This is a blog I originally posted on the CSC blog, and I like it so much I want to include it here on ExNotes. The topic is, as the title implies, the ebike scene in China.
I encountered electric bikes in a major way on my RX3 ride across China (you can read that great story in Riding China). Electric scooters and other vehicles are everywhere in China. Quite simply, electric vehicles are a way of life over there. Rather than babble on about that, I thought I would include an excerpt from a Riding China chapter. The locale is Beijing, where I was struggling with the heat and a minor injury…I had been nailed in the eye by a bug the night before, and…well, let me get to the pages I’m talking about…
The next day we took the subway into Beijing. We already were in Beijing when we got on the subway, but Beijing is a megacity and you can’t simply drive into the center of it. We rode the subway for a good 45 minutes, and when we emerged, we visited the Forbidden City and Tien An Men Square. It was all grand. It was touristy, but it’s something that should be on any China visitor’s bucket list.
At the entrance to the Forbidden City.In the Forbidden City. It’s an amazing thing to see.A glimpse of ancient Chinese architecture in the Forbidden City.
After seeing the Forbidden City, we walked around downtown Beijing for a while. I told Tracy (note: Tracy was our translator on this trip) my eye was getting worse and I wanted to get antibiotic eye drops for it. It was Sunday afternoon, but there was a large pharmacy right in front of us and it was open. Tracy went in with me and he told one of the young pharmacists what I wanted. She responded and it didn’t sound good.
“She cannot sell it to you without a prescription,” he told me.
“Well, shoot, Tracy, it’s Sunday afternoon,” I said. “We’re not going to find a doctor. I’ll be okay. Let’s just go.”
“No, it is okay, Dajiu,” he said. “We are China and we have a bureaucracy. It is my bad.”
Good old Tracy, I thought. The guy felt responsible for everything. I was resigned to the fact that my eye was going to take a while to get better. Tracy, in the meantime, had walked not more than 8 feet away to an elderly woman sitting at a wooden table. He spoke to her in Chinese and pointed to me. She never looked at me, nor did she look up. She simply pulled out a white pad with a big “R” at the top. Nah, this can’t be, I thought. She wrote something in Chinese characters and handed the slip to Tracy.
“Our prescription,” Tracy said. “Such a bureaucracy.” He walked the three steps back to the pharmacist, Tracy handed her the prescription, and 30 seconds (and 24 yuan, or about $4) later, I had my antibiotic eye drops. I put two drops in my eye.
When we got off the subway after visiting The Forbidden City and the center of Beijing, we waited on a street corner for our Uber ride back to the hotel. I watched the scooters and small utility vehicles rolling by, and I realized that nearly every one of them was electric. I must have seen 200 scooters during the 20 minutes we waited, and perhaps 2 had gasoline engines. This wholesale adaption of electric scooters and small utility vehicles in China is nothing short of amazing.
One of many, many electric bikes and scooters in Beijing.Another electric scooter……and another……and another……and another……and another……and another……and another. They were all over. I’d never seen anything like it.
Sean (our guide) explained to me that the transition to electric vehicles started about 15 years ago, and the government has done a number of things to encourage people to convert to electricity. For starters (once again, pardon my pun), many of the larger cities in China now prohibit motorcycles and scooters unless the vehicle is electric. Electric scooters are allowed where gasoline-powered bikes are not. That alone is an enormous incentive. The next incentive is that you don’t need a driver’s license to take an electric vehicle on the street. You just buy one and go. And finally, as I’ve mentioned before, electricity is cheap in China. There are windfarms, solar panel farms, coal plants, nuclear power plants, and hydroelectric power plants all over the country. We saw scooters parked on the sidewalk and plugged into extension cords running into small stores everywhere. People charge them like iPhones; they didn’t miss any opportunity to top off the batteries on these things.
An unusual electric trike in Beijing. We saw many unusual electric vehicles in China.
That night was a great night. The Zongshen dealer took us to a restaurant that specialized in Peking duck. The guys were excited about this development, but I was initially leery. I thought I didn’t like Peking duck. Boy, was I ever wrong! I tried Peking duck 25 years ago when I visited Beijing with Sue. We both thought the duck was awful. That’s because we went to a restaurant that served tourists. The food at that place didn’t have to be good. They knew they would never see us again, and Yelp hadn’t been invented yet.
