My Adventures (& Failures) Learning to Drive a Scooter in Asia

I Was Scared to Learn How to Drive a Scooter

I put off things, I’m not sure why. Like scuba diving – I have been SO. Many. Places. with absolute world-class scuba diving, but since I never bothered to get my scuba certification I have never done it 🤷‍♀️. Maybe it’s some type of subconscious fear that manifests in procrastination – because it always seems like I’m putting off things I really would like to do! 

Driving my own scooter is no exception, I put off driving my own scooter until after I had been full-time traveling in countries where they drive scooters more than cars for over a whole year. 

I’ve been in so many places where people get around by scooter, it seems like only in the United States are motorcycles really considered anything but mainstream. And that makes sense – scooters are smaller, cheaper, easier to park, and guzzle less gas than a car. Absolutely perfect for cities with high density, windy streets, and unpaved roads (aka, most of the places I like to travel in!) 

I was so scooter adverse that when I was in Bali for the first two months, the land of skimpily bikini-clad tourists driving Moto-scooters, I used GoJek (a type of Indonesian Uber) to hail a scooter WITH a driver that I would just hop on the back of to get from point A to point B. I don’t speak a word of Indonesian, so these were some pretty awkward small-talk-less rides clutching the back of an absolute stranger through crazy Balinese traffic 😅.

In order to get around in Tulum, another Moto Scooter Mecca, I bought a 🚴‍♀️ BIKE and would stubbornly ride that around instead of a scooter – always arriving sweaty and gross after biking 20-45 minutes in 90-degree heat while everyone else cruised by on a Moto. 

Riding A Scooter for the First Time

By the time I arrived in San Andres, a tiny Caribbean island, I figured it was finally time to upgrade from a bike to a Moto-Scooter if I wanted to see anything while I was there. 

In Bali, the traffic is absolutely wild with cars and Scooters swerving and cutting off one another on windy roads. In contrast to a busy island like Bali, most of San Andreas is pretty sparsely populated and there’s just one large road that goes around the whole perimeter of the island. 

There probably isn’t a better place to learn to drive a scooter than on a long, wide, flat road that goes on forever in San Andreas (or, for however many times you decide to repeat the loop), or at least that was how I felt. 

My Adventures (& Failures) Learning to Drive a Scooter

Renting a scooter was easy, learning how to drive it was the tricky part! I hadn’t even driven a car since 2020! And even then, it was just a handful of times. I had gone from college, where I didn’t have a car, straight to living in NYC, where nobody has a car, straight to Nomading where ride-sharing is usually more affordable than renting a car. 

So… All this to say, I’m not the best driver. 

Couple that with the fact that I was a bit nervous to drive a scooter for the first time and I made some seriously stupid mistakes. 

The first one was when I went to park for the first time, I didn’t realize there were two different ways to turn the key and I didn’t have it turned all the way in the ignition to the right, (when you’re driving a car it’s usually just on and off, but the scooter ignition keys are a bit trickier). 

I thought I had turned the scooter on, because I had turned the key in the ignition to the right but not *all the way* to the right, and it was saying the gas was 100% empty. People who drive cars will know that the gas meter doesn’t read if the vehicle isn’t turned on, and I know that – but like I said I was nervous. 

The scooter, which I had never actually had to turn on myself before since the guy I was renting from turned it on for me when I left, wasn’t turning on! 

I frantically texted the owner of the scooter, saying “I don’t know what happened, it says it’s 100% out of gas. When I parked it said the tank was 50% full! It’s not turning on – I don’t know where to go to get gas!”. He, very calmly, responded and asked for a picture of the key in the ignition – where he immediately sussed out I hadn’t actually … turned the scooter on 🤦‍♀️. 

Tip: Know These Scooters Are HEAVY!

The first scooter I rented in San Andres was similar to a Yamaha NMax, these don’t look too big but are easily 300 pounds. I didn’t realize how incredibly *heavy* these scooters are when I rented them. I stopped on the side of the road to take a picture without putting down the kickstand and the scooter quickly started to fall sideways. 

I couldn’t catch it. It was just too heavy. 

You could tell me these scooters are 500 pounds and I would believe you – they’re SO heavy. 

The scooter fell over onto its side and I was just staring at it, on the side of the road, with NO cell service (it was my first day there and I hadn’t gotten a SIM card yet) for like 5 minutes, before a nice guy on a scooter saw me and helped me pick it back up. He didn’t seem to have much of an issue righting it, so maybe they’re not 500 pounds and I’m just weak – still, they’re ridiculously heavy things. 

My Big Mistake: Falling Uphill

Another big “oops” moment was when I was starting to really feel like I got the hang of things. It’s like the Dunning-Kruger effect when a person knows a little bit about something, and they start to feel like an expert because they don’t know enough to even realize how much more they have to learn. 

That definitely applied to me after a few days of riding my Moto around the very flat road that goes around the perimeter of the island. In the middle of San Andres Island, there’s a big lake called “La Laguna” that you need to take an intersecting road that cuts across the middle to access it. 

I had only been driving on the road that wraps around the perimeter of the island, all of which is pretty much flat, and when I went to visit the Laguna I encountered my very first *hill* 😅. At the top of the hill, there was a crossing, and I stopped by de-accelerating the way I usually do on the flat roads I was used to driving on. 

And then…. The scooter started rolling backward 😭. 

Instead of doing the LOGICAL thing and gripping the breaks I tried to accelerate out of it, but the scooter was trying to go backward so quickly, and to accelerate you need to twist the right handlebar backward towards you, but I was too busy trying to catch the 300 pound + scooter that was quickly going backward down a hill (with me on it!!). 

I just couldn’t get the grip to stop the scooter, as it started rolling back down the 100-meter hill. Luckily some locals that were hanging out at the intersection on their front lawn were quick to help the dumb tourist on a scooter and caught me before I slipped back down the super-steep hill. 

San Andrean locals are really nice like that. 

And I didn’t have to learn the hard way (just the embarrassing way) that driving a scooter is *just* like driving a car, and you need to squeeze the brakes when you’re on a hill in neutral or you’ll just roll down 😅. That sounds logical, but I’ve since seen TONS of people make this mistake when going uphill!