Good drivers, bad cyclists and a new kind of traffic

Published in the November/December 2009 issue of Momentum: the magazine for self-propelled people.

Do bicycles change the way we communicate?

With no windshields to mute it, this traffic talks to itself.

I was really looking forward to my dental appointment – the adjustment to my night-guard would be pain-free; but more importantly, I would enjoy a long ride across town on one of Vancouver’s traffic-calmed commuter bike routes to get there. I hadn’t done a good spin on it since before I’d left to live and cycle in India a year ago. When I returned I worked from home and – you’ll only hear this from a cyclist – I no longer commuted as much as I wished. I was curious: had traffic changed while I was away?

I set out in golden autumn air that shimmered off storefronts selling felt hats and pumpkin spice lattes.  One foot on the road, one foot on my pedal, I waited for a green light at a busy intersection. A coal-gray Pathfinder pulled up along side me at the white line.

“Hey, hello,” called the burly driver across his girlfriend in the passenger seat. I peered into the open window of the SUV, not quite sure what to expect.

Cycle Goa, India with Hostelling International

[Published in the August 2009 issue of Goa Today Magazine]

Backroads “Slow Goa” tour targets cyclists and activists

YHAI cycle expedition takes an early start out of Assolna, Goa (click to view photo gallery)

Visitors have toured Goa by car, motorbike, bus, boat and train; but now – thanks to the Goa Branch of Youth Hostels Association of India (YHAI) and Sports Authority of Goa – adventurers and activists can learn about the state’s natural beauty and social issues from the seat of a bicycle.

Says Panjim-based Program Director Manoj Joshi, who added a series of seven-day, 360-kilometre bike expeditions to YHAI’s popular trekking programmes last year, “We wanted to create a tour with the activist in mind. Cycling is a sport for people who have an awareness of environmental and development issues. This expedition shows beaches, nature, and water falls but it also shows how Goa is being deforested; how the greed of the few is displacing families, and the rape of the nature.”

To that end, Joshi and his team volunteered months of their time researching equipment, attractions and routes. In 2008, they provided five groups of twenty cyclists with knapsacks and 24-speed mountain bikes for a circular route that reached as far east as the Karnataka border. Starting from Panjim (Goa’s capital city), youngsters and grandfathers alike pedaled south along the Arabian Sea on Colva-area beaches, east through Balli’s terraced paddy fields and Cavrem’s mining villages; up into the ecologically significant Western Ghat mountains; and then west along the freighter-trafficked Mandovi River past Old Goa (a UNESCO World Heritage Site) and back into Panjim.

Along the way, cyclists stayed in rooms in Assolna’s sports complex, lodges in Netravali’s Tanshikar Spice Farm, tents near Dudsaghar Falls in Bhagwan Mahaveer Sanctuary, and dorms in Bondla Wildlife Sanctuary. Extra side trips included Budbudyanchi Talli (Bubbling Lake) at Gopinath Temple; a forest trek and swim at Savari Falls; a zoo tour of cobras, guars and leopards in Bondla Wildlife Sanctuary; and a visit to the Bom Jesus Cathedral in Old Goa.

The YHAI Goa Biking Expedition runs December/January of each year and is open to anyone who is a member of Hostelling International or Youth Hostels Association of India (YHAI). Joshi estimates the 2009/2010 fees will be Rs 3000 ($61 USD) for Indians and Rs 5000 ($102 USD) for foreign visitors. Bicycles, rucksacks, safety equipment, accommodation, and meals are all included in the price of the trip. For more information contact Manoj Joshi, Sports Authority of Goa,
or visit YHAI’s web site at www.yhaindia.org.

• Photos: 2008 YHAI bike tour in Goa, India
• Stories: 2008 YHAI bike  tour in Goa, India
• Girl Gone Goa – tales of travel, sex, magic and cycling

Social media sprout a social cycle club

How an average cyclist became an accidental activist in India

[Published in the July/August 2009 issue of Momentum Magazine.]

An early ride of the Goa Cycle Club

Here in Vancouver, Canada, I consider myself just another person in the city who rides a bike. I keep a pretty low profile compared to the cycling artists and advocates I admire. But something radical happened when I bought an Atlas bicycle, rode it, and wrote about riding it in Goa, India for six months. I became an accidental activist.

