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Festival Stories

Disco de Wheels

The best cycling in the world — with a soundtrack added through silent disco.
Headphones off while we cross the big road back into Yangshuo.
Finding the small roads, joining them up and then creating a soundtrack around the landscape is what we love to do.
Silent disco on a bike.
The song was “Beautiful Girl” by INXS. We stopped cycling by this reservoir, but the music played on, as you can see from the unusually animated bodies. This is the power of silent disco on a bike — what we call the Disco de Wheels.
Sam from Bike Asia swimming with Bono in the Yulong River, famous for its bamboo rafts.

Food, obviously

Noodles by the Yulong River.
Food is a massive theme of our rides. On our 2018 Longji Rice Terraces pre-ride we had a bamboo-rice cooking workshop, with beautiful Lou very focused on the task.
Sam serving Terry Li’s fabulous local Yangshuo fare.
The Saturday-night feast on the rooftop of Zen Box in Jiuxian Village in 2018. Saturday night’s feast is always somewhere scenic — and always local Yangshuo style.

Local heroes & occasional accomplices

Nancy Liang — one of the original “back in the day” Yangshuo bicycle guides, a Moon Hill local and an amazing cook. Very much an inspiration for the go-local philosophy of all our trips and the festival.
Shelley — one of Yangshuo’s pioneer guesthouse owners — sings some traditional Yangshuo songs over dinner on the rooftop of Zen Box in Jiuxian Village.
Some refined zither before the rock and roll.
If we can find someone musical, interesting or an expert in their field, we’ll grab them. This was a Saturday-morning Qigong session and demonstration on the rooftop of Zen Box.
We always loved those reviews of five-star hotels where people say, “They even had a cold towel for us on arrival” — such luxury in Asia. A retro ice-lolly company had dressed these girls up as Red Guards to sell mung-bean and red-bean ice creams on West Street. Of course we recruited them for the festival to angrily hand out ice-cold towels, hoping that one day people would give us cracking reviews too.

Art, music & mild eccentricity

Aristo and gallery — an exhibition created for the festival at the one-off pop-up Valle Luna gallery.
Close-up of Mark’s bicycle art.
This is artist, tea grower and chicken barbecuer William, famous in Yangshuo from the early days. I remember interviewing him about food and he told me he was sculpting Buddha hands for mass-produced statues because they couldn’t get the hands looking right. A man of many talents — he did a lovely live performance-art hand painting at the festival in the beautiful Valle Luna, Terry Li’s hotel renovated from an abandoned village of old mud brick and Qing-era grey stone in Gaotian.
This is Foop, playing drums with Retrophase in a memorable party set.
Joyce — fired up to dance as soon as Retrophase took the stage, again at Valle Luna, Terry’s hotel in Gaotian. So glad we got to use it for the festival and a few other biking trips too.
Mad Max: Fury Road has that great scene of a truck screaming down the highway with a demonic figure at the front and a high-energy soundtrack. We decided to emulate it to open the festival and launch our cycling “dragon” into the streets and countryside around Yangshuo. It ended up with Bike Asia mechanic Pengsai cycling a tricycle carrying giant speakers and blasting out “Kashmir”, which almost couldn’t have been more perfect. Much better than Fury Road, and with Xiao Yi, flower-wreathed, looking anything but demonic.
Sponsored by Valdivia — thanks, Claudia.
Claudia — head honcho of Valdivia / Castello del Vino — sponsored us with Prosecco several years running.

Back in the day

The once-famous yellow brickwork of Yangshuo is fast disappearing, but it remains such a touchstone of farming life. Bikes are still one of the best ways to find the real Yangshuo.
Daxu Guesthouse on our Guilin-to-Yangshuo festival pre-ride in 2015.
Fenglou — 2019 festival night dinner.
Enjoying music under the stars in 2014. This was our first festival and we actually camped on Yangshuo Island in the middle of the Li River, where we piggybacked on another festival. We were pretty small back then and wanted to stack the photos with some other festival-goers.
Chorten, Tashi and La La hosting the very first Yangshuo Bike Festival launch in 2014, which happened to coincide with Halloween. This Tibetan bar was on the old historic cobblestone street in Xingping.
Xi’an paper-cut style for this 2015 poster flyer. Many thanks to our friend Jing Ming in Beijing for sketching out the design for us.
Close-up detail of our T-shirt and poster. We were playing with the idea of a great long critical mass of cyclists making up a dragon as it wound through the scaly karsts.
A few festival posters for the 2017 Bike Festival — and a spin-off Mongolia edition based around the madam.
Designing the poster and T-shirt is always fun. We were trying to bring the famous Yao minority women into the imagery. This was phase one of a design that eventually became Snow — Scott’s wife — as the face of a Yao woman doing a big flying wheelie over the Longji rice terraces, where we planned to start our pre-ride.
Back roads from Xingping. Scott and I were riding around looking at a new itinerary to make the most of the new Yangshuo Station at Xingping. Somewhere along the way we sat down and had a beer. I wish I had a photo of the little shop, the saw-tooth karsts and the sun streaming through. The conversation was about how precious such moments were — and how hard they were to recreate on group tours.