Kate Rawles built her own bamboo bike — then rode it the length of the Andes

Kate Rawles walked into the Bamboo Bicycle Club workshop having never built a bike. She walked out with one she named Woody — and went on to ride it 8,288 miles down the spine of the Andes.

The challenge

Kate is an environmental writer and adventurer, and she wanted her next expedition to match its message: a long, low-carbon journey through South America to look at biodiversity loss, one of the most important and least-reported environmental crises of our time. That meant starting not with a bike off a shop floor, but with a pile of canes in the corner of a workshop.

What we did

Kate came to the Bamboo Bicycle Club in London and built her own frame from scratch — 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. In her own words, "Starting with a pile of canes in a corner of the Bamboo Bicycle Club's workshop… it was an adventure in its own right." She named the finished bike Woody.

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 on 16 February 2018 after thirteen months of cycling through heat, cold, rain, dust and altitude. The frame came through it with virtually no mechanical issues at all. The journey 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

"The final distance of my ride was 8,288 miles, and Woody made it with virtually no mechanical issues at all."
— Kate Rawles, Swoop Patagonia

"The bike was unexpectedly brilliant. That was the first time I'd ever built a bike and I really didn't know if I was going to get to the end."
— Kate Rawles, Total Women's Cycling

Why it matters

Kate's ride is 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 the whole spine of the Andes — and it held. It says what we believe: bamboo isn't a novelty, it's a genuinely capable material, and the people who build with us can make something they'll trust with a serious journey.

Proof and links

• Kate Rawles, The Life Cycle: 8,000 Miles in the Andes by Bamboo Bike (Icon Books, 2023)
• Coverage: Swoop Patagonia, Love Her Wild, Total Women's Cycling, Outdoor Philosophy, University of Cumbria