“Hi Ulrike,” wrote a reader in response to one of my Girl Gone Goa blog stories, “We’ve recently returned from the UK, to resettle here. I’ve brought back a bike, but as it needs some basic work, I’ve not begun pedalling here. Everyone here tells me I’d be crazy to try, so it’s good to hear of your experiences.”

“We” was Luis Dias and his wife Chryselle. They were Goan and keen to ride, though eight-month-pregnant Chyselle admitted she’d need to have the baby first. Luis and I headed to the Panjim ferry jetty and cycled and chatted along the Mandovi River. He said he was looking for a community project to dig his teeth into.

Cycling Culture in Vancouver

Published in the Spring 2009 issue of Vancouver Review, a nationally distributed quarterly magazine that focuses on ideas, culture and arts from Canada’s West Coast.  A collaboration with Museum of Vancouver’s June – September 2009 exhibit Velo-City: Vancouver and the Bicycle Revolution.

• Listen to Ulrike Rodrigues and JJ Lee discuss cycling style and fashion on CBC  Radio One’s Fashion Mondays (YouTube audio, 6:30 minutes).
• Read what The Business of Fashion editor Imran Amed has to say on Vancouver’s new Fashion Cycle
  

It’s the New Normal

By Ulrike Rodrigues

Three things happened in Vancouver’s bike scene  in 1991: Lance Armstrong won the Gastown Grand Prix, Richard Campbell founded Better Environmentally Sound Transportation, and an elderly gentlemen on Bidwell Street sold me his silver Nishiki bike for $300.

I didn’t know anything about Lance, BEST, or Vancouver, but I did know the quickest way to acquaint myself with my new city was to touch it – metre by metre – with the treads of a bicycle. Starting from my new home on Guelph Street (the same name as the Ontario city I’d just departed) and armed with a vague BC Transit map, I surveyed my Mount Pleasant neighbourhood on two wheels.

In the following months, my circles widened and I became familiar with the alleys, warehouses, dirt lots and secret gardens that radiated out from Main and Broadway. I ventured across each of the three False Creek bridges and joined segments of paths that followed the water’s edge. They led me to even more cycling adventures: soft, wooded paths in Stanley Park; goldenrod-lined dykes near Science World; breezy, crunchy gravel on Locarno Beach; and a maze of hard-packed forest dirt in the UBC endowment lands.

“It’s like hiking through the forest!” I marveled as each pedal stroke revealed a new turn of trees, “Only faster! And funner!” I was ten again – on my Supercycle, a lettuce-and-mayonnaise sandwich in my blue plastic basket, shoe laces coming untied, hands wrapped around white plastic grips with blue-and-white striped streamers.

I was free, flying, laughing out loud, grinning at dogs. I was in a new city – Vancouver! – and in a familiar place – on a bicycle! It was so simple. Could it get any better than this?

Face, meet World

Beauty, cycling and silicone collide at the make-up counter

I'd rather be Audrey than tawdry

Published in the Sept/Oct 2008 Style issue of Momentum Magazine.

“What you need,” Christopher murmured, peering into my face, “is a silicone primer.”

Oddly, he wasn’t talking about bike frames. I had run into a department store to escape the rain and a handout In the ladies’ room had caught my attention. “Come by the Calvin Klein counter,” it suggested, “Receive a FREE Foundation Consultation and Sample!”

I wandered the maze of make-up boutiques until a red-haired woman at the Clinique counter with eerily perfect skin asked if she could help me.

I motioned at my handout. “I’m actually looking for the Calvin Klein counter but…” I offered, “you could show me what you’ve got since I’m here.”

“Well sure,” she said as she opened a tube of foundation, “We can dab a little on your hand if you like.” I looked down as she spread the flesh-toned liquid on the meat of my thumb. It blended in fine, but bits of lotion stuck in the lines of my skin. It reminded me of women I’d seen (usually in the late-night food and beverage industry) who walked around with tiny, tawdry channels of makeup dried into their eyelids.

I showed her the bits and told her that’s why I’d been avoiding foundation up til now. “Well,” she said sweetly, “That’s why you need to exfoliate.” I thanked her and headed for the Calvin Klein counter.

