One of the most delightful experience in Cycle Tokyo! activity is to meet cyclists from overseas and learn about bike culture in their country.
We had a chance to meet TBLA(Taiwan Bike Leisure Association) (*1)members in Tokyo on September 12th. TBLA is a cycling club in Taipei.
We received an e-mail from Simon Wu who is a leader of TBLA. According to his mail, he would come to Japan for cycling with six members. He invited us to join their tour. Unfortunately, we were not available to travel with them but could meet Simon and two members at McDonald's near JR Mejiro Station.
Simon appeared with his yellow folding bike.(*2) He arrived Japan few days before than other members and already traveled Nikko alone. He came back from Nikko to Tokyo at the day we met.
When we had coffee at McDonald's with Simon. Michael Yu and Peter Liu came and joined us. They introduced TBLA and their activity.
TBLA has around 650 registered members. They normally have an activity every Wednesday night and Sunday morning. On wednesday, they start “Night biking” from 8:00 p.m. and ride around for 1.5 hours. On Sunday morning, they meet at 7:30a.m. and ride together around 30 km including 8% hill climb. In addition to weekly activity, Simon plans a travel for cycling not only in Taiwan but to overseas. He visited Japan with 6 members for this time.
They gave us a Taipei Cycling Map and Travel Map of Taiwan.
According to them, Taiwan government promotes the increased use of bicycling to resolve traffic jam and pollution issue. With this policy the government is spending more money on developing bake path.TBLA members told us that center of Taipei was still heavy traffic and difficult to ride for visitors but outside of Taipei area was nice for us. They highly recommended to ride through bike path on the East Cost. They told us they would ride together if we visit Taiwan.
It was very nice time with TBLA. We hope we ride together near future.
*1 TBLA WEB SITE : http://groups.google.com.tw/group/tbla
*2 Bike Friday Pocket Rocket Pro : http://www.bikefriday.com/