From it's humble beginnings to a 'monster' website of more than 430 pages... full or original thoughts, fantastic photos, fine video and funny facts from two round the world touring cyclists on a mission to discover cultures and cuisines; enjoy countries and their comraderie; from a saddle point of view.
Welcome to the history of www.tour.tk !

How it all began...

Around July 2003 we decided we wanted to cycle around the world. We also realised that if we really wanted to do it, we had better start the preparations. Three years before we actually left the Netherlands on our trip around the globe, we began getting ready for our two wheeled bike journey.

One of the first things we did, was look for a punchy, but relevant domain name. Because I (Aaldrik), was already into building websites with the help of free resources, I had already registered several domain names using www.dot.tk (sonali.tk - snooker.tk - worldpassport.tk ). The company sells and/or gives away TLD's (top level domain names) from Tokelau, which is a group of islands in the Pacific, belonging to New Zealand. That's where the dot tk comes from if you were wondering. Anyway, at that time, the domains were all free, but you couldn't do much with them as they were more of a redirect to some other space on internet.

We had already personally christened our trip as 'what a wonderful world tour' and had our hearts set on a www.tour domain. Unfortunately, all the tours were taken. Even dot tk, but... when I tried to find the actual site www.tour.tk, the person who registered this supposed free-domain, was also trying to sell it, even though it wasn't his to sell. Luck was on our side, because after a conversation with the real owners, www.dot.tk, the site was immediately transfered to us at absolutely no cost.

And there it was: www.tour.tk - what a wonderful world tour

At the start of building the www.tour.tk website, we made several versions of the site, before we came up with this at the beginning of 2005:

In the meantime, a regular customer of SnookerCentre Zevenaar (also a www.sonali.tk website!) offered to host the www.tour.tk site at his company, Totaalnet, for free! Pascal gave us 1.5GB of space and 10GB bandwidth per month on the EuroSRS server for absolutely nothing from March 2005 untill March 2015. Thanks mate!

Following shortly afterwards, we bought the domain name from www.dot.tk so we could control everything involving the site and we also moved the content from our internet service provider Tiscali to the EuroSRS server.

Six months down the track, we'd figured out that our world cycle touring website was going to be HUGE (which we were so very right about!). Therefore, we made enough room in our navigation to move things around a bit, while we're on tour. All the pages we thought we were going to use were built and the only thing left to do, was get our bikes packed and get on the road, so we could fill the rest in. This was the version we introduced:

It still looks very much like this today, apart from the fact that we have a lot more information on the site now: tonnes more pages, plus loads more photos, plenty of video, not to forget the volumes of words in our monthly diary over the past few years, and especially for those who like that sort of thing... here are the stats (as of March 2009):

IMPRESSIVE OR WHAT?!

But, hopefully you wouldn't have noticed too many of those statistics, because we have tried hard to keep things simple. The website is as 'flat' as possible and on purpose: we figure it is easy to navigate through and you don't feel like you're getting lost. Admittedly, our diary entries are a committed reading session, but they are intended to be as such: more a daily account of feelings, strange meetings and cycle anecdotes than as pure cycling resource pages. Those details like trip distances, country information, photos, video, tips, statistics, you name it, are no more than two mouse clicks away. That gives you the opportunity to get to the information you're looking for with ease.

And that's what we would like our website to be about: bringing all our knowledge together, no strings attached and no bars hold. We are not saving any little secrets for books or other publications. We choose our best photo's; our best words; and to the best of our cycling touring knowledge, our best thoughts on this wonderfully rewarding way of travelling around the world.

All the climate charts, 80 to 90% of the buttons and graphics are home-made; anything else are copyright-free images, mainly sourced from Microsoft's Media Gallery or commons.wikimedia.org. We thank those for their contributions. If there is one thing we are not into, that's copying and pasting information or images, unless agreed upon by the owner. Bear in mind though, we do a lot of reading and researching and we are naturally influenced by what we see. That information however, is interpreted in our own way and with our own unique tour.tk style.

Almost all photos used on this site have been taken by us; either the ones in our monthly slide show (more than 2500 as of March 2009), or the ones used in headers or buttons. The ones that aren't, we have gained permission form the owners to publish them on our site and they have been credited accordingly. All music used in the videos has been produced by Sonya (in her previous life as a musician; more details on the about us page) or sourced from royalty-free music sites like openmusicarchive.org, opsound.org or the freesoundproject.

We have put advertisement on the site, but always in a manner whereby you can recognise what is site content and what are ads. We don't want to trick you in clicking on what you think is information from our site, when it isn't. That's not our style. But that probably explains why we don't make a lot of money out of the adverts.
But hey, if there is anything in the ads you like, don't hesitate to visit those sites; buying stuff via us at Amazon for example, will give us a few percent of the sales and will keep us travelling just a tad longer.

And take a look at the banner above: we have also built ourselves a little cyber shop full of bicyle touring and outdoor equipment that we like. Hence, we are now in partnership with Amazon , who stocks our shop with books, bicycling and outdoor gear.

This website also features GoogleAds, which give us revenue on a click-through basis. But, judging by our earnings through these means, the content of this site must be way too interesting for people to click away...

And all this, to keep us on the road for a bit longer...

If you want to donate any amount of money because:

~ you want to see this site grow to even bigger proportions and with even better information...
~ you think we should stay on the road even longer...
~ you thought you saw some bones sticking out in a few photos and think we need some extra food...
~ you just like us very much...

than please feel free to do so by using our Paypal account. You're just one click away, the button's just there... not convinced yet? Check out our donate to us-page .

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All information on this site is © copyright www.tour.tk, unless stated otherwise. Please do not publish anything from this site, without our permission. It has taken us a lot of time, effort and money to get this site to where it is today. We hope we will be able, in the near future, to make some money out of this site and our world cycle tour. We hope you appreciate that. Donations are welcome (see above).