The Yangshuo Bike Festival began over a few beers at the end of a research trip.
We were in a remote village surrounded by Yangshuo’s limestone karsts, talking about one of the problems of organising travel: the best moments are often the ones you can’t organise.
A wrong turn. A conversation in a village. Somebody producing an instrument. A swim because it is hot. A meal that goes on much longer than expected. The things that happen when there is enough time and space for something unexpected to occur.
How do you design a trip without designing all of that out of it?
The idea we came up with was a bike festival.
Not a race. Not really a tour either.
A few days when travellers, guides, local riders, musicians, farmers and assorted friends could get on bicycles and have some fun together.
A celebration of place
The festival has always been an experiment in slow and thoughtful travel, with a healthy dose of irreverence.
Yangshuo is extraordinarily beautiful, but landscapes aren’t just scenery. They are places where people live and work.
We wanted to celebrate the farming culture of the valleys, local food, local knowledge and the people who know these roads and mountains better than we ever will.
It was also a quiet resistance to a glossier, increasingly globalised version of travel in which places can begin to look strangely alike — and where the very things people have travelled to see are sometimes polished away in the process.
So we went looking for the opposite.
Back roads. Farmhouses. Swimming holes. Old villages. Local restaurants. Slightly eccentric hotels. And people with something interesting to contribute.
Guides get to have fun too
There was another idea behind the festival.
Tourism is increasingly performative. The local people are observed. The tourists take photographs. But we want to include the locals, and enjoy what they enjoy observing.
Over the years we’ve persuaded erhu players, opera singers, performance artists, local bands and DJs who happen to like riding bicycles to come along with us.
Sometimes they perform. Sometimes they ride. Sometimes they eat and drink with everybody else. Often the distinction becomes fairly meaningless.
That is rather the point.
We even exported the idea once to Mongolia — which made very little geographical sense for something called the Yangshuo Bike Festival, but was enormous fun. Throat singers, horse-head fiddlers and shamans joined us on the road and performed around the fire at night.
Weird and wonderful Yangshuo
We’ve deliberately sought out people and places that preserve some of Yangshuo’s character.
That has meant staying in quirky locally run hotels and restored villages, including places such as Terry Li’s Valle Luna, where old houses built from Yangshuo’s distinctive yellow mud brick and more substantial grey fired Qing-era brick were given another life rather than demolished.
We’ve held photography exhibitions. Malcolm set haystacks on fire for photographs. We’ve put wireless headphones on farmer bike guides. There have been musicians in improbable places and meals in places we probably couldn’t find again.
Some ideas worked better than others.
There have been enough weird and wonderful moments that we decided to keep doing it.
And then there are us
The festival is put together by Bruce Foreman of BikeAways, and Scott and Snow of Bike Asia, along with a changing cast of Yangshuo guides, riders, musicians, hotel owners, cooks, friends and occasional accomplices.
Between us we’ve spent a considerable part of our lives travelling, guiding and riding bicycles around Asia.
We don’t think thoughtful travel has to be terribly serious.
In fact, sometimes the best way to appreciate a 300-million-year-old limestone landscape, a farming culture generations in the making and the knowledge of people who have spent their lives here is to slow down, pay attention —and occasionally put on a pair of headphones and have a disco on a bicycle.