This night in Beijing with the Zongshen dealer and the RX3 owners club was different. The Peking duck was incredible. The chef sliced it paper thin right at our table. They had thin tofu (almost like a crepe), and the guys taught me how to eat duck properly. The deal is you put a few fresh vegetables on the tofu, you add a slice or two of duck, you add this amazing brown gravy, and then you roll the affair up like a burrito. Wow, it was delicious!
We had several rounds of toasts at dinner that night and the liquor flowed freely. I got lucky. Kong sat next to me and he schooled me in the proper way to make a Chinese toast. To show respect, you clink your glass against the other guy’s glass, but you hold your glass at a lower level so that when the two glasses meet, the rim of yours is lower than the other person’s. When the Zongshen dealer toasted me, I followed Kong’s advice, and the Chinese riders all nodded approvingly. Ah, Dajiu knows.
It was funny. Sergeant Zuo and I had made several toasts to each other, and when we touched glasses, we both tried frantically to get our glasses lower than the other, so much so that we usually crashed the bottoms of both on the table (to a hearty laugh and round of applause from everyone). Zuo was being polite; I was being completely serious (I have enormous respect for him).
It was a great night, and the next morning was even better. Those eye drops Tracy had helped me secure a prescription for did the trick. When we rode out of Beijing the next morning, my eye was good as new.
So there you have it. It was in China that I realized this electric bike thing is for real. It’s not just a fad. I think it’s going to be for real in the rest of the world, too. It is the future.
You can read our other ebike materials here, and check back here on the ExNotes site regularly. We’ll be including new ebike materials often.
We’re Los Angeles Times subscribers. I tell you that not to imply I’m a well-read person who keeps up with things, and I’m certainly not bragging about the paper (in fact, I don’t think the LA Times is a very good newspaper). But this morning’s issue had an advertising supplement from China, and it got my attention. It’s one of those supplements where the advertiser tries to make it look like another section of the paper, except the whole thing was a big ad. What caught my eye this morning was the faux International Daily’s headline about Qingdao’s international beer festival.
I’ve been to Qingdao. I like the place. The story in the Times this morning immediately brought me back to the Arjiu and Dajiu China ride (that would be Joe Gresh and yours truly), a ride that was the grandest adventure of my life. It’s what Riding China is all about.
I’ve thought about this a lot, and you should buy Riding China (you can do so by clicking here or on the cover photo to the right).
Then I thought about it a bit more, and you know what? I’m going to share Riding China’s last chapter with you, right here on the ExhaustNotes blog. I think you’ll like the story on Qingdao, and I can tell you that the rest of Riding China (the other 26 chapters) is just as good. Like I said…you should buy a copy.
Enjoy, my friends….
Chapter 27: Qingdao, Our Final Destination
Qingdao (pronounced “ching dow”) means “green island” in Chinese. It’s on the eastern edge of China on the Yellow Sea, and it sure is green. It is one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever seen, and it’s one with a storied past. Beaches, seafood, and more, the city has had more owners and rulers than you can shake a stick at. Like a lot of places on the east coast of China, it was controlled by the Germans in the late 1800s (you can see the German influence in the city’s architecture). The Japanese took over after World War I, it reverted back to Chinese control shortly after that, and then the Japanese took it over again during second World War, and then, well…it’s in Chinese hands now. But I’m getting ahead of myself yet again. Back to the ride.
The changing of the guard in Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius.
We started our morning in Qufu with a visit to a fort that is evidently a significant Chinese attraction. I didn’t understand too much about the place at the time we visited, but it made for some great photo ops. There was a changing of the guard similar to what might be seen at Buckingham Palace or Arlington National Cemetery, and it was exciting. I enjoyed watching the Chinese tourists take it all in even more. This is their country, and I could tell that what we were all seeing was of great significance to them.
A waterway in Qufu near the fort.A Chinese woman, standing on the pegs of Sergeant Zuo’s motorcycle, photographing the changing of the guard in Qufu.
After the ceremony, it was back to the freeway for the quick 200 kilometer ride to Qingdao. I was very excited about seeing Qingdao for several reasons. It marked the end of our ride. This had been a motorcycle ride like no other, and Qingdao was our final destination. For that reason alone, it was significant.
