For the first time in seven rallies, the vehicle wasn't ours. With no interest in shipping our own bikes halfway around the world and back, we rented through Giant Adventure, the rental arm of Giant Bicycles, Taiwan's homegrown manufacturer and the largest bike maker on the planet. Giant Adventure hands you a bike and a set of panniers in Taipei, and lets you drop it all off at any of their rental stores on the island when you're done. For a one-way 1,004 km circumnavigation this was the easy call, and one of the reasons we picked Taiwan in the first place.
The bike
We each rode a Giant FastRoad SLR 2, a flat-handlebar sports bike with a road-bike groupset and disc brakes. Giant's own marketing for this model promises "more speeds and lighter weight, making endurance road challenges more effortless", which is accurate up until the bit where you have to push it over a 1,442 m day of climbing on Stage 9.
- Model
- Giant FastRoad SLR 2
- Type
- Flat-handlebar sports bike, road-bike groupset
- Unladen weight
- ~12 kg
- Loaded weight
- ~25 kg (incl. 11 kg panniers, water, tools and gear)
- Rental
- Giant Adventure, Taiwan
- Distance ridden
- 1,004 km over 12 days / 10 stages
- Total climbing
- 7,124 m
In all honesty, these were not light bikes. 12 kg unladen, and once fully kitted out with panniers, tools, gadgets, water, snacks and everything else, we were riding 25 kg. For the first couple of days the weight was the only thing we thought about. After that, the bikes stopped being a thing we were fighting and became a thing we were riding. As we wrote at the end of Stage 10: "the bikes became part of us, and not once did they let us down."
Reliability, in numbers
This is the section that matters most if you're researching a rental. We set out expecting the usual run of minor mechanicals and came away with a very short list of issues:
Zero punctures. Across 1,004 km of mixed tarmac, rough road and one very long descent down the Suhua Highway, neither bike had a single flat tyre. The tyres Giant fit to the rental fleet are clearly chosen to survive cyclists who don't know the roads yet, and they earned their keep.
Zero major mechanicals. No broken spokes, no snapped cables, no failed hydraulics, no pedal trouble, no bottom bracket grumbles. The only drivetrain incidents were on Stage 2, where a chain decided to take a brief unscheduled break and a gear needed a minor roadside adjustment. Both were fixed in ten minutes with the basic toolkit Giant provide.
Every climb completed without stopping. All 7,124 m of ascent across ten stages, including two categorised climbs on Stage 9, was cleared on the bike. No pushing, no walking, no "just for a minute" pauses halfway up. The bikes did what we asked of them, gear for gear.
Trip top speed: 58.9 km/h on the long mountain descent into Yilan on Stage 9. On a loaded bike that feels considerably faster than it sounds.
Panniers
The rental came with a pair of panniers each, fitted at the Taipei shop before we rolled out. They're the single biggest reason we'd recommend this rental option over trying to shoehorn your own set-up into hand luggage. Between the two of us they comfortably carried:
Two sets of cycling kit (one for riding, one drying out in rotation), a separate change of clothes for off-the-bike evenings, one spare pair of shoes each, toiletries, phone cables and power banks, travel documents, a lightweight waterproof and a modest pile of snacks. Anything more than that and the climbs start to feel pointed.
Giant also include pannier rain covers, which we didn't think much about until Stage 8, when the rain finally arrived somewhere north of Ruisui and didn't let up. Covers on, panniers dry, kit inside still clean at the end of the day. That's a rental detail that only matters once, but when it does, it really does.
What you can't rent
Two items are firmly off the Giant Adventure menu for hygiene reasons: helmets and water bottles. Entirely understandable, and frankly we'd rather buy our own than ride in rental kit that's been on a few hundred strangers' heads. Plan for it and budget a small amount for a basic helmet and a couple of bottles the day before you set off. We picked both up in Taipei without any drama and they lasted the whole trip.
Giant's rental bikes have standard bottle cage mounts, so any shop-bought bottle fits straight in.
Would we recommend the rental?
Yes, without hesitation. The bikes did exactly what a rental bike is supposed to do: they got on with it. They carried two riders and a combined ~50 kg of gear across 1,004 km and 7,124 m of climbing, through Stage 6's brutal headwinds, Stage 8's rain, and Stage 9's tunnel-lined mountain pass, and they finished the whole thing without a single flat tyre or mechanical issue worth mentioning. If you're researching a round-Taiwan bike rental, Giant Adventure is a solid call, and if you pack light enough to make friends with those 25 kg, the FastRoad SLR 2 is more than enough bike for the job.