Drivers Needed

I have been wanting to share this with you guys for a while... the car culture is truly unique here in China. So as to not bore you to death with my stories, I have pasted excerpts of an article pushlished on the NY times website by Ted Conover (Thanks Joan!). He wrote a great article on Driving in China called Capitalist Roaders describing the car culture in China quite accurately... I just added my own pictures to embellish my page!!! ( http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/07/02/magazine/02china.html )


"It was the sweepers I worried about. Officially, there were two lanes of travel in each direction. But each side also had a shoulder, and on this expressway, at least, the shoulder was exactly as wide as the travel lanes. Thus Zhu and others (despite signs asserting that it was forbidden) used the shoulder as the passing lane. Occasionally, of course, a sweeper would loom, or a disabled vehicle, and Zhu would slam on the brakes and veer into the truck lane. Once past the obstacle, he would floor it and swerve back out, brake once again, swerve, honk — it was almost like being in a video game, except that video games end or you can walk away. We, on the other hand, had a long way to go
[...]
The national roads, while more interesting to drive than the expressways, were also more nerve-racking. There were considerable numbers of people on bicycles, on foot and on small tractors; there were crossroads; and least expected by me, there were many places where I had to swerve toward the middle of the road because of farmers having appropriated a strip of pavement along the edge for drying their grain, usually corn. Sometimes the grain was laid out on blue tarps; other times the drying zone was outlined by rocks or boards; more than once, traffic slowed because of it. I had heard of Chinese farmers sometimes laying their wheat across the road so that passing vehicles would thresh it for them. But there was something aggressive about this appropriation of the highway
[...]
An ebullient atmosphere surrounds the automobile in China. You can see the excitement continuing, even growing, as more people buy cars: China now has fewer than seven of them for every thousand people, roughly the same level as the United States had in 1915. Everyone expects the ownership rate to keep growing, which means there could be 130 million vehicles on China's roads by 2020. By 2030, according to one estimate, there could be as many as in the United States "

I've just been playing with Pacasa's new add-on for sharing pictures... Pls. click on picture below to see more of my pics...

Drivers Needed

Jul 11, 2006 - 6 Photos