Highway Yangshuo

After driving back and forth to the different climbing areas for the past 3 weeks I have developed a pretty good understanding of the workings of the highways in rural China. I've been either taking mini-buses, riding bikes or taking motorcycle taxis up to an hour out of Yangshau.

In the states traffic has such hard a fast rules. Each driver has their own lane; bikers have their own lane; pedestrians even have a lane to call their own (sidewalk). If you veer outside of your lane there are immediate consequences: you're either going to get a ticket, hit somebody, or at the very least piss somebody off.



In China there still seems to be the three lane system (lets say six to cover an entire road- and to be entirely clear here, I mean: 1) shoulder- 2) biker lane- 3) driving lane - 4) driving lane - 5) bikers lane and 6) shoulder). However in the Chinese system any one vehicle seems to feel entitled to use up to four of these lanes on a need based basis. To explain this point, lets say you have some one walking in lane 1, motorcycle in 2, car in 3, and an oncoming motorcycle in 4- and a giant (and I mean enormous) truck behind the car decides he needs to be in front. Also let me make a point here that faster traffic always thinks it needs to be in front. There is no getting stuck, there is just pushing ahead until you more or less force the other vehicles out of the way. The standard procedure is for the truck to hold on his horn and partially swerve out into oncoming traffic. This has the effect of getting the car to push over the motorcycle who pushes over the pedestrian and forces the oncoming motorcycle to go over to the shoulder. There are no yellow lines here. Usually accidents wil happen when 5 of the lanes are already full and someone goes for a pass. Here is some hair-raising video of what it is like driving in Yangshuo.