Zen and the Art of E-bike Touring


 

3 Chapter 4
Chapter 6 4
Index


 

Chapter 5: Mindful Riding

Awareness of your surroundings is critical to both truly experience your ride and to be safe. A bicycle offers you a panoramic, sweeping view of the scenery and a direct connection with your environment that is unmatched by any other vehicle. You will truly see things "up close and personal" as you roll silently along, almost like being on a Magic Carpet. An ebike is almost noiseless, the only sound being a light whirring noise when the motor is assisting, but that is so quiet that we continually surprised birds, squirrels, and other fauna as we biked along, occasionally with comical results.

At a Safari Park, we even found we could bicycle through herds of wild animals! We rode our ebikes through herds of wild donkeys, horses, and Bactrian camels--which are much larger than they look on TV, but are fortunately peaceful critters. We probably would have been OK with the giraffes also, but they were in an area with rhinoceroses, which can be quite aggressive, so we were not allowed in their enclosure. We were also not allowed in the Siberian Tiger enclosure, lest we accidentally become "Meals On Wheels!"

From a Zen point of view, the signal advantage of ebike touring is that you can also really see, hear, smell, and feel the environment, allowing you to truly live in the moment. You will hear the birds chirping and the wind rustling in the trees or blowing across the fields of grain. You will quite literally smell the roses, or more likely the rows of lilac bushes and fields of rapeseed plants in bloom that adorned our ride in Denmark. You will smell the salt tang of the sea as well as perhaps the rotting seaweed on the shore. You will feel the wind caressing your face, or possibly assailing your skin with stinging drops of rain or sleet! But be it positive or negative, a bicycle tour is really experiencing a land rather than merely traveling across it.

You will also be exquisitely aware of the road surfaces you ride on, including each and every bump in the road or crack in the pavement that you fail to miss, especially at the end of the day when you are already saddle sore and weary! Attending to the bike path and negotiating around obstacles such as turnstiles, curbs, tree roots, rocks, mud, sand, and gravel (and pedestrians wandering the bike path!) is part and parcel of mindfully experiencing a bike tour. Those surfaces can be intimidating, and once we bailed out from a rocky, twisting bike path in the forest that had steep ascents and descents because we felt the likelihood of an accident was just too high. But that said, the experience of blasting through mud or sand with the assistance of the electric motor can also be quite exhilarating even if you have to pay extreme attention to negotiating the treacherous surface.

The one awareness you must maintain is awareness of vehicular traffic around you. Most commonly, you should be listening closely for the sound of cars coming up behind you. Some people use rear view mirrors for that awareness, but I found my ears worked better to detect approaching automobiles. Surprisingly, even on bicycle paths we were occasionally overtaken by small mopeds or motor scooters, which are allowed to use bike paths in Germany if they are small enough. The mopeds are no problem if you are listening for them because they are quite noisy for their size and fortunately rather slow!

The only time we were ever felt in danger of a collision, however, was in Denmark when we were passed by a peloton of young male bicyclists. They suddenly passed by just inches from our handlebars at high speed with absolutely no audible warning of any kind. We were both so startled when that happened that we almost jerked the handlebars over and veered into them, which would have caused a bad accident. Since they, like we, were noiseless, a rear-view mirror might have been valuable in that case. In Germany overtaking bicyclists customarily use bells for a warning, but apparently that is not the norm in Denmark. I was in fact scolded by a Danish pedestrian when I used my bell to warn him I was passing. In general, however, mindful riding includes not only a full experience of the environment, but also the good situational awareness upon which safety depends.



Copyright 2015 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt


 

3 Chapter 4
Chapter 6 4
Index

Return to the Wanderungs Homepage.
Sign the Guestbook or Read the Guestbook.
Comments about this site? Email the Webmaster.
Contact Bob and Monika at bob_monika@hotmail.com.