From Pole to Pole on Bamboo Bicycles

On July 4, 2010, Michiel Roodenburg and Joost Notenboom from the Netherlands embarked on a 20-month journey, and after cycling across over 15 countries the two recently finished their journey in Antarctica. Their ‘Cycle for Water’ campaign is the first attempt in history to travel from the Arctic Circle to Antartica aboard bicycles, and bamboo ones at that.

Roodenburg and Nootenboom aimed to raise awareness about the global water crisis, which affects one seventh of the world’s population. Cycling across some of the most amazing places in the world, their 30,000 kilometre adventure took them through such areas as the Canadian wilderness and the rainforests of Central and South America. The pair decided to create the campaign after they saw the water shortages in Africa and the Middle East. "We believe that everyone on this planet has the right to a basic and sustainable source of drinking water. It is the first step out of poverty. Water is life, literally and figuratively," says Roodenburg and Notenboom.

The National Geographic says "over 97 percent of the world's water is too salty to drink, another 2 percent is locked up in the world's ice caps and glaciers." This leaves us with less than one percent that we are able to use, so it's probably a good idea to keep it clean.