My E-Bike Adventure in Yangshuo

As I was searching through my old pictures, looking for something to go with my Honk if You’re Horney article, I came across several pictures that reminded me of something I really didn’t talk about before. Well, in my 2009 post about e-bikes in China, I mentioned driving an e-bike myself, and in my book, I mentioned getting said e-bike stuck in a rice paddy, but that’s it.

So let’s talk about that e-bike journey now…

When my parents, brother, and I were in Yangshuo, we rented e-bikes for a day. Friends who had traveled there before said riding e-bikes into the countryside was the highlight of their trip, so I wanted in on this. While navigating through the city was a hair-raising experience, once we were on the highway, it was a lot of fun. We passed several farming communities, drove through another small city, and wound up at a local attraction that had the audacity to call itself the Shangri-La. But it was still pretty:

On our way back through the second city, we stopped at a food stand to get some lunch. As we ate, the shop owners let us plug our e-bikes into their outlet to charge. My father took a picture of this crazy contraption during our rest:

This is the part where we decided to take the path our hotel guide had marked on our maps, and that’s when things got… ricey. As per his instructions, we drove through a small village, turned left after the bridge, and then… um… where do we go now? The road went from paved to dirt to grass to nothing. We still obediently followed his directions, but it was pretty clear we were lost when our bikes were now right in the middle of a rice paddy! In my brother’s Guilin/Yangshuo video, you can see this happening at about the 2:20 mark:

Two other people on normal bikes tried to take this same path while we were presently trapped on it. They went on ahead of us and could very well still be stuck in that rice paddy to this day. We turned around. It took a long time to get our bikes out, and we broke off one of the side mirrors in the process. Once we were finally on what was “probably” the correct path, our bikes were running low on power, so we abandoned our guide’s suggestions and drove back on the highway we came from.

So we didn’t get to take the scenic route we’d heard so much about, but there were still some good photo ops in there amongst all the frustrations:

Back in Yangshuo, we’d worked those e-bikes so hard, they were literally rolling into the rental place on their last breath.

17 August 2011 | China | Comments | Home
tags: attractions, transportation

• « Newer Post
• Older Post »