Going Round In Circles: A Quirky Bike Ride Through Kleve by Catherine Cooper
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How many people do you think you can you fit on a bike? One? Two at a push? In Kleve, Germany, you can hire a circular bike which will take up to seven people at a time. And yes, it is just as bizarre as it sounds.
Quircky Bike
Here’s how the GeccoMobil works: the driver faces forwards, controlling the steering wheel and brakes, while the other six sit in a circle facing inwards, holding onto a bar. All seven riders pedal frantically while passers-by stare open-mouthed. I made the mistake of taking a seat at the back which meant that, even though I was pedalling forwards I was travelling backwards, which was very disorientating.
The ride started in Kleve’s very beautiful botanical gardens but speeding backwards towards a stream on a strange contraption steered by someone I had only just met, I was too busy shouting “Turn! Brake! Slow down!” to really enjoy the view.
Enjoy the Ride
After a few minutes, we all changed seats and by now I had got a bit more used to the bike’s strangeness and started to enjoy the ride. The tour operator, Gecco Tours, owner Karl Reinery, accompanied us in his van for the first kilometre or so through quiet, residential streets where everyone from school children to lorry drivers smiled and waved. After that we were given a laminated map which detailed a five kilometre route through fields to a tea house near the Rhine where he would meet us and pick up the bikes.
Driving the bike is surprisingly easy – the roads and cycle paths around Kleve are very flat and with seven people peddling, you don’t have to work very hard. You don’t want to sit at the back; you either have to twist round to see where you are going or put total trust in your driver and not care that you are travelling backwards – but the ones at the extreme edges are no picnic either. The strange shape of the bike makes it quite wide and at one point a woman sitting closest to the edge leapt up with a cry of “My ***!” as the bike veered a little too close to some barbed wire.
Something Different
Karl has eight bikes which allows for a bit of healthy competition between the riders – we got to the tea house first – but then we did cheat slightly by using a GPS to check we were going the right way. During the week, the bikes are very popular with large companies using them as a bonding exercise. “Everyone faces each other and has to work together so the bikes really get people talking,” Karl explains. While at the weekends his customers are families and groups of friends.
So why did Karl, who used to be a carpenter, choose to offer GeccoMobil bikes, when he set up his company six years ago? “I wanted to offer something really different,” he said. Well, he certainly does that.
Before the ride, we all drew pictures on napkins of what we thought a seven-seater circular bike might look like. The reality was even stranger than we had imagined.
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