Impact story

Two doctors rode London to Singapore on bamboo they built themselves

Tom and Nicky rode 22,000 kilometres from London to Singapore on hand-built bamboo bicycles. Every component broke at some point. The bamboo never did.

22 February 2026 · 1 min read·By Bamboo Bicycle Club

The programme, in numbers

90%+

course completion

OCN L1 & 2

accredited qualification

4,000+

builders since 2012

Figures from BBC programme records. Reoffending is a contested measure — we report what we can verify.

In September 2014 two London junior doctors, Tom Roberts and Nicky Moore, left home on bamboo bikes they'd cut, sanded and wrapped by hand. They didn't stop pedalling until they reached Singapore the following July.

The road

Fifteen thousand miles, twenty countries. London out through Europe, into Turkey and Georgia, across Central Asia, then down through India and Southeast Asia to the far edge of the map. (Our own write-up clocks it at 22,000km — the same ride, measured in kilometres.) They fundraised as Cycling Without Borders, riding for Médecins Sans Frontières — Doctors Without Borders.

What we did

A bamboo frame isn't bought finished. It's made. Tom and Nicky built their bikes at the Bamboo Bicycle Club, learning the method part by part and leaving with frames they understood completely — which matters more than anything when the nearest bike shop is a fortnight's ride away.

What held up

The interesting thing about a long tour is what breaks. Tyres wear through. Chains snap. Pannier racks shear off. Across the whole journey, not one bamboo frame failed. In words written from the road rather than dressed up afterwards:

"The unrelenting bamboo frame will eat up tyre after tyre, snap chains, break pannier racks — but the frame will always be there, ready, waiting."

That's the whole point of the material, told better by a rider mid-journey than any spec sheet could manage.

Why it matters

People assume bamboo is fragile. A ride this long, on self-built frames, across that much terrain, is a quiet argument to the contrary — and a reminder that the people who build their own bikes tend to be the ones who can keep them rolling anywhere in the world. As the riders put it, the spokes you turn are "yours from hours of measuring, marking, sawing, sanding." It's the same conviction behind everything we do: that making something with your own hands changes your relationship to it for good.