How does being on a bike change one’s perspective of a place? How does it open one up to new experiences that otherwise would have gone unfulfilled? The following are some first-hand insights from some avid Columbia bikers: Isabel Peñaranda CC ’14, Isabel Ricker CC’12, Alexa Semonche CC’14, and Claudia Sosa CC ’12. Below is a collage of some of their words.

I can’t name one bad thing about biking. It’s cheap, it’s environmentally friendly, it allows you to lead a healthy lifestyle without having to torture yourself at the gym. I’m a big seasonal biker and take my bicycle everywhere over the summer, and then when I move back to campus and the weather starts getting colder, I’ll venture out less and less.
-Claudia

I bike in Philly to get to work, to school, or just to meet friends in town. I also have been on a few distance bike trips to see parks nearby and visit Valley Forge. In NYC, I bike for the same reasons, but mostly for fun and exercise. My favorite places are along the river, such as down the West Side Highway, up from Columbia down to Battery Park. The place I most remember biking is probably the bike path along the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, simply because I have biked it so many times. I know every foot. It is beautiful and makes the seven miles from my house to center city extremely enjoyable. I especially love biking in the spring when the cherry blossoms are out and the trees along the river are full and green. Another part I always remember is the numerous geese that live along the path. They are not a particularly pleasant part of the biking experience, often honking and standing stubbornly in your way - I have even had one nip me as I biked past. But, in the spring, the mothers are sure to be followed closely by the cutest little fluffy goslings.
-Isabel R.

I’ve done a good amount of biking in New York City: most notably, the bike path along the West Side Highway because it’s the easiest path to access around Columbia, and I’ve used it regularly to bike to internships, to and from work, etc. I don’t think anything beats biking the Brooklyn Bridge at 3 a.m. I clearly remember biking into Manhattan on a beautiful, clear night, and being able to admire the views instead of having to yell at pedestrians to respect the bike path. I also liked biking from Williamsburg, up the West Side of Manhattan, across the George Washington Bridge, and down New Jersey into Hoboken. If you time it right, you get to see Manhattan as the sun sets, and the PATH train to get back into the city form Hoboken is cheaper than a metro ride. One summer I biked in Switzerland when I lived out there with my aunt, and I would get lost in the sunflower fields and vineyards, or ride along the bike path on the edge of the Geneva Lake.

Biking isn’t always fantastic, though. Commuting across the Brooklyn Bridge during the day is hell. Tourists never respect the signs and a lot of cyclists are reckless and don’t respect the tourists. As a woman, it’s challenging to dress appropriately for biking/working, and if changing, then it’s difficult to store a change of clothes and a laptop if you can’t afford the bicycle basket. Cycling in Midtown can get challenging because of the complete disregard for cyclists in this area. Furthermore, there’s always the risk that your bike will get stolen, even if it’s locked up properly. Depending on the time and the day, if you use your bicycle to meet all of your transportation needs, there will come the point when you feel irresolutely too tired to bike home, and yet you still have to do it.
-Claudia

I have had a little trouble loving New York – I don’t know why. Maybe it’s that when you live in a place, you take it for granted. You think you “know” it. I’ve discovered a way around this: getting lost on my bike for hours. Honestly, my happiest times with the city have been on my bike. When you’re lost that way, in a way that you can keep moving, then the city becomes mysterious again. It can’t quite touch you, or tie you to a place, so you understand the city as a whole better – the transition from coming out of Central Park, and being in Times Square within a few blocks, or from Chinatown to Wall Street (there are so many juxtapositions you only really understand when you’re going at a certain speed), or riding across the Queensboro Bridge from Randall’s Island (a strange place- psychiatric institutions overlook soccer fields, still named “Ward’s Park”). If you stop in the middle of the bridge, you can almost see all the boroughs, Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, if you really try. You can finally put distance between yourself and Manhattan and everything that living there represents.

