Yangshuo: The Adventurous Tale of the Electric Scooter

This was before our battery died!

Days like this one are proof that everything happens for a reason.

Electric scooters are all the rage on China. They are a cheap and relatively environmentally friendly option over buying a car and for this reason, many Chinese people use them on a daily basis. As you can imagine the roads in China are bonkers. The rules of the road are opposite of what they are back home and some,times crossing the street can be a death wish, let alone riding a scooter around.

Because you only live once and Yangshuo's roads aren't as contested as in the city, Nathan and I decided to rent an electric scooter to take out a beautiful dragon bridge outside the town. We went to the scooter place and told the lady where we would like to go ( a very old bridge named the dragon bridge) and she assured me that see we would be able to make it there and back no problem so we hopped on the bike and headed out of town.

It was so exhilarating! I felt so free driving along a country road amongst beautiful karats with my hair blowing out the wind...sounds cheesy I know but it really was THAT sweet. Everything was fine we were loving whipping around at a decent speed and only had a few scares when there was a big truck speeding full force towards us. We were not even half way to the bridge when we started to notice that we were running out of juice on the bike and were not going to make it to the bridge. We stopped in at a village and luckily found a charging cable in the bike. We asked a local if we could use her electricity to charge up our bike and she hesitantly agreed, asking for a 10 quai fee. We sat and waited for half an hour and were sick of waiting, thinking the bike would be charged up enough to get to the bridge where we could charge it again while we hung out for a while. We hopped back on the bike and off we went.

But the charge didn't last for long and about 10 minutes later we were back in the red. Luckily we were very close to another small village so we coasted into town and looked for a place to try to ask to use someone's power. We noticed a small shop just of the main road and turned in to ask the owner for some electricity. I asked the shop keeper in the most broken Chinese but he understood what we needed and didn't hesitate to get us an extension cord and even offered for us to sit down with him in his shop and watch some tv. We sat and waited for a while and I got bored so I grabbed my camera and headed outside to take some photos.

I noticed a group of children playing and decided to approach them, As I walked up to the kids, they seemed extremely afraid. Probably because I was a foreigner and I am sure even though the kids had seen foreigners whiz past their village, I don't think they have been so close to one. I smiled and greeted them in Chinese asking their names and they looked totally shocked. They turned to each other and said, "the foreigner can speak Chinese" they started to be a little less shy and sure enough a crowd of young and old drew around to hear the foreigner speak Chinese. I had my camera in hand and started to take pictures of the kids. Some of the children were terrified of the camera and others warmed up to the idea. The way their faces lit up when I showed them the pictures I could tell that they had never seen a photo of themselves before. A few young boys were loving the pictures and kept urging me to take more as they made different faces and poses it was adorable.

Some of the village kids

I continued to play with the kids, running around chasing them or just chatting its them. It's crazy that even though a language barrier exists, I was still able to create a friendship with these young kids. They seemed so shocked and excited that a foreigner actually wanted to hang out with them. It was a special feeling to see the way the kids smiled when I asked them questions. I played and chatted with the kids and more came, curious to see the foreigner. They asked me to teach them English words or read thenEnglish writing on their clothing and were so excited when I gave them praise for saying a word right. None of them had English names so I decided to give them some names. This was so special for them and their eyes lit up with each name that I gave

Villagers of all ages came out to see the laowai speak Chinese!

Some time passed and I went to go check in on Nathan to see how he was doing. I sat down again and some of the kids came inside. The shop keeper was beaming from ear to ear watching and when I asked him if any of the children were his he proudly pointed to one of the boys, who I had named Tom. I had so much fun hanging out with the kids it was a really special afternoon. Even though our bike had died for the second time and there was no way in heck we would make it to the Dragon Bridge, I think the afternoon we had was ten times more special.

After a little while longer we decided that our bike was probably charged enough to make it back to Yangshuo so that we could return it. We thanked the shop keeper for is hospitality and pushed the bike out to the road to head on our way. I honestly felt like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz the way the kids gathered around us saying their goodbyes. We slowly made our way back to Yangshuo (we didn't wanted to waste precious electricity and have to stop again) and both Nathan and I were beaming from ear to ear and couldn't stop discussing the events of the day.

There were so many ways that that day could have played out and we should have been bummed out that we never did make it out to see the dragon bridge but to be honest I am glad we didn't make it. The experience that we shared with those kids was ten thousand times more beautiful than an bridge in the world. What we gave them that day was special. They are so used to foreigners buzzing through their small village and treating them as scenery and we got the chance to treat them like people and it was so obvious that they appreciated it a lot. It was such an amazing day and a true lesson that things always work out the way that they were intended to.