The idea of making the caravan accessible to all was taken very seriously. The group that initiated the Caravan had a bike repair facility in Hanover, and in the months leading up to the caravan they collected old bikes and bike parts, and they fixed up a bunch of bikes that they made available for free to anyone who wanted to join the caravan (although this also meant that a number of people made the entire journey riding single-speed clunkers!) Similarly, once the caravan got started one of the follow-trucks carried a bunch of extra bikes and if someone standing on the side of the road saw the caravan travel by and felt like joining, he or she could just grab a bike and join in for as long (or as briefly) as he or she wanted.

There's another purpose that the bicycles served, though I'm not sure how consciously anyone was thinking about it. In the weeks leading up to the protests the media, and particularly the Czech media, were demonizing the protestors and attempting to portray them as violent hooligans. Bikes are inherently friendly and non-threatening, and I think to the extent that there was media coverage of the caravan it helped humanize the protestors and communicate to the public that we weren't the monsters that some of the media reports made us out to be.

.during the trip you faced a hairy crossing of the Czech border, and stun grenades when in Prague - what was the most worrying moment for you personally?

The scariest moment was probably riding the long downhill from the Czech border at night in the rain. We normally put our bags in a follow-truck, but I was worried that the truck might not make it through customs and thought it would be better to keep my bag with me when we crossed the border. I didn't have any panniers on my bike, just a luggage rack over the rear wheel, so I could only strap the heavy pack on top of the luggage rack. The result was a very high center of gravity and my bike was very unstable. Plus it was pitch dark and I couldn't see either the road or other riders, and it was wet so our brakes were barely working. We were passing by these little illuminated huts by the side of the road that served as brothels, and I couldn't resist taking out my video camera to capture something of this surreal scene. I nearly killed myself trying to ride my overloaded bike one-handed while filming, and had a lot of trouble getting the video camera back into its pouch and getting my bike back under control!

The second scariest moment was when we were attacked by the riot police at the border of Saxony. The scary part was the sheer unexpectedness of it; we were biking down a peaceful country road, and we rounded a corner and there in front of us lined-up across the road was a phalanx of riot police, and a few moments later they were running at us. Nothing so terrible happened - they shoved us around, pushed people off their bikes, and did a lot of screaming - but the shock of having something like that happen literally out of the blue with no advance warning was very upsetting. Of course, the fact that they were screaming in German and I don't speak a word of German and had no idea what was going on didn't help. But even the Germans on the caravan had no idea what was going on or why the police behaved the way they did on that occasion.