Kate Rawles rode 8,288 miles down the Andes on a bamboo bike she built herself

Kate Rawles came to the Bamboo Bicycle Club having never built a bike. She left with one she named Woody — and went on to ride it 8,288 miles down the spine of the Andes, from Colombia to the southern tip of Argentina.

Context

Kate is an environmental writer, cyclist and former environmental-philosophy lecturer. She uses long, low-carbon journeys to look hard at the issues she cares about. Her first big ride, The Carbon Cycle, took her from Texas to Alaska to explore climate change. For her next one, The Life Cycle, she wanted to follow the length of the Andes through South America and ask why biodiversity is collapsing, and what can be done about it — and she wanted the bike itself to fit the message.

What we did

Kate built her own frame from scratch at the Bamboo Bicycle Club in London — the first bike she had ever made. The bamboo was grown at the Eden Project in Cornwall, and the joints were wrapped in Yorkshire hemp soaked in a UK-made plant-based resin. As far as we know, that makes Woody the UK's first home-grown bamboo bicycle. The rest is built from standard mountain-bike components.

The outcome

Kate rode Woody 8,288 miles from Cartagena on Colombia's Caribbean coast, down the spine of the Andes, to Ushuaia at the southern tip of Argentina — reaching the bottom of the continent in February 2018, after thirteen months of heat, cold, rain, dust and altitude. Along the way she visited community conservation projects and met people working to protect habitats and wildlife. The frame came through the whole journey with virtually no mechanical issues at all. The ride became her book, The Life Cycle: 8,000 Miles in the Andes by Bamboo Bike, published by Icon Books in June 2023.

In her words

"Woody turned out to be the most reliable bike I've ever owned. I had hardly any mechanical problems on the whole journey and it was a smooth and shock-absorbing ride."
— Kate Rawles, Outdoor Philosophy

Why it matters

Kate's ride is about the plainest test of bamboo we have. A first-time builder made a frame by hand and trusted it the full length of a continent — and it held. That is what we believe about the material: bamboo isn't a novelty, it's genuinely capable, and the people who build with us can make something they'll trust on a serious journey.

Links

• Kate Rawles, The Life Cycle: 8,000 Miles in the Andes by Bamboo Bike (Icon Books, 2023)
• Kate's own account: Outdoor Philosophy — outdoorphilosophy.co.uk
• Coverage: Swoop Patagonia, RTÉ, Love Her Wild

Build your own: Kate built her frame from scratch with us in London. Book a bamboo bike frame building workshop in London and build yours with us. Or browse all our bamboo bike frame kits.