Woody comes home: the Eden Project bamboo bike that rode 8,288 miles down the Andes

In 2016, environmental writer and cyclist Dr Kate Rawles built a bamboo bicycle frame on a Bamboo Bicycle Club course in London. The canes came from a mature clump grown at the Eden Project in Cornwall, the joints from Yorkshire hemp soaked in a plant-based resin. She named the bike Woody and believes it is, as far as anyone knows, "probably the UK's first home-grown bicycle."

Then she rode it 8,288 miles down the spine of the Andes — from Colombia to Patagonia, through Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina — over roughly thirteen months, reaching Ushuaia in February 2018. The expedition, The Life Cycle, was a journey into biodiversity loss: what it is, why it matters, and what can be done to protect it. Woody returned to the UK by cargo ship in spring 2018.

The bamboo more than held up:

"Woody has proved to be an extremely tough and reliable bike, coping with extremes of heat and cold, rain, dryness and altitude." — Kate Rawles

And the bike itself became part of the story:

"I love the human-magnet effect that Woody has, and the fact that I was on a biodiversity ride on a bike that used to be a plant." — Kate Rawles

The journey later became Kate's book The Life Cycle: 8,000 Miles in the Andes by Bamboo Bike (Icon Books, 2023).