Love Her Wild interviewed Kate Rawles about her bamboo bike expedition
Before she set off down the length of South America, Kate Rawles sat down with Love Her Wild for their wild-women interview series. The piece, published on 26 April 2017, introduced the expedition that would become her book The Life Cycle — and the hand-built bamboo bike at the heart of it, named Woody.
The story
Kate is an environmental writer and adventurer from Cumbria, and a former lecturer in environmental philosophy. Rather than buy a bike for her ride down the spine of the Andes, she came to the Bamboo Bicycle Club in London and built her own frame by hand over a roughly five-day course. The bamboo was grown at the Eden Project in Cornwall. She named the finished bike Woody.
In the Love Her Wild interview she talked about why she travels by bike at all — that on a bike you are part of the landscape rather than passing through it — and about the environmental questions, especially biodiversity loss, that the journey was built to explore.
What happened next
Kate went on to ride Woody roughly 8,288 miles from Cartagena, Colombia, down through six South American countries to Ushuaia in Patagonia, reaching the bottom of the continent on 16 February 2018 after around thirteen months of riding. The hand-built bamboo frame came through it all with virtually no mechanical issues. The journey became her book, The Life Cycle: 8,000 Miles in the Andes by Bamboo Bike (Icon Books, 2023).
In her words
"On a bike, you are really IN the landscape you are travelling through: you feel it, hear it, smell it so much more vividly."
— Kate Rawles, Love Her Wild (26 April 2017)
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 it held. Bamboo isn't a novelty; it's a genuinely capable material, and the people who build with us can make something they'll trust on a serious journey.
Read the original
- Love Her Wild: Interview with Kate Rawles — Bamboo Bike Expedition (26 April 2017)
- Kate Rawles, The Life Cycle: 8,000 Miles in the Andes by Bamboo Bike (Icon Books, 2023)