I also biked to this place called Dead Horse Bay in southern Brooklyn. It’s called that because there used to be a glue factory nearby and the carcasses of the horses used to wash up on the shores. Now, the beach is almost made out of glass bottles of every shape, size, and color you can imagine. This glass beach, surrounded by marshes –it’s kind of post-apocalyptically bizarre. And, nearby, Greek neighborhoods mix with Korean stores. That’s the New York I expected when I moved here.
-Isabel P.

Biking has caused me to have a better knowledge of the geography of the places I go. You move slower than by car, so it requires you to stop and look around you, to notice stores you’ve never seen before. And the ride down the West Side Highway is majestic. Sure, it can be annoying, but every now and then you get a whiff of the sea, and you’re reminded that as crazy as life on this island is, we’re surrounded by sea; I don’t know how many people remember this amidst the subways and cabs and appointments. -Claudia

Bike tours have been a vacation staple for my family for the past decade. As kids, my brother and I approached each trip with reluctance, as the idea of biking forty miles a day uphill in the Tuscan countryside only to reach a worn-out historical site didn’t appeal to us very much. However, whenever we actually reached the top of each hill, there was a sense of accomplishment and relief that made whatever sight we were to see there much more rewarding than expected.

I think one of the greatest moments of any bike trip I’ve taken occurred when I split off from the rest of my family to bike an extra few kilometers up a hill to a historic war memorial site in the Friuli region of Italy. I don’t remember the name of the hill, or even which of the world wars the memorial meant to commemorate, but what I do remember is the feeling of approaching a historical site alone, without any tour guides, translations, or souvenir stores in the vicinity. The four-kilometer climb up the hill was so brutal that, eventually, I had to disembark and trudge slowly up the last leg of the path. When I reached the memorial, the silence of the site and the flowers that the residents of the area had left at the bottom of the stone granted such significance to the lives lost, commemorated in the memorial, that I was moved to sadness. I don’t think any textbook picture, any guidebook, or even any popular memorial has ever evoked that kind of response before.
-Alexa

The most important ways biking changes my perspective: first, increasing awareness of the outdoors, the scenery, the weather, etc., which are interesting as they change dramatically, temporally (with the seasons), and geographically (even in different parts of the same city your experience of the environment can be quite different). Secondly, I have found that I am much more connected to and aware of other people and more eager to interact with strangers. This almost certainly improves my experience, greatly increases the amount I learn about a place, and leaves me with a stronger connection to and memory of it.
-Isabel R.

Two of my best days ever involved biking while I was in South Africa. First, the Soweto Bike Tour in Johannesburg, I had never done a bike tour, and I really believe that you can see a place in such a different way when you bike (or walk) than you ever could while driving. I have the most vivid memory of little kids running alongside us through the streets, and stopping to try to teach them to ride, which they had never been able to do. Bikes can be such a liberating tool for township residents because with poor public transit people often are forced to walk eight miles or more along the highways to work, and I saw one such commuter get hit head on by a mini-bus (South Africa's cheap taxi, sometimes called a kombi).
-Isabel R.

This summer, when I was doing research in rural Ghana, I went into Cape Coast and rented a bike for a month from a tailor. Since the paved road stopped a village before the one where we were staying, I used the bike to go down the dirt road that extended farther. Kids used to call out to me “obruni on a bike! Obruni on a bike!” Cute, except that obruni means “white person.”

I also did a three-day trip by myself in Cuba this summer. There is a rich bike culture in Cuba – when the Soviet Union fell, oil prices skyrocketed in Cuba (I think they increased by 90% or something), and suddenly, the only way to get around became biking and hitchhiking. As a guidebook put it, Cuban drivers treat bikers well, even now when they are coming out of that Periodo Especial, because they remember when that was the only way anyone ever got around. The effects of Cuba’s lack of foreign capital and of the U.S. embargo reverberate in the bicycles themselves – all that you can find in Cuba are clunky Chinese bikes, awkwardly named “pigeons.” I biked around Pinar del Rio, home of Cuba’s famous tobacco. It wouldn’t have made sense to know this place any other way – the same limitations of oil that made biking so popular also dictated the speed of this area, which relies on agriculture. The Special Period meant that cooperatives, which were formerly given new tractors by the USSR every time one broke down, had now sold them all because oil was too expensive, and were working with oxen to plough the fields.
-Isabel P.

