Night Biking

I've been having trouble accessing my blog this week, plus I've started taking Chinese lessons, which explains the lack of posts this week. I hope to have more next week:

Our 3rd day in Yangshuo my travel partner and myself checked out of our hotel in the city and into a hostel about 3 miles outside the city, nestled along the banks of the sleepy Li River and the towering mountains. After dropping our bags, we rented bikes and set out north along the river to find the old ‘dragon’ bridge which is one of the few traditional bridges still standing in the region.

The countryside itself was wonderful, as we passed fallow fields of rice patties, water buffalo, and orange orchards. We stopped to admire each, stealing oranges and eating them on the riverbanks, pondering the age of the mountains and what the area had been like 1000 years ago. I almost found inner peace, almost.

I should have known we were in for it when I discovered my travel buddy hadn’t learned to ride a bike until she was 19 – understandable for someone who grew up in hilly San Francisco. Not noticing any discernable problems with her bike riding abilities (it is, after all ‘like riding a bike’), we decided to try something cute and return home on the other side of the river, crossing back at a bridge later on down the river.

This decision proved to be our undoing. As the road got smaller and smaller, my travel partner found it harder and harder to maintain control and not fall off the road, ending with us actually walking our bikes. It began to get dark, and we were still on the wrong side of the river when we found a long paved road perfect for riding on and making up time! The road, which we took for our salvation, proved a false prophet, as it didn’t end at a bridge – it just ended at the riverbank. A man soon emerged from a hut with a small boat and ferried us across, directing us further down the river to reach our hostel. Had we gone not more than 25 yards around the bend the other direction we would have been sitting at the hostel, but we took his advice and went blindly the wrong way. And it got dark.

And as it got dark my travel mate continued to struggle riding her bike. Tempers never flared, but moral plummeted – or at least for some, it was a beautiful stretch of land and against the deep evening sky the towers hung stunningly above us. Eventually we came out at a road and asked directions from a restaurant owner, where we discovered we were clear on the wrong side of town (and 2 miles south of it at that!). With help of a friendly motorbike who lit our way though the Yangshuo night along a busy highway we biked to the city center, but were still 3 miles from our hotel with no further means of lighting our ride home.

Inspiration struck in the form of a tuk-tuk – an oversized 3 wheel ATV with a trunk like an old army truck, covered by a high arching canvas. For 50 RMB (about 7 bucks), we hitched a ride, bikes and all, back to our hostel. It felt like we were riding in a Red Army truck rolling through the countryside when we hit the dirt road. It was the prefect ending to a prefect adventure – my travel partner did not agree.