Klunkerz: Billy Savage’s MTB flick goes DVD

Now on film: the bikes, parties and people that made mountain bike history

It’s not something you should watch by yourself, Klunkerz. The independently written and produced DVD by fat-tire aficionado Billy Savage recounts mountain biking’s California days in the ’70’s and takes you there so vividly — with tons of footage, still photos, and interviews with a bunch of guys (and a couple of girls) who drank beer, smoked pot and then got on their damned bikes — that you and your friends will want to join in.

Wendell, Karen, Ian, Paul, Andrew and I didn’t light up, but we did crack a few beers in my living room one Friday night as we gathered to watch Savage’s flick. Finally on disk, Klunkerz has sold out theatres, won awards, and no doubt brought tears to a few MTBer’s eyes as it screened in the film, bike and sport circuits.

Filmmaker Savage demonstrates a genuine knowledge of the bikes, and rapport with the people who first dragged their heavy ’40’s and ’50’s-era Schwinns up a San Francisco-area mountain for kicks. Not only do many of the Mount Tamalpais riders — Joe Breeze, Gary Fisher, Tom Ritchey et al. — do screen time, but they share their stories and video footage with him in a way that feels trusted and intimate.

Not just talking heads, the film lingers on the stuff us riders love: the bikes, the parties and the trails that made Marin County famous. You actually see the 1.8 miles of fire road that the riders ate up (or ate them up, as injuries were frequent), the grease smoke coming off the hubs, and the keg-parties that fuelled the whole thing.

The editing is so sharp that the riders practically finish each others’ sentences. You get a real sense of their excitement and you’re reminded that at mountain biking’s heart, the message is universal: riding a bike is super fun, and you ought to try it.

Our gang really picked up on that. In discussion afterwards, Ian was stoked to see how how fun — rather than equipment — created the scene. Wendell liked seeing the riders’ passion turn into something huge, and Paul (an MTB Hall-of-Famer himself) was impressed by the amount of history that the film dug up that he hadn’t heard before. And I felt affirmed by how writers and photographers like Wende Cragg, Jacquie Phelan and Dogtown’s Ray Flores can play an important part in recording a movement and spreading the word.

Visit the Klunkerz web site at www.klunkerz.com to chat with Savage and order your own copy. For more on the history, I recommend the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame web site.

Published in the May/June 2008 Momentum Magazine.

A “gonzo” rail and bike trip around Western Canada

Being on a train is like riding a bicycle: it’s slow, social, historic, and rebellious

What is it about trains? And what was it about a train journey into western Canada that yanked on my heart hard enough to make my eyes water? That wasn’t the idea. When we first batted the idea around, Momentum editor Amy Walker and I played with a “gonzo car-free road trip” that would see me, a buddy, and a couple of bikes onto a few trains and into a few communities for laffs and blog stories.

To select a route I pored over road atlases and train brochures and happily found that, not only can you circle the region by train (as opposed to just going across), but that two rail providers ~ Rocky Mountaineer Vacations and VIA Rail Canada ~ are wowing the tourists doing just that.

Now, I’ve travelled by bike and train in Thailand, New Zealand and the U.S.; but it wasn’t until California-based Dahon put a couple of tour-ready folding bikes into my hands that I even considered doing it at home.

Gary Fisher: down from the mountain

Mountain biking scenester sees fun and profit in city cycling trend

It’s not unusual for a few of us at Momentum to gather around a table at Gastown’s Irish Heather, order some meat pies and Kilkennies, and brainstorm on cures for the common car. What made it unusual one rainy night last November was that the most fervent ideas came from Gary Fisher.

Fisher was in town for the weekend to help Cap’s Bicycle Shop celebrate their 75th birthday (they were the first shop in Canada to carry Gary Fisher’s fledgling line of mountain bikes back in 1980) and as he put it, “I picked up a copy of Momentum at a bike shop, read it, and went “wow!”

“It felt really good,” relates the bike industry veteran on why he requested a meet-up, “It was people who had the right attitude ~ and I thought I’d just try to investigate.” Being “investigated” by Gary Fisher is kind of like being offered a drink by a Sony Music A&R rep. The man’s talking your language and you’re charmed by the attention, but you kind of wonder where his hands have been.

Same place as yours, it turns out: wrapped around bicycle grips and bullhorns. Only, he’s Gary Fisher and he literally invented the term “mountain bike”. He’s very successfully sold the mountain bike lifestyle to the world-at-large, and now he says he’s wants to do the same for urban cycling.