Qingdao is a city with a rich history, as I mentioned at the start of this chapter. Situated on China’s eastern coast, I was hoping that the temperatures in Qingdao would be a little cooler. On a personal level, Qingdao had a special meaning for me. It was situated directly on the Yellow Sea’s western shore. More than 40 years ago I had been a US Army lieutenant on the eastern shore of the Yellow Sea, in Korea, on a HAWK missile site. Our primary target line (the direction in which our missiles and radars were pointed; the direction from which we anticipated an attack) was not aimed at North Korea. It was instead pointed west, directly across the Yellow Sea, toward the People’s Republic of China. Yes, the spot I would be riding into this fine day was the very spot my US Army missiles pointed to more than four decades ago!
Ling, a great guy and a great rider.
Our freeway ride to Qingdao that morning was largely uneventful except for one thing: Ling’s RX1 ran out of gas. To me, it was amazing that this was the first time any of us had run dry. We routinely rode 50 or more miles after our fuel bingo lights starting blinking. Gresh and I never quite understand our approach for determining when to get fuel, or who called the shots on that topic. We didn’t know if it was Zuo on the lead bike, or Tracy in his car, of Qi and Ma in the chase truck. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Zuo.
Up until the point when Ling’s bike ran out, I thought the RX1 had more range than the RX3, because Zuo (who rode an RX1 on this trip), kept going long after I would have refueled my RX3. But Ling, on an RX1, was the guy whose bike ran dry that morning. Gresh was riding with Ling when it happened. Joe stopped and luckily he found a rope by side of the road, so he towed Ling along until the next gas station.
When the chase truck caught up with us at the gas station, Ma evidently said something to Sergeant Zuo in Chinese about waiting too long to refuel, and Zuo didn’t care for it. Sometimes we weren’t sure if the Chinese were upset with each other (we couldn’t tell from the conversation), but there was no doubt in my mind this time that Zuo was not taking what Ma said very well. A little bit of gasoline later (or oil, as the Chinese refer to it in English) and all was well.
As we approached Qingdao, Zuo was working his magic on his smartphone’s GPS, and we found our way through thickening Chinese traffic to the bay. A ferry ride across the bay was in our plans. This was good. Any motorcycle adventure always goes better with a ferry ride. It adds to the magic.
We took a ferry ride across the bay to downtown Qingdao.
We rode the bikes onto the ferry, parked them, headed topside, and were underway in minutes. I was surprised that we didn’t need to tie the bikes down, but they were still upright when we arrived in downtown Qingdao. Everybody was in high spirits. We were arriving at our destination, the city we had been riding to for the last five weeks. It signified the end of our epic journey. The cameras were out and we were all snapping photos. I took a photo of a Chinese man and his young son, and then the son asked me if his father could take a photo of me with him. He did so with his cell phone, and then I handed him my Nikon and he took the same photo with it. As Americans, Gresh and I were unusual sights on that ferry.
Qingdao has a population of 9 million people. Once again, I thought about how amazing being in this place was. I was the unusual American; I had heard of Qingdao before this ride. I only knew of it because of my Army days 40 years ago. Most Americans have never heard of Qingdao, yet we have only one city (and that’s New York) that has a population comparable to Qingdao.
With my young Chinese friend.Joe Gresh, somewhere on Qingdao Bay, as seen through Deng’s Canon.
We hit downtown Qingdao at rush hour, but the traffic wasn’t too bad on the elevated freeway that ran over the city. It was a Sunday afternoon, and that helped. Once we were into the city, though, it was the usual tuck and roll routine we always did when we blitzed through Chinese urban areas. That meant lots of weaving and bobbing, giving the horns a thorough workout, and a bit of profanity thrown in for good measure, directed at folks who most likely had no idea what we were yelling about.
Riding on an elevated freeway above downtown Qingdao. That’s Gresh and Zuo in front of me.
I realized I had become accustomed to Chinese urban traffic. As I worked more motorcycle miracles keeping up with Zuo and Lu, I thought about what it would be like to ride back in the United States again when I returned to California. I knew I’d have to dial it down substantially. No more missing cars by centimeters passing on the right and the left, no more assuming people will move over when we pass into oncoming traffic, no more passing on blind corners, and much less risk. I wondered if it would be boring. When our Chinese and Colombian friends rode with us last year on the Western America Adventure Ride, they told us the riding in America was less intense than what they were used to in their home countries. It’s only scenery in America, they said. Riding a motorcycle in the United States required no aggressive maneuvering with cars, trucks, buses, other motorcycles, and scooters. They said that the courtesy of American drivers made the riding less exciting. Riding in China, on the other hand (and Colombia, too) required absolute and intense concentration. It was stressful, exhausting, and exhilarating.
