‘Don’t go right. Please, don’t go right…’ Talking to the road is never a good sign, but I’d become obsessed with its direction and the crazy thought that I could win it over as an ally in my all-consuming struggle with the Patagonian wind. Now so strong I could barely keep my bike on the road as it slammed into me from the side, a bend to the right delivered me straight into the teeth of a headwind that made it impossible to progress at all. I’ve never worked so hard for such little gain in terms of miles. And I was running out of time, trapped in a race-to-the-finish cliche of my own making. I had promised that my journey would finish at Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego, the town they call ‘the end of the world’. Not reaching it now would feel like a failure.
Why ride a bike made of bamboo?
My journey had begun just over a year previously, 8000 miles to the north in Colombia. I’d been pedalling south since then, following the spine of the Andes mountains, and I’d been grinning almost all the way. Despite never being particularly athletic, I’ve always loved cycling in mountains, and the Andes are the longest mountain chain in the world.
My trusty steed for the duration was called Woody, a bike I’d built myself at a course run by the Bamboo Bicycle Club in London, with a frame crafted from bamboo grown at the Eden Project in Cornwall. All bikes are like magicians, transforming interactions with people and landscapes alike, but a bamboo bike multiplies that a hundredfold. And while all bikes have a low environmental impact, a bamboo bike has an even smaller carbon footprint than a steel, aluminium or carbon one. I once heard that a cyclist on a flat road without a headwind can travel ten miles per peanut, but they obviously had never ridden in Patagonia.
I’d been inspired to set off by the writer Bill Plotkin, who wrote that if you can find the place where something you love doing intersects with something the world needs, that sweet-spot will be not only where you are at your happiest, but also your most effective.
That simple but powerful idea had literally changed my life. It inspired me to quit my university job and try to figure out how to put riding my bike in the sweet-spot instead; to create a mountainous bike ride that would not only be a fabulous personal adventure, but also give something back. I now think of it as ‘Adventure Plus’: using adventurous journeys to help raise awareness and inspire action on our most urgent environmental challenges.
At university, I’d read an article arguing that biodiversity loss was as great a threat as climate change. Could this possibly be true? One of my previous journeys, The Carbon Cycle, had focussed on climate change, and so on this trip through South America, which I dubbed The Life Cycle journey, I was exploring biodiversity: the astonishing variety of living beings we share the planet with, from oak trees to ants, from blue whales to plankton, otters to ocelots. What’s happening to this incredible diversity? Why does it matter? What can and is being done to protect it?
Riding for biodiversity
Biodiversity refers to habitats and landscapes as well as species. My route took me through an extraordinary range of both, from Colombia’s Caribbean coastline to high paramo grasslands, from humid rain and cloud-forests bursting with life, to the Atacama Desert, one of the driest places in the world. Finally I was in the wide sweep of Patagonia, with some of the most beautiful mountains imaginable. It was in El Chaltén in Los Glaciares National Park, under the shadow of Mount Fitzroy, where the winds finally caught up with me. Still, the tough pedalling gave me time to reflect on what I’d seen on my trip.
I loved riding solo and the feeling of being part of the landscapes I was cycling through – feeling, smelling and hearing them, as well as seeing them. I loved the remoter parts of the journey, especially in Patagonia, where the vastness and beauty put all trivial concerns firmly in perspective. Even punctures.
Yet my biggest highlights involved people. I met and learned from those working to protect biodiversity at every level of society, from very grassroots to the national senators. I met people working on forest regeneration and people selling upcycled plastic waste products to create local incomes that gave families an alternative to cutting down trees to grow food. I met people standing up against the devastating threat of copper mining in cloud-forests (one of the most biodiverse habitats on earth) and other forms of highly damaging extraction industries such as oil, gold and lead. And had I met Kris Tompkins, who had bought millions of acres of land in Patagonia only to donate them to the Chilean state wildlife conservation, creating some of the most beautiful national parks on Earth in the process.
Challenges and opportunities
My encounters with these brilliant and often brave activists are at the centre of my book The Life Cycle. They underscore the fact that biodiversity is not a luxury. It gives us ecosystems, and ecosystems deliver ‘ecosystem services’ such as fresh air, clean water, fertile soil, pollinators – things we literally cannot live without. And biodiversity is also communities of other living beings who are every bit as entitled to be here as we are (and in many cases have been on earth a whole lot longer.)
Biodiversity is threatened – everywhere My own home country of the UK has been described as one of the most ‘nature-depleted’ countries in the world, with one in ten native wild species heading for extinction. Globally, we have lost 69% of populations of wild animals since 1970, according to WWF’s latest ‘Living Planet Report’; a recent UN report said one million species are now on course for extinction. Losing biodiversity at the current rate is as dangerous as climate change – to humanity as well as wildlife.
Yet there are many grounds for hope. At a project in Manu National Park in the Peruvian rainforest, I learned that nature bounces back much faster than we thought, if it is protected going forward. Those findings have been replicated all over the world. There are so many wins. Regenerating ecosystems from forests to peat bogs to wildflower meadows is not only great for biodiversity, but also amongst the most powerful ways of capturing carbon, combatting flooding and other climate change impacts. Regenerative agriculture can provide higher quality of food in wildlife compatible ways.
And there is so much we can all do, including shifting what we mean by quality of life away from the notion that we need more things and more money to be happy, given the inevitable high impacts of resource extraction on the planet’s ecosystems. An understanding of quality of life focussed on experiences – including experiences outside, that enhance our connection with nature – and on strengthened communities, human and ecological, is one which all people could share and enjoy, without costing the earth.
The road ahead
In Patagonia I ground on, pedal stroke after pedal stroke against the immensity of the wind and the landscape. I was intoxicated by a strange mix of exhaustion and beauty. There had been vivid turquoise lakes and the jagged ice-clad shapes of the mountains. On the final stretch of my journey I had encounters with wild guanacos and rheas, and men on horses herding their stocky, thick-wooled sheep along the road in front of me. The local gaucho cowboy culture here still stood strong in one of the last remaining true wilderness areas on Earth.
At the eleventh hour, the wind changed, and I rode a tail wind into Ushuaia for 90 miles. I arrived with one day left to make arrangements to get back north to Santiago in Chile to catch my cargo ship back to the UK – an option I chose for its lower carbon impact over flying. I’ve never been so exhausted or elated in my life. The final distance of my ride was 8288 miles, and Woody made it with virtually no mechanical issues at all.
But this pales into insignificance compared to the achievements of the activists I met, working tirelessly and often at considerable risk to protect the natural world we are part of and that we utterly depend on. They know what’s at stake. If they can find so many powerful ways to make a difference, we can too.
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The Life Cycle: 8000 Miles in the Andes by Bamboo Bike is published by Icon Books, with an Audible version read by Kate. For more information on ‘Adventure Plus’ and The Life Cycle journey, including what we can do, visit Kate’s website Outdoor Philosophy, or follow Kate on X (Twitter) and Instagram.
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