“Okay,” you say as the waiter slides a fresh pint in front of you, “I’m listening.”

Joe Breeze: on naked bikes and self-propelling prophecies

MTB pioneer admits trail biking was a “diversion” from his real passion

It’s not even lunch time yet and Joe Breeze has already blown my mind. Breeze ~ who with Gary Fisher, Tom Ritchey, and other Mountain Bike Hall-of-Famers basically invented the sport ~ has just admitted over the phone that if he hadn’t been so distracted by that whole fat-tire repack thing, he might have gotten down to what he really wanted to do a whole lot sooner: design commuter bicycles.

“The off-road thing was a diversion from my plan,” admits the creator of Breezer Bikes from his Marin County work space, “It wasn’t part of the script. It just happened…like life.”

“My interest in city bikes came long before mountain bikes,” he explains. “My father commuted to his job in the 1950’s by bike, so I grew up aware of that aspect of bikes.” Breeze rode to school and around his neighbourhood as a kid, but it wasn’t until the 17-year-old bike-toured in Europe that his eyes opened to bike transportation culture.

Says Breeze, “Nowhere was this so pronounced as in Holland with their extensive bicycle thoroughfares, cloverleaf interchanges and bicycle traffic signals….I thought, ‘We’ve got to do this in America!’”

Joe returned home inspired, and got involved in the beginnings of the region’s bicycling infrastructure. Perhaps more significant to the history of cycling, he also paid five bucks for a beat-up 1941 Schwinn Excelsior and turned it into what would eventually be called a “mountain bike“.

Nootka Sound aboard the cargo ship M.V. Uchuck

Cycle across Vancouver Island, then soak up the history on a working vessel

When people ask why I go where I go, I tell them it’s “part curiosity and part stubbornness”. The curiosity part is usually prompted by a map. My Vancouver Island Backroads Mapbook, for example, shows an east-west Highway 28 between Campbell River and Gold River that ~ by following a river valley ~ allows a shorter and more level crossing of the mountainous island than Tofino’s trafficked Highway further south.

More intriguing still, when the solid line of highway ends at Gold River’s pier, a dashed line takes up the roadway’s westerly route and continues into the water! It heads west towards the village of Yuquot, then curls around Nootka Island to head northwards into long, fingerly inlets with names like Tahsis, Esperanza and Zeballos.

Blood, Blisters and Bears: one woman’s Odyssey Tour

A 1,600 kilometre expedition by kayak, foot and bicycle through B.C.’s north

Day Two of a 10-day hike...no trail, no boots, no turning back.

ISKUT, B.C. — Gregg Drury is a Minnesota-raised outdoorsman, social activist and eco-entrepreneur who ~ I discovered ~ has a lot to say about menstrual products.

I’d agreed to join him on an exploratory section of his 60-day self-propelled Odyssey Tour and inquired ahead of time ~ as any inexperienced gal about to go hiking through northern B.C.’s grizzly country might ~ if it was okay to bring “Aunt Flow” along.

“Well,” I could hear him deliberate over the phone, “There is no doubt in my mind that a woman who is menstruating while on a wilderness trip increases the risk associated with a bear attack ~ both for herself and her travelling companions.” He went on to describe the dangers of conventional disposable tampons, the benefits of reusable menstrual cups and where in Vancouver I could get one.

Simultaneously terrified and impressed, I made the necessary gear adjustments and met Gregg, assistant guide Fiona Brodie and fellow guinea pig John Harrison over topographic maps in Gregg’s Iskut, B.C. base about 320 kilometers south of the Yukon border. We’d be helped along by Tahltan elder Pat Etzerza, his nephew Clarence Quock, and five of their pack horses.

Practical Dances for Travelers

When you travel with someone, you learn how to share a trip’s rhythm

"Take a moment to enjoy the simple pleasures that surround you every day"

The Canadian customs line was moving slowly. Most of the passengers coming up from Seattle on the Greyhound waited sleepily in line, but I was curious about the unusual baggage of a couple of travellers in front of me.

Gurney-style, they’d carried a couple of beaten-up and duct-taped cardboard boxes out of the bus’s luggage compartment. They also unloaded two old canvas backpacks, a milk crate with a wire basket bungyed inside it, and a plastic Chinatown-style shopping bag. The tip of a bike’s front fork peeked out of one torn-up corner of one of the cardboard boxes.

