The Wild West (Part One)

I’ve been meaning to mention Chinese driving for a while. It’s mad. It’s like there are no rules, you just get from A to B as quickly as possible and to hell with everyone else. Yet, despite this apparent chaos, you see remarkably few accidents.

There is a system at work; it’s just the opposite of what we’re used to in the UK. There, the assumption is that you – the driver – take responsibility to drive as carefully as possible and not make any mistakes that could affect other drivers. Here, the assumption seems to be that you expect the other guy to be a maniac and so you concentrate on avoiding him. You expect to see cars coming towards you on the wrong side of the road. Or to be overtaken on the nearside (the term 'undertaken' is grimly appropriate). Or for that car jesuslookout! to pull out in front of you with no warning whatsoever.

It’s why Chinese traffic is so bloody noisy; it’s not that people are enraged and pressing their horns in frustration or anger, rather they are simply letting other drivers know that they’re coming – to warn them of their presence (which, I believe, is what horns were fitted to cars for in the first place).

But sometimes it does go wrong.

We took a bus westwards this week to visit Kangding way up in the mountains at a height of around 2600 metres above sea level. That’s over two and a half kilometres upwards. And the only roads are gloriously narrow and windy ones which meander along towering valley sides. If you’re a truck driver though, the fact that you’re 500 metres above a treacherous ravine is no reason to slow down or to drive on the correct side of the road. A... B. Quickly!

The blue truck carved into the red one. The whole of the left side of the cabin – the driver’s side – was crushed. I guess only the huge weight of these massive dumpers kept them on the road at all and stopped them tumbling down the cliff face. When we finally passed the accident both drivers had been extracted; God knows if the blue driver survived but a good hour after we’d stopped we saw an ambulance threading its way through the backed up traffic.