The Guardian: Kate Rawles gears up for a 6,000-mile bamboo bike ride

In November 2016, The Guardian's Steven Morris reported on an environmental writer who was about to set off the length of South America — on a bike she had built herself, by hand, out of bamboo.

The story The Guardian told

Kate Rawles came to the Bamboo Bicycle Club workshop in London and built her own frame from bamboo grown at the Eden Project in Cornwall — as far as we know, the UK's first home-grown bamboo bicycle. The Guardian covered her as she geared up for The Life Cycle: a low-carbon expedition down the spine of the Andes, planned at around 6,000 miles, to investigate biodiversity loss and the "sixth great extinction." It followed her earlier ride, The Carbon Cycle, from Texas to Alaska.

How it actually turned out

The planned 6,000 miles became 8,288. Kate rode the bike she named Woody from Cartagena on the Caribbean coast of Colombia all the way to Ushuaia in Patagonia, through six South American countries, reaching the bottom of the continent on 16 February 2018 after thirteen months of riding. The frame came through heat, cold, dust and altitude with virtually no mechanical issues. The journey became her book, The Life Cycle: 8,000 Miles in the Andes by Bamboo Bike (Icon Books, June 2023), endorsed by former BBC News Science Editor David Shukman, Eden Project co-founder Sir Tim Smit OBE, and Jonathon Porritt.

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

Why it matters

A first-time builder made a bamboo frame by hand in our London workshop and trusted it the full length of a continent — and it held. That is the plainest test of bamboo we have, and it is exactly what we want people to take from it: bamboo isn't a novelty, it's a genuinely capable material.

Read the original

• The Guardian, "Environmental activist gears up for 6,000-mile bamboo bike ride," Steven Morris, 3 November 2016: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/03/environmental-activist-gears-up-for-6000-mile-bamboo-bike-ride