessly trendy, with its painstakingly restored historical houses that were built during the Industrial Era of the Wilhelminian boom. After that, it's off to Berlin's historical city center, where Museum Island, the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag are just a few of the many sites you will experience first hand. You'll see how 40 years of the GDR (communist East Germany) left its mark on the city, and you'll get a feeling for contemporary Germany with the breathtaking architecture of the new government district.

This bike tour is the perfect way to get to know Berlin. We pass along our love and enthusiasm for this fascinating city. With an interesting mix of entertainment and information, we easily take you through many complicated and significant subjects that give you greater insight into the darkness and light of the history of this inspirational and ever-changing city. That way, you'll be ready to discover Berlin on your own and prepared for your next bike tour.

With our guided bike tour you can discover the Berlin Wall.For almost 30 years, this 160-kilometer-long, so-called 'death strip' cut through the city and the lives of its people. Few families remained untouched by the division of the city; parents separated from their children, lovers who wound up on the 'wrong' side of the Berlin Wall or young people who wanted to escape the restrictions of the GDR and risked their lives trying to get over the Wall.

The stories around the Berlin Wall and the East German secret police (Stasi), are many. Some of our guides have experienced them first hand; from the funny, to the tragic, to the unbelievably absurd. Along the 15 kilometers between Bornholmer Straße and the government district, our bike tour follows the obvious as well as the hidden remnants of the 'Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart'. The Berlin Wall bike tour takes you to border checkpoints, like Checkpoint Charlie and places like Mauer Park, where a section of the so-called 'death strip' has been transformed into a vibrant part of the new Berlin. You'll also visit the official Berlin Wall Memorial Museum area in Bernauer straße where the last remaining, totally intact portion of the Berlin Wall and a guard tower can be seen.

We'll delve into the political dimensions, the background circumstances and, above all, the human element in the everyday madness of life in a divided city, right where it happened. Kids along for the ride? No problem! Our competent bike guides break it down so that even generation Facebook will understand.

Each of these many different crowds have left their mark on Berlin over the years, creating a patchwork of ever-changing neighbourhoods. Join our guides for a great tour through some of Berlins most diverse and exciting districts.We take you from the formerly club-driven-now-gentrified Prenzlauer Berg with its collection of beautiful little shops and the famous Mauerpark, to Friedrichshain with its countless bars, clubs and street art. Then it's over the river into multi-ethnic Kreuzberg and Neukölln with their cross-cultural hipster-crowds. Experience a city that is as diverse as its people.

On our tours we'll introduce you to the wild 90s in East Berlin, the revolutionary Kreuzberg of the 70s and 80s and present-day undergroundculture with street art, graffiti and new ideas we don't even have names for. Most of our guides were born in Berlin or have been living here for decades - Let them show you their city - and tell you the stories they love. This tour is celebration of our wonderful Berlin and it's colorful people, streetlife, nighttime-convenience stores (Spätis!) and everything else that makes Berlin such a great place to be. All this happens in a fun and laid-back way, and your guide will always make sure there's enough time to stop somewhere for a drink or chilling out on some riverbank or park.

From pre-fab to Stasi prison - Join us on an bike tour expedition to a lost land, discover what it was like behind the iron curtain.The GDR (German Democratic Republic - communist East Germany) was a country made up of contradictions. Some say, that people stuck together more; other say that you couldn't even trust your own family. We examine the clichés and the prejudices that still exist today and take the time to look behind the scenes at the inner workings of the omni-present communist regime. Find out how much of East Berlin and East Germany still lingers in the lives and minds of people almost 25 years after the fall of the Wall.A new country with a new socialist people also needed a new capital city. So the leadership got to work, radically transforming East Berlin, the capital of the GDR. Modern representative buildings, like those in the Stalinallee (English: Stalin Avenue), as well as the ubiquitous pre fabricated apartment blocks for the masses, shot into the air with dizzying speed.

These remnants of socialist central planning are still definitive in the atmosphere of the former East Berlin.On our way through Prenzlauer Berg you'll meet Ernst Thälmann enshrined in one of the few remaining monuments to the heroes of the communist era. You'll see the Sportforum Hohenschönhausen where young men and women were drilled and doped into elite super athletes meant to demonstrate the superiority of the communist system. You'll also get a look over the forbidding walls of a Stasi prison and see inside the massive apparatus organizing over 80,000 secret police and their collaborators, whose sole duty was to spy on their own people.

Unlike our other guided tours, we are on the road for six hours and ride a distance of around 22km including a leisurely lunch break.

An odyssey through un-discovered and green spaces of Berlin. Berlin is big, colorful, lively, and sometimes totally stressful. But there is another side of the city, with tranquil courtyards, serene spaces of unusual beauty, and places where strange and funky projects happen that would even surprise many Berlin natives. What kind of tour takes you to places like these? Just take one of our individualized tours of Berlin's Oases.

All of our guides have their own personal insiders' tips for green spaces and creative oases in Berlin. Sometimes the tour leads you through parks and along the waterfront, then suddenly you are in a seemingly surreal cityscape where you discover an unexpected little paradise hidden around the corner. Or maybe the bike tour will take you to places where strange and unusual events took place, things you'll never read in any history book.African beach bars, parks, courtyards, airfields; our oases tour is full of surprises. Come with us and we'll show you another side of Berlin, beyond Bradenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz. Always different and always good, our Oases Berlin bike tour is just the thing for the experienced Berlin traveler and a lot of fun for natives!

The air pulses with the electricity of Berlin's nightlife as bars clubs and restaurants spill over with energy and excitement.

Elaborately lit and eerily empty buildings dissolve into lively neighborhoods where the party spreads into the sidewalks and streets.

For many Berliners, a beer on one of the numerous bridges at sunset is the perfect start of a balmy summer night and the perfect way to ease into Berlin's world famous nightlife. Come with us and experience this fabulous atmosphere and the magic of a city that never sleeps! The tour begins at 8 o'clock, as always in the Kulturbrauerei and ends between 11pm and midnight - you'll have no trouble at all getting home with the public transport to all other parts of the city.

Berlin has always been an artist's Mecca for artists from all around the world. As a result, exciting alternative cultures have been born into public spaces, created by people with their own ideas about beauty and creativity.

A vacant lot or the side of a building can become an exhibition space. From classic street art to urban farming, many projects push and blur the boundaries between what is sanctioned and what is illegal.

How and where does art and creativity develop in Berlin? It's all about atmosphere and lifestyle, creativity in a larger context, and influencing the urban environment. Where a guerrilla art sculpture stands today, the next luxury loft apartment could take its place tomorrow.

Discover on this 'Streetart Berlin' Bike Tour the open-air art metropolis Berlin!

The center of the city sometimes seems like one giant construction site, and hardly a day goes by without the newspaper reporting on some new gigantic building project. We show you on this bike tour the Berlin of the future and bring some order to the chaos.

What's happening at this giant construction site? Where did they build those adorable little town houses? How do major projects get planned and built? Why are they re-routing this massive street? What exactly is Berlin's master plan? Where are the next skyscrapers to be built?

Our tour takes you from the giant urban playground that is Mauerpark to the area around Hauptbahnhof (Central Station) where new government buildings, the new headquarters of the BND (German Federal Intelligence Service), and an entire new urban quarter is taking shape on spaces that were once demolished to make way for the Berlin Wall. We visit Germany's most controversial building project, the complete reconstruction of the Berlin City Palace, and fantasize about utopian plans for the Alexanderplatz. We also tell you exactly why David Hasselhoff sang a song to save the wall.A bike tour not only for visitors, but great for curious Berliners too.