Standing behind them in the line, I helped push their considerable pile of gear forward each time a passenger stepped forward to be questioned by a customs officer. I turned to one of them and asked if they were in the middle of journey. Her eyes shone as she explained that they’d just biked down the Baja Peninsula and would be finishing their trip in Coquitlam.

Soloists Team Up to Beat Singles’ Fees

Would you like a good spanking? Would you? Because if you’re single and like to travel, expect to get spanked hard when you go to pay for that fabulous all-inclusive holiday. In addition to the taxes, surcharges, and fees everyone else pays, solo travelers must submit to an additional smack called the “single supplement” merely because they have the cheek to journey alone.

A single supplement, in case you’re not experienced, is an industry convention that allows cruise, resort, and package-tour operators to pass on up to 200 percent of an accommodation’s double occupancy rate, on top of the rate. According to Paul Noble, an industry veteran and instructor at International Travel and Business College, “Most pricing for tour product is based on two people so [singles] have to pay more than if they were with someone.”

Merridale Cidery in Cobble Hill, Vancouver Island

Family-run apple orchard grows, squishes, ferments and pours their own ciders

Terry and I were waiting on the corner of Granville and Broadway for the #601 bus to take us to the Tsawwassen ferry terminal, when a grey pony-tailed fellow in mirrored sunglasses rode up on a blue ten-speed with two shopping bags hanging from the handlebars. He said he was going to Jamaica.

“How are you going to get to Jamaica once you’ve run out of land?” I asked him, motioning to his bike. He looked at me hard. “What are you, writing a book?”

“Er, no,” I back-pedaled, “I was just wondering in case I want to try it myself.”

Our journey ’s motivation was much simpler: we’d take our bikes on the ferry to Vancouver Island, cross the Saanich Peninsula, jump on the Mill Bay ferry, and cycle the rolling hills and smooth blacktop around Cobble Hill’s Merridale Cidery.

The family-run cidery grows apples, cultivates honey, and squishes the two together to make a sweet, hi-test cider called Cyser. I wanted some, and I figured it was worth a weekend of camping and riding to get it.

Monthly salons draw fans of flying solo

Where do you book an off-season college-dorm bed in Edinburgh? Which cruise lines don’t charge single travellers an extra fee for a cabin? Is it really possible to experience a fulfilling, worry-free adventure if you travel by yourself?

Advice, anecdotes, and appetizers fly across the table at the Solo Travellers’ Cafés. For those who have journeyed by themselves –or want to– this monthly salon offers up servings of solo-oriented tales and information at an eatery near you.

Created less than a year ago by “returned” traveller and workshop instructor Deborah Tiffany, the roving café, usually held on the second Wednesday of every month, has attracted up to 50 participants to neighbourhood tapas, dessert, and ethnic restaurants. A table of 20 café-goers joined Tiffany at Commercial Drive’s Artistico Greek Café recently. Prompted to describe their latest trips, the chatting travellers recounted tales ranging from a Canadian studies work term in Scotland and a Star Trek convention in Las Vegas to a road trip up the Yukon’s Dempster Highway and a cross-country tour of France’s valleys.

Hostels can be ‘lux’ for just a few bucks

West Coast accommodations debunk myths and welcome families

TOFINO, B.C. — It’s a characteristically wet, winter day and, as a Whalers on the Point Guesthouse visitor, you find yourself faced with a difficult decision so early in the day. Should you sip rosehip tea and watch for whales in the solarium, curl up with a thick West Coast guidebook in front of the massive stone fireplace or bake a batch of chunky cookies with some new British, Aussie and Brazilian friends in the kitchen?

Life is good at this exclusive, award-winning Vancouver Island hostel and — for the nominal cost of a hosteling membership — it’s yours for only $22 a night.

A hostel?

“A lot of people in North America are still unaware of hostels,” says Shelbey Sy, from Hostelling International’s Vancouver office. She and other staff realized that, despite its century-old history as a member-driven, not-for-profit association, Canadians still have a lot of misconceptions about hostels.

The staff started hosting workshops regularly called “Hostelling 101″ to debunk myths, share hostel basics and give “locals” the scoop on what five million worldwide travellers already know: hostels can be “lux” for not a lot of bucks.