I have to say that my experiences in Slovenia would have been fundamentally different had I traveled the country on foot or by tour bus. The routes we biked were in the most remote, rural regions of Slovenia where tiny villages dotted the countryside. For the first time, I believe I saw a foreign area for what it was, instead of through the lens of its tourism industry. No English signs invited us in for a cool Coors Light as we coasted from village to village, and no storefronts promised to sell us the essence of Slovenia in a decorative paperweight. In passing expanses of farmland, I saw how agriculture was still such an essential component to Slovenia’s economy, and how this rural countryside so strongly contrasted with Slovenia’s rapidly modernizing capital city, Ljubljana. I could see how riding past villas and farmland for forty miles would strike some as boring, but I don’t regret it at all. From this trip, I took away a sense of Slovenian life that wasn’t communicated half as well in guidebooks, which I think is a great justification for travel in general.
-Alexa

My bike trip to Stellenbosch, the wine producing area outside of Cape Town, South Africa was definitely a favorite experience. A bunch of friends and I took a train to Stelli (as it is affectionately called) and stayed in the "Stumble Inn" hostel. We finally found enough bikes to rent the next day to explore some of the vineyards nearby. We successfully made it to three wine tastings, including South Africa's most popular champagne producer, where we sampled six varieties, each paired with appropriate fudge. The trick to enjoying the bike ride as you get increasingly tipsy is to start with vineyards at the top of a hill, so afterwards you can ride downhill to your next stop. I definitely feel that biking, and the wine, forced me to appreciate the amazing scenery much more than, say, if I had done a bus tour or driven. Biking encouraged us to stop whenever we wanted, to hang out in a field, and to be outside in the vineyard rather than in the farmhouses.
-Isabel R.

Once I was biking through the countryside surrounding the Li River with my family. We stopped to go inside a famous cave, and some nice men near the parking lot let us keep our bikes there for a small fee. But when we came back it was almost nightfall, and we found that every single bike had flat tires. The nice men offered to take us back – for a much bigger fee. Realizing that we had been sabotaged, the entire family stormed off – before realizing the difficult situation this put us in. We were miles and miles away from the nearest town, and it was getting dark, and we had four bicycles with flat tires. With the righteous dignity of the outraged tourist, we kept walking down country roads, but as it grew darker, we started questioning the point of this “dignity.” A lot of self-reflection happened then – about the nature of being a tourist, of feeling you deserve to be treated “fairly”… I don’t know what we would have done had a truck not stopped by the side of the road and picked us all up, bikes and all. We couldn’t speak to each other, we could only say “thank you” in faces and repeat sounds, which couldn’t mean much to these young truck drivers. Once we arrived back at the town, we tried to pay them – they refused to take anything. When you make yourself vulnerable when you travel, I find the best things happen, at least in my experience.
-Isabel P.

Just this past Sunday, I biked down to TriBeCa and was stopped by a man named Sean. He worked for Amnesty International and tried to get me to stop by mentioning a fancy bicycle seat he might or might not have had in his bag as a giveaway. Of course I stopped. Similarly, one of the people at the Whole Foods Wine Store on 97th always says hi to me and my boyfriend because he loves that we bike in to get our groceries and that we always say no thanks when he offers us a paper bag.
-Claudia

Two of my best biking stories:
1. One time my friends and I met at the Met and were going to this café on the Lower East Side to do work. They had bikes, but mine was in the shop, and so I rode down Park Avenue for a while, sitting on my friend’s handlebars on a busy Saturday afternoon.
2. I rode with my boyfriend from Park Slope to Central Park to line up at 4:30 in the morning for Shakespeare in the Park tickets.
-Claudia

I think there’s also an element of vulnerability, especially when you travel, and especially when you travel alone. People are more open to someone who is vulnerable, and it’s easier to get closer to people that way. Also, about seeing the places in between, when you ride in motorized transport, I guess, you’re travelling between two points, but there’s not much in between. But when you bike, you spend most of that time in between, which is sometimes where places are most “real.”
-Isabel P.