Outdoor Philosophy: why Kate Rawles built a bamboo bicycle
This story first appeared on Outdoor Philosophy — the writing platform of environmental writer, cyclist and former philosophy lecturer Kate Rawles. It's reproduced here with attribution.
Before she rode 8,288 miles down the spine of the Andes — from the Caribbean coast of Colombia to Patagonia — Kate Rawles had to build the bike. She'd never built one before. She built it with (a lot of) help from the Bamboo Bicycle Club in London, and named it Woody.
Why bamboo, and why build it yourself
For Kate, the choice was philosophical as much as practical. A bamboo frame has a smaller carbon footprint than the average steel or aluminium tourer — fitting for a journey whose whole purpose was to raise awareness of biodiversity loss. And building it herself changed her relationship with the machine: people kept being surprised she'd made it with her own hands, which was rather the point.
That sits squarely with why the Bamboo Bicycle Club exists. James Marr started BBC in 2012 to put frame-building back into ordinary people's hands — no welding, no factory, just bamboo, natural fibre, hand tools and patience. You walk in with no experience and leave having built your own frame. The aim is to make bikes, and the knowledge of how they're made and maintained, a great deal more accessible.
How Woody was made
In Kate's own words on Outdoor Philosophy:
"The bamboo came from the Eden Project in Cornwall... The joints are made from Yorkshire hemp soaked in 'Super Sap', a European Eco-Resin... probably the UK's first home grown bicycle!"
(For BBC's current builds we use a UK-made plant-based resin. We've kept Kate's original wording above in quotation marks, as she wrote it at the time.)
The doubts about whether a home-built bamboo bike could survive 8,288 miles of Andean cols, salt flats and gravel were considerable. They didn't survive contact with the road: Woody made the entire journey, as Kate has put it, "with virtually no mechanical issues at all" — the most reliable bike she's ever owned.
The journey
Over roughly thirteen months across 2017 and into early 2018, Kate rode the length of South America, reaching Ushuaia in February 2018. Along the way she investigated biodiversity loss first-hand — cloud forests, deserts and salt flats, the damage of gold-mining and oil-drilling, and communities working to regenerate habitats. The ride became her book, The Life Cycle: 8,000 Miles in the Andes by Bamboo Bike (Icon Books, 2023).
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Original source: Kate Rawles, Outdoor Philosophy — The Bamboo Bicycle. Reproduced with attribution.