Street smart Copenhagen makes footwork fun

There are bicycles everywhere. Pink, black, purple, yellow and blue; two-wheeled, three-wheeled, fold-up, retro and tandem. They run around the perimeter of the square, a haphazard boundary wall of wheels, chains, baskets and saddles. Nowhere is Copenhagen's love affair with the bicycle more apparent than here, in Amagertorv Square. Located just off Stroget, Europe's longest pedestrianised street and Copenhagen's main shopping district, Amagertorv is where the city's cyclists have to abandon their bikes and take to their feet. I've been told, repeatedly, that there are more bicycles than people in the Danish capital, and as I survey the chaotic jumble in front of me, I don't doubt it. So ingrained is cycling in the city's psyche that it has given rise to the term "Copenhagenisation", a cyclist - and planet- friendly - approach to urban planning that is being embraced across Europe. There are 350 kilometres worth of cycling tracks snaking through the city and at least a third of all Copenhageners use them each day to go about their business. Everybody's at it. Women in pretty summer dresses perched on old-fashioned bikes with baskets; sporting types with their layers of Lycra and barely there racing bikes; parents carting their kids around in three-wheeled Christiana bicycle trailers, a uniquely Danish contraption made in an eponymous hippie commune in the east of the capital. This is probably why, on my final morning in the city, having not ridden a bike for nearly a decade, I find myself going for a very slow, very shaky ride along the banks of Copenhagen Harbour. I may have been inspired by the city's natives, but I display none of their grace. I'm huffing and puffing, and my calves are cramping. I find myself thanking the cycling gods that after four days of uninterrupted sunshine, the weather has turned slightly. I blame the bike. It is old, heavy and rickety, but also provided free of charge by the City of Copenhagen as part of one of Europe's oldest city bike schemes. Having parted with a meagre 20 kroner (Dh14), I can use the bike to my heart's content, and will get my money back as soon as I return it to any of the 110 allocated racks dotted around the city. Luckily, topography is on my side. Copenhagen is completely flat and extremely easy to navigate. The city centre, or Indre By, is hemmed in on one side by Tivoli Gardens, the second oldest amusement park in the world. Tivoli is one of the city's anchors, socially and geographically, and acts as a useful way-finding tool. My cause is also helped by the fact that Copenhagen's roads are remarkably safe. Motorists are unexpectedly deferential, if not sheepish, as if they know that they too should be abandoning their heavily taxed, gas guzzling vehicles in favour of two wheels. "Everybody shares the streets. And the smaller you are, the more people take care of you," says Vincent Brice, a rickshaw driver who has spent the past eight years transporting people around the city. The Frenchman insists that he has had no major run-ins with either cars or pavements in that time, so I take his word for it. "Cycling is just part of the lifestyle. You'll see kids riding behind their parents from a very young age." I test my own unpractised cycling skills along the waterfront promenade of Kalvebod Brygge before crossing over the channel into Islands Brygge, an area best known for its Harbour Bath, a cluster of open-air pools filled with water from the Islands Brygge channel. Copenhagen went through a process of cleaning up its waterways in the late 1990s, and the Harbour Bath opened as a result in 2003. A sign on the perimeter fence tells me that the outside air temperature is 18°C, while the water temperature in the pools is 21°C. It's too chilly to tempt me, particularly at nine o'clock on a blustery, overcast August morning, but there are plenty of other takers.