We at DBB are seasoned users of bike mapping apps.
For example, Alexey has been posting his rides to Strava since 2012 (for 13 years and counting). Alex remembers using it in 2014 and has plotted countless routes there.
Just recently, we discovered MapMagic and are excited about the perks we get from it.
First, our world travels
When presenting a trip — such as our last year’s bikepacking tour to Bosnia & Herzegovina (shown above) — we had to design a map to give an idea of where we were going:
With MapMagic, we can not only demonstrate a much longer tour interactively — we can keep tweaking, real-time, the routes and hotels (as it happens in such a complex event). Magic!
While particularly convenient for tours — shown above is our upcoming Viet Nam Tour in November–December 2025 — MapMagic also works well for camps.
Take our Colombia Camp planned in February 2026. A camp differs from a tour in that it’s more chilled and doesn’t have a particular plan of where and when exactly we’ll ride.
We do have more fully scouted routes than we could ride in those 9 days. Showing them on a map is impractical — it would be just a mess of various overlapping loops around the campsite.
We have drawn the above map by hand, showing just a few key points — but MapMagic now lets us not only easily plot more POIs, but also indicate their type, add descriptions & photos:
Moreover, we can add all the routes (or any combination of them) with their own POIs, anytime. Here, we have the same map but with one of the routes shown separately from the main points:
You can also switch the layers underneath — choose a satellite view, topographic maps to better understand elevation (and there’s some in Colombia 🙂 or even just Google Maps.
For any route, you can download a GPX file to use with your cycling computer — it’s not even needed to register or login to do that. Nice.
Next, our group rides
Apart from the tours & camps, DBB organises weekly social rides in Belgrade.
One of them is our Thursday beer ride called Dark-On-Draft (or Dark-On-Rocks if there’s gravel involved). Every week we choose one of the routes — there’re more than 25 of them by now.
For that to work, people should be motivated to be putting routes forward for voting — and to do that, one needed to browse through dozens of various routes and pick a candidate.
Now, we have plotted them all at once on the map — yes, this looks a bit messy, but anyone who lives in Belgrade can easily pick a route that starts from, or goes through, a certain place.
The routes with gravel sections are visually separated from the pure asphalt ones by colour:
• red is road with more than 500 m elevation gain
• orange is road with 200 to 500 m elevation gain
• yellow is road with less than 200 m elevation gain
• green is gravel with less than 200 m elevation gain
• blue is gravel with 200 to 500 m elevation gain
• violet is gravel with more than 500 m elevation gain
It’s now much easier to browse, choose and put a route forward — thanks to MapMagic.
Last but not least, free routes
We have been working on publishing free plans for self-guided cycling tours, based on our previous events. That takes a lot of time and effort — so stay tuned for when it’s completed.
For now, we have the first one — Golija Gravel — ready & available at DBB website with the use of MapMagic. Visit & subscribe to our newsletter to be notified when the rest are fully ready.