When Indonesian President Joko Widodo showed Anthony Albanese through the lush gardens of a presidential palace south of Jakarta earlier this month, he presented Australia’s new prime minister with an unusual gift: a bamboo bicycle.
The night before, designer Singgih Susilo Kartono learned that it would be the Spedagi model, which he is making in a small village on the island of Javathat leaders would ride side by side in a unique moment of bicycle diplomacy.
Prime Minister Albanese tucked his pants into his socks after the statesmen stripped off their jackets and ties and donned their helmets, and set out on the light and eco-friendly two-wheelers for the symbolic bike ride.
The 54-year-old designer told AFP the diplomatic gesture was a “special, magical moment” for him after years of working on the bike.
“It’s not that Jokowi bought the bike, it’s the fact that it was used to greet PM (Albanese),” he said.
When he’s not arming world leaders with new bamboo bikes, Kartono uses his sustainable bicycle craftsmanship to provide jobs for local people and teach Indonesian villagers how to make use of the environment around them.
“I train young people here who lack skills. We have a system to train unskilled people until they can make quality products,” he said.
Named after the Indonesian words ‘sepeda’ for bike and ‘pagi’ for tomorrow, the model is being built by a team of 15 at a workshop in Kartonos village in central Java, where they saddle up for their own bike ride every day.
Fast-growing bamboo poles are cut, coated with preservatives, dried and then laminated by his team before being assembled with other parts to form the stable bicycle frame.
Pound for pound, bamboo is as strong as steel when used in lightweight construction, studies have shown, with a high tensile strength that makes it a worthy and environmentally friendly substitute.
A fully assembled Spedagi bamboo bike can take a week of intricate work and fetches up to 15 million rupiah ($1,000), and some have been sold as far away as Japan, company co-founder Tri Wahyuni told AFP.
– friendship on wheels –
The green bikes used by the two leaders were built with more expensive parts, Kartono said, declining to disclose the price of their rides.
Widodo, famous back home for giving away bikes to ordinary Indonesians, is a Spedagi fan and personally bought one from Kartono in 2015.
Albanese was similarly beaming at the bike, taking it back to Canberra and saying people would see him on the streets riding what might be the “only bamboo bike” in the Australian capital.
Both bicycles and bamboo — affordable and plentiful in Indonesia — have strong ties to the archipelago’s lower classes, something that resonated with the two humble leaders.
But while the Kartono creation fused two symbols of Indonesian heritage, it is now linked to a thriving bromance cultivated in the first few weeks of Albanese’s tenure as prime minister.
“Every time I ride my bike, I will remember the friendship with President Widodo,” he said.
With his own creation now crossing the Pacific, Kartono said that making bamboo bikes in places where the plant is rare — like northern Europe — first motivated him to make his design.
“When I researched bike products online, I found that bamboo bikes are made in countries that don’t have bamboo. That was a blow for me,” said the entrepreneur.
“Bamboo is all around my house.”
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