The Ultimate Tourist Transport

It is twilight in the city of Budapest. Despite the fact that it's still early March, there is a warm hush in the air — earlier today it reached temperatures which Scotland hasn’t seen since August. By day, the light here has a bright silver tinge; right now the sky has transformed to an iridescent Prussian blue. The wind rushes through your hair, the hubbub of a foreign city rushes past you, flashes of baroque architecture pass in a blur. The hills are alive with the electric humming of your Lime scooter. 

There is no better way to travel. You are the embodiment of speed, of elusive cool. As you pass a local couples you slow to shout back to your friends. The man takes note of you and turns to his wife, switching from Hungarian to English to say “I f*cking hate tourists”. And then the spirit of elusive cool crumbles around you. You are now nothing more than a typical tourist stirring irritation into the consciousness of the city.

Okay sure, the dissappeal is easy to sympathise with. To resident city dwellers, scooterers must be nothing more than stinging green ants, clogging the streets as they speed through, leaving lines of chaos trailing in their wake, dirt kicked up on a loose gravel road. To people who live with them, the novelty must wear off, leaving in its place a grim and faded annoyance.

Nevertheless, the Lime scooter has come over the last few years to typify the European city break. They bring a holiday right to its core: new experiences, sparkling joy, flashes of a city, and throbbing streams of sound. They are the most effective form of tourist travel. Unlike the metro, they offer you views of the streets you travel through; faster and cheaper than a taxi, and perhaps most importantly they’re a break from the exhausting and endless walking which sightseeing entails. 

Are Lime scooters not the ultimate doorway into any new city, any new place? Whilst scooting from your hostel on Pest side to the river Danube, a movie montage scene unfolds before you. You witness the broad glamour of Fashion Street, the domineering towers of St Stephen’s Basilica, the cool marble floors of Heroes Square, the grandeur of Parliament Hall. Blue light fades to black around you, the streets are lit orange by ornate lamps whose sole purpose is guiding you to your destination. Ordinary walkers swim in the dust behind you, outraced by your effortless speed. 

And scooters will always embody the whimsy of childhood. They offer a return to naïveté with the novelty of their movements. The joy of feeling faster, cleverer, more fun than everyone around you is something generally cut off to those over the age of ten. They provide a sacred bubble of insight into the magic which an ordinary night can provide.

Plus, there is some small element of danger in reaching the extraordinary speeds of fifteen miles per hour in a place unknown, flitting between main roads, cycle paths, and pedestrian walkways. For some the instability of a two wheel ride must be too much to handle. Disaster will undoubtedly ensue. Not for you though. For you, the danger is no more than a complement to the freshness of a novel area, the strangeness of the views you pass, the bizarre sounds of a language only clumsily practiced beforehand. You are the God of this foreign city, astride your noble steed of green metallic speed. 

Is this not the sole purpose of a get away holiday, to have a break from your everyday responsibilities, the burdensome yoke of your part time job, the Sisyphean boulder of that next essay due, the everyday human oppression of walking from A to B? Scooting creates a journey out of a destination. It frees you from your mortal woes. 

So, I rest my case: the Lime scooter is the ultimate addition to any holiday. As you scoot to your next stop, I guarantee that your worries will scatter behind you, bouncing across the pavement like loose Forint coins.

Image from Wikimedia Commons