Bamboo bikes

A Santa Cruz bike builder Craig Calfee, who is considered one of the country's elite, has hopes of providing Ghana's desperately poor with bicycles made of bamboo.... Unfortunately they currently run with a price-tag of around $2,700.

His dog Luna was adept at crushing wooden sticks with her powerful jaws. Give her a piece of wood, and she'd chew it to splinters in no time. But the best she could manage with the hard, round stalks of bamboo was a tooth mark or two. And that got Calfee to wondering: If bamboo was strong enough to withstand Luna, why couldn't it be a bicycle frame?

Since then, Calfee has gone from building clunker bamboo bikes to fashioning sleek, pricey racing machines that turn heads in even the snobbiest pace lines. He's built 91 bamboo bicycles, enough for their reputation to spread across the country. And, perhaps as important, enough for Calfee to have faith in his unusual contraptions.

Craig Calfee is no ordinary bicycle shop owner. He's considered one of the country's elite bike builders, someone who creates machines for the likes of Greg LeMond, the first American to win the Tour de France. He fashions the lightest of bike frames from carbon fiber.

His shop is outside Santa Cruz, a community known for its laid-back style. His only link to the Third World is a long-ago trip to Africa. Yet somehow, more by accident than design, Calfee and his bamboo bikes may provide a means for rudimentary transport in the emerging world.

In a sense, Calfee is part of a bamboo craze sweeping the United States. Bamboo is suddenly chic, now that it's being made into everything from baby-soft T-shirts to baseball bats. Gone are the days when it was the stuff of cheap, ugly curtains and tacky lawn furniture. Bamboo has arrived.