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How some bumps in the road made us switch gears

By Erik Nilsson (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-10-27 11:10

I had only two choices - crash or splash.

So into the brook I went, tumbling over our hulky electric bike, off the bridge and down the gully's slope. I splooshed into the waterlogged bed of a roughly 3-m-deep ditch, somehow landing on my feet.

I glanced up at the farmer standing on the bridge with his pushcart, and then down at the bike in the ditch.

It was impossible to tell what damage the two-wheeler's nose had sustained, because it was buried beneath muddy wavelets. I was imagining what its mashed front might look like and wondering how I'd explain this to the woman from whom we'd rented the bike near our hotel in Yangshuo, Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.

The farmer, whose age had sculpted his crinkled and toothless visage to resemble that of a tortoise, poked his head out like the said animal to peer over the bridge's edge. I stood in the creek, radiating ring-shaped ripples from the middle of my shins as he looked at me, shocked.

He'd also surprised me when he appeared out of nowhere and hobbled onto the bridge, leaving me without any room to circumnavigate his cart.

After hoisting myself out of the steep gully, Dad and I hauled the hefty bike up to discover the only damage was a dangling bumper.

Our family had rented diandongche (electric bikes) because we thought we'd be cruising along the paved roads connecting Yangshuo's hinterlands to its downtown. We had no inkling our local guide would be leading us through the slender dirt trails crisscrossing the area's limestone knobs, bamboo thickets and rice paddies.

The problem was that many of these bone-juddering paths were less than half a meter wide, but our bikes were more than half a meter wide.

Only my sister-in-law had been wise enough to opt for a mountain bike, and we discussed how much safer it was as we zipped down a gravel road.

"I'm really glad she got this bike," she said, "because" - BLAM!

At that instant, her front wheel struck a large, sharp rock poking out of the ground, catapulting her off the bicycle. She scuffed her elbow and knee. The bike's back tire deflated and the chain flopped off.

Toward the day's end, we were coasting along the busy main road leading to our hotel.

Someone, for some reason, had scattered hundreds of fake 1-yuan bills all over the road. The bikers in front of my parents slammed on their brakes to inspect the cash, causing another near miss.

When I also stopped to examine the phony banknotes, another biker whizzed past me, howling, in English, "Money! Money! Hahaha!"

The next day we decided to bike again, this time keeping our electric two-wheelers to paved roadways.

But the handbrakes of Mom and Dad's diandongche didn't work, and the motor in the bike my wife and I had rented was too wimpy to carry us uphill. While Mom and Dad had to drag their feet to slow their velocity on downhill stretches, my wife and I had to use our feet to push uphill, mimicking the locomotion of a frog.

We eventually figured out our parents' model also had a footbrake, so they no longer needed to use the Flintstonian deceleration method. I rode home with them, because my wife and I had traveled too far out on "the little bike that couldn't".

Locals who hadn't thought a thing of seeing two foreigners on a scooter now howled with delight at the site of three. Two grinners on a motorbike turned their vehicle around for a better look. At the main intersection, they turned to us, jabbed their thumbs into the air and declared, in English, "Yeah! Yeah! Let's go!"

We had hoped for no mishaps when we'd set out to bike Yangshuo's pristine countryside. But we found that sometimes, it's the bumps in the road that make the journey more exciting and memorable.