The dinner that evening was extravagant and exciting, as you might imagine it would be for a group that had just arrived at their destination after an 8,800-kilometer motorcycle ride across China. When the restaurant realized how many of us they had to feed (and they heard the story of how we made it all the way across China to Qingdao on our motorcycles), they wisely opted to move the tables to the parking lot in front of the restaurant and let us cut loose outside.
It was a grand dinner. The beer flowed freely. Where before our Chinese brothers drank beer from little juice glasses, tonight it was all pitchers of draft beer and mugs. And folks, these Chinese guys can put away the suds. Everybody was in high spirits. Ma and Zuo were good buddies again (they had forgotten all about Ling running out of gas earlier in the day). There was more beer and more toasts. Lu was spilling been all over himself as he chugged mug after mug. Tracy was telling Sean that he should shave off his goatee to be more popular with the ladies (bear in mind that Sean is Tracy’s boss). More beer. More toasts. Did I mention we drank a lot of beer that night?
Lu enjoying a beer, with a bit of help from Dong.
We stayed late and closed the place. It was one of the best dinners I have ever had anywhere. The food was outstanding (as it always was during the entire China adventure ride), but that wasn’t what made it all so grand. We had arrived. We would do a little more riding in and around Qingdao, and then we would all be heading home. Everyone realized that as the evening ended, and there was a palpable note of somberness as we called it a night. Everyone wanted to get back to their families and their normal lives, but no one wanted the ride to end.
A fine celebratory dinner in Qingdao!
That night ended well, and the next morning we were off for a publicity ride to Qingdao’s coastline. We met at the Qingdao Zongshen dealer where five or six guys on other bikes were waiting for us. One was on a Shineray 400cc single that looked more like an original Triumph Bonneville than do the current Triumph Bonnevilles. The company was one I had heard of but didn’t know much about. We say “Shine Ray” because that’s the way it’s spelled; the Chinese pronounce it “shin you way.” There were a couple of 250cc Suzukis and a couple of all-out dirt bikes (with no lights or plates) that used the Zongshen NC250 RX3 engine. The Zongshen dealer rode his 650cc CFMoto street bike (it’s a very large motorcycle that looks a lot like a Honda ST1300). Interesting motorcycles, to be sure.
It was to be one of the best rides of our entire China adventure. We were on the edge of Qingdao headed across the peninsula and there was very little traffic. As we rode, I saw a concrete ribbon off in the distance that snaked over a mountain, and sure enough, that was our road. It was a great ride. Zuo set a sensible pace, we crested the mountain, and then we descended to sea level. Soon we were riding the Qingdao coastline. It was a magnificent road. The road and the location reminded me of Italy’s Amalfi Road below Naples. We stopped for photos in several locations. It was definitely a tourist spot for the Chinese; there were lots of busses and more than a few cars with families. But it was not touristy. It was just fun.
Has China out-Triumphed the British?
At one of the stops I commented to Gresh that this was a great ride and I was enjoying the more relaxed pace. Joe laughed and said, “You’ve gotten too used to riding in China. We’ve been passing busses on blind corners and doing all the things these guys do. If you think this is a relaxed ride, you’ve become a maniac, too.”
I guess maybe I had, but unlike the other times, it wasn’t bothering me that morning. I guess you can get used to anything. I really enjoyed that ride.
Riding along the Yellow Sea coast in Qingdao. It reminded me of Italy’s Amalfi Road.
As we road along the coast, Lu saw an opening on the left that led directly onto the beach. He took it and we all followed. The beach was great, it wasn’t too hot, and it felt wonderful to be there. I parked my RX3 in a spot where there were rocks and the sidestand found decent support. Gresh was in soft sand and his sidestand was just sinking into it; there was no way it would support the bike. Dong was next to Gresh on an RX1 and he said, “No, Arjiu, like this,” and with that, he revved the engine, popped the clutch, and spun the rear wheel. The back of his motorcycle dropped several inches as the rear wheel excavated a hole, and when it was resting on the frame, Dong stopped, killed the engine, and stepped off. The bike remained vertical, held in place by the sand on either side of the rear wheel. Gresh did the same.
I walked up to the edge of the ocean and shot a few photos. Gresh was walking toward the water in a bright green floral pattern bathing suit. It looked brand new. “Where did you get that?” I asked.
“There’s a guy selling them over there,” Joe said, pointing to a shack, “and he’s got a place where you can change.” That was all I needed to know. I wasted no time in buying my own a bathing suit. I had been hot and sweaty for over a month. A swim in the ocean sounded like it was just what the doctor ordered.
It was wonderful. I was swimming in the Yellow Sea, along with Zuo, Ma, Qi, Gresh, and Dong. The water was warm for the first few inches near the surface and cold below that. The chill felt wonderful. It was lowering my core temperature, and I basked in the wonder of it all. It was the first time I felt that good in quite a while. We cavorted in that water for a good hour. I didn’t want to leave.
Dong demonstrates how to park a motorcycle on the beach.
The Yellow Sea. I thought about where we were, what we were doing, and what we had done. We had ridden across the Tibetan Plateau. We rode in the Gobi Desert. We followed the Silk Road and China’s Great Wall. We rode our Zongshen motorcycles in sweltering heat and in torrential rains. We had been terribly cold at altitudes as high as 14,000 feet. And now we were at sea level, swimming in the Yellow Sea.
This was not my first time being at the edge of the Yellow Sea, but it was the first time I swam in it. As I mentioned at the start of this chapter, four decades earlier as a young US Army lieutenant, I had stood roughly 700 miles due east of this spot on the other side of the Yellow Sea, ready to shoot down any Red Chinese aircraft that violated Korean airspace. Fast forward more than 40 years, and now I’m a senior citizen on a motorcycle adventure ride playing in the water with a bunch of Chinese tourists on the other side of that same body of water. Times change, I guess. In this case, for the better.
Lu grabs a selfie in the surf.
After our swim, we all rode the bikes into a line at the water’s edge so the video guys could do their thing. Our videographer, He, was running the drone and Deng was working his magic with the Canon digital camera. In the maybe 10 minutes we were there on the beach, I watched the tide move the water line up a good 10 feet. We had to keep moving the bikes to not let the water surround us.
The Yellow Sea is an interesting body of water. It was originally more yellow in color due to mineral sediments carried downstream by the rivers that feed it, but it lost its yellowish tinge (according to the experts) due to pollution. To me, the water looked about the same as any other place I’d ever seen the ocean. The most interesting thing about the Yellow Sea, though, is its extreme tidal variation. It has one of the highest tidal movements in the world. When I was in Korea, I was told the water level moved up and down vertically 30 feet every day (I later read it is actually 26 feet). Whether it’s 26 feet or 30 feet, that’s a huge tidal swing. I remember being in Korea and looking at the Yellow Sea when the tide was out. It was stunning. Where before there had been ocean, there were now miles and miles of mud, with the occasional fish flopping on what had been the sea floor an hour or so ago.
On the way back to the hotel on that next-to-last riding day, we were caught in a severe downpour. We were soaked, but nobody cared. We were China-riding veterans. It rains, you get wet. No big deal.
The next day, we all saddled up and rode to the freight forwarder who would ship the bikes back to Chongqing. It was a short ride, and we were in and out of the freight yard in less than 30 minutes. Gresh and I wanted to buy jewelry for our wives, and the Zongshen dealer’s wife accompanied us to downtown Qingdao’s jewelry district. She helped us score great jade necklaces and both Joe’s wife and my Sue loved what we brought back for them. We said goodbye to the Chinese riders at the freight yard, thinking that we would see them at dinner that evening.
When we returned to the hotel late that afternoon, we learned that the goodbyes we said to the other guys at the freight forwarder had really been our final goodbyes. While we were shopping, the Chinese guys left by air to return to their homes. King Kong was still there (he had gone shopping with us); we would drop Kong off at the Qingdao train station the next day. Joe and I flew home after we dropped Kong off. It was a long flight, but it was great to be headed home.
I had mixed emotions about not being able to say a proper goodbye to the other Chinese riders, but I was glad it worked out the way it did. I wanted to say goodbye for real, but I really didn’t want to say goodbye at all. A few days after I arrived home, I received a nice email from Zuo. He told me that he and the other riders had left while we were shopping because they, too, did not want to risk becoming emotional during our